As some of you will know, I work for an independent research institute called Pontydydgu (Welsh for the Bridge to Learning). That's our logo above.

Much of Pontydysgu's work is research and development in the use of new technologies for learning and for knowledge development and sharing, especially though communities of practice, although we are also working on informal learning, teacher training, regional economic development, social inclusion and more general projects in vocational education and training.

Whilst we undertake some consultancy work, the bulk of our funding is grant aided. By coincidence, there are a considerable number of funding programmes issuing calls for proposal in the first part of this year. These include:

1. The EU Framework 7 programme
2. The EU Lifelong Learning Programme
3. The Hewlett Foundation
4. Eduserve
5. FurtureLab

Pontydysgu has limited resources - there are just four of us working for the organisation at present - but we have ideas beyond our resources!

Usually organisations keep their project ideas secret. But in the sprit of Web 2.0 and in a conviction that collaboration lies at the heart of innovation and development I am sharing the list of ideas for projects that we are currently thinking on.

If you are interested with collaborating with us on any of these ideas please do get in touch.

1. Open Content. This would be a proposal for developing a community of practice around the production of Open Content involving four or five clusters of vocational schools in Europe.
2. Ebloggers Europa. This would be a proposal to extend the work of Edubloggers in the UK to establish a European Community.
3. Virtual exchange. This project would invlove the development of an immersive environment for virtual exchange visits.
4. Social citizenship. This project would utilise immersive environments for learning about citizenship.
5. Supporting open content and open source software in education
6. Migration in Europe.
7. Developing communities of practice. This would focus on the use of ICT to support distributed communities of practice.
8. Culture and the use of ICT. This would look at the cultural issues involved in the adoption,development and (re) use of open content.
9. Quality and open content - developing a distributed metadata approach to quality issues with open content.
10. Peer assessment. developing systems and practice in peer assessment
11. Personal Learning environments. Developing and piloting the use of Personal Leng environments in education and training.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, projects