The Committee for Culture and Education (CULT) invites with high level international experts for a public hearing on "The Internet: an educational tool for cross-cultural understanding within the EU", in the European Parliament in Brussels.

Brussels

public hearing

Committee on Culture and Education

Education (T2)

The Internet, an educational tool for cross-cultural understanding within the EU: extracts from the public hearing

SOUNDBITE (English), Johannes DE GRUYTER, Policy Officer of AVNet and project Manager at EuroPACE, Catholic University of Leuven, When you use ICTY to support international, cross-border experience in learning and teaching, you can reach the same depth as physical experience. I think everybody agrees that we are in a sector that is not the same and maybe comparing in even is not really needed, because it leads to really nowhere. We just need to research how far you can go with ICTY and where added value for ITCY itself could be and therefore, thinking that way, it is definitely sure that if you are going to have a full experience of totally being drowned in another culture that i-city does not yet have the range of tools to give that full experience.

SOUNDBITE (English), Andrew RASIEJ, Personal Democracy Forum, US expert, I encourage you to explore what the term open data really means and what public data means and to consider the notion that the term public must mean searchable and readable online, machine-readable online. There needs to be something new in the way we define public information. A document or a piece of data in the file cabinet in an office of a government agency does not mean it is public in a connected age.

SOUNDBITE (English), Andrew RASIEJ, Personal Democracy Forum, US expert, It has become clear that we have to consider that ordinary people will do things with the net to connect with each other across boundaries in addition to what governments may try to do and they will do it faster that the government can do it for them. These people will also develop a common language to understand each other rather that lean on each other's native tongues. They will also communicate using video as a tool rather than text and I will describe a new term I created called "videracy" which video literacy as reseeing a new generation of human communication. I would venture to guess that everyone in this room is half-viderate because we all can absorb video content as we watch it on television or in movies or now online without any trouble. Ask any of us to create this content, a much smaller subset of us are able to do that.