ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the recently completed CoLabs.eu project funded within the R3L initiative on ‘European Networks of Learning Regions’ (European Commission 2002),1 which involved some local social experiments in order to ‘make the village a virtual campus’. The motivating background for the project was the need for major educational process re-engineering in order to work effectively within the remit of the third mission of universities; that is, to engage in the development of suitable competences of relevance to the surrounding society. The objectives for the project included the design and implementation of local ‘collaboratories’. A collaboratory was our concept for an ICT-supported facility for combined learning and project work in a local context. In the project, such facilities were called CoLabs and the key objective was to design and implement such CoLabs to support local learning initiatives and exchange of experiences between the project partners. The outcomes of the experiments and the general results achieved are discussed in more general terms with some recommendations on how to make villages not only ‘learning villages’, but also innovative and creative, signalling the need for a new framework for knowledge creation where place and people really matter.
