International UNESCO Education Server for Civic, Peace and Human Rights Education

Each of these institutions had its own group of inquisitive young people, interested in meeting other young people in other countries and regions using our virtual meeting place for youth, "Kidopolis". Some young Danes and a group from Belarus also joined in shortly afterwards.
 

The highlight of the project, however, was to take place in the real world in Trebnitz near Berlin, in a wonderful old rural castle. Having previously crossed boarders only in a virtual setting, these 45 young people from 4 countries experienced a new form of openness during a Babylonian cultural event. People stopped asking: Where do you come from?

My own view of the "BosnianKidsOnline" project was: That the Internet offers a fascinating way of establishing contact with people at a safe distance, but this is not enough on its own. Actually meeting someone in real life, to actually see them, smell them, feel them, taste them, hear them and touch them cannot be replaced by the Internet – nor should it. Once these young people had returned home and were meeting again in the chat room, but also writing letters and posting them, the same question kept running through my mind: Would it be possible to use the Internet for civic education?

I spent time talking to experts and teachers from South East Europe, drove to Sarajevo to find out what organisations tasked with providing education were doing to tap the potential offered by the internet. During talks with the Association for Peace Education Tübingen and others, the idea of creating a website, that is, an Education Server offering information and materials for promoting civic education began to take shape. For teachers and multipliers in the Balkans. And in their own language!

During the winter of 1998, I travelled to Sarajevo with an initial concept to see whether a similar concept already existed there. To my great surprise, no one had taken advantage of this new technology in this way. But what was the situation in the schools? Did they have the hardware? Did the teachers have the necessary IT skills? We decided to visit schools and hand out questionnaires. The result of this process was encouraging: While teachers were keen to access information on the subject of civic education, they had little experience of computers. Some schools had access to well-equipped computer rooms, paid for by international sponsors, but did not have the necessary "software", that is, training or learning programs.

The situation on the ground was reflected in our project concept. We decided to base our program on three pillars - a website, CD-ROMs and internet training for teachers - a policy that has proved successful in 6 countries. Yet for all its success, the entire project very nearly failed through lack of funding. Because our proposal of combining the internet with civic education was a ground-breaking concept, we faced misunderstanding and a general lack of interest. Following many months of fundraising, we had managed to raise some of the money necessary - but the decisive sum of DM 70,000 was still missing. By April 1999, I was almost ready to give up. But then, quite by chance, at the German UNESCO Commission, I bumped into its General Secretary, Dr. Traugott Schöfthaler. Without him our program would not exist today.

Our four-member Project Team met for the first time in June 1999. We set out the basic structure of the Education Server and began work. Having completed a prototype of the Main Subject Group of Human Rights by November, it was presented to and discussed by representatives of the education authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and a pilot group of 16 teachers from both entities. Our Education Server went online on the 1st of April 2000. The 16 teachers of the pilot team met again to test the website, to give their opinions and to discuss the next Main Subject Group planned to follow on from Human Rights: Basic Information on Democracy.

At the end of April 2000, our Bosnian Webmaster Haris got in his car and held 9 computer courses for teachers across the entire country. Our first CD ROM was released during the summer and was distributed free-of-charge at seminars and events. In May 2000, the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation promised DM 60,000 special financing from the Stability Pact and we were able to realize our long-standing dream. To work in Croatia. By the end of the year, our new member of staff in Zagreb, Denis Zoric, held 10 seminars for teachers across the entire country.

At the end of 1999, I was commissioned by UNESCO to fly to Kosovo and find out whether it would be possible to implement a similar project there. I was soon discouraged in a very cold Prishtina. Given that the telephones didn’t work and that life usually went on without electricity, heating or warm water, the possibility of the internet was hardly worth contemplating. Wearing winter coats, head teachers would sit in their un-heated offices making coffee on their camping stoves and dreaming about how different school life might be with a telephone.

Was this really the right place to start an Internet project? It didn’t take me long to regard the whole thing impossible and my thoughts soon turned to going home. It was then that I heard about a plan to open so-called "Internet Information Centers" with American money in an attempt to offer the people of Kosovo a way out of isolation using satellite communications. Indeed, right here in the middle of this chaotic post-war country, I found two rooms containing brand new computers in a basement floor of the NGO building in Ferizaj, 50 km distance from Prishtina. All that was needed now was for the satellite equipment to be installed. Plans were also in place to set up similar systems in 6 other locations.

I was able to reach an agreement with the body responsible for this equipment, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), allowing us to use this infrastructure for teacher training purposes. We began training the first teachers in April 2000. By this time, we had already had the Education Server translated into Albanian and released a second CD-ROM.

At the beginning of 2001, I travelled to Berlin and held discussions with the respective department at the German Foreign Office about the possibility of financing for the project. The long-awaited phone call came in July and we were given the go-ahead for a program in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and – Albania!

My colleague, Bill Sterland, then working in an honorary capacity, and I travelled down the bumpy, dusty roads to Tirana in gruelling heat not really knowing what to expect. On seeing the dried-out river valleys, we had a good idea as to the cause of the problems: the electricity supply. With a great deal of improvisation and a large fuel bill for the generator, but also with a lot of support from the GTZ in Tirana, we were able to provide 100 teachers with training between September and December 2001. We found an enormous amount of enthusiasm for information, for the new and for electronic communication. Indeed, the number of schools with computer rooms is steadily growing.

At around the same time, the Project Manager of the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy received an application from us and, at the end of 2001, she made a decision to finance a pilot phase in Serbia and Montenegro. After the 5th of October 2000, the day on which the Milosevic regime was replaced, the former villain-state of Yugoslavia, which alongside Irak had been the only state in the world that did not share a motor vehicle insurance agreement with Germany, was almost overnight transformed into a destination and area of activity for a host of international aid agencies.

In December 2001, I took part in a symposium in Belgrade focusing on introducing democracy into the country’s education system. The view of the Ministry of Education and of those taking part in the symposium was that comprehensive reforms were needed along with new educational and organisational methods. It looked as though we were in the right place at the right time with our project and decided to choose one of the most problematic regions as our target area. The region chosen was the south, including the boarder area to Kosovo with a high proportion of Albanians. We drove to Nis in February, found a partner and began our events in May 2002. Since then, 257 Albanian and Serbian teachers in Nis and the Presevo Valley were trained by our team. Our Nis-based project co-ordinator has recently started his own NGO and will carry on the work we started on his own.

In autumn 2003, as we were reflecting on the further development of the program and how to make it sustainable in the long term, we took the major decision to concentrate on two aspects of our work: to train trainers and make available resources that allow others to work in EDC. In organisational terms, we decided to cut back the teacher training and search for strong partner organisations in the region instead of having own staff. To date, we are offering two kinds of trainers training: The 6-month course “Teaching Politics in SEE” and training for facilitators for the Betzavta-method (see projects).

In addition to the Education Server, we have developed an innovative training concept on CD-ROM for ICT in-service teacher training. This "FIT@school" concept is made available in “Serbo-Croatian”, Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian and can be used by official teacher training institutions in the respective country and by interested NGOs.

With the Swiss-funded regional “I.M.PACT”-project in which D@dalos is a partner, a new aspect was added to our work. D@dalos became a training centre for project planning and evaluation that can be offered to EDC organizations (see www.impact-see.org).
 

Author: Ingrid Halbritter questions or comments? Ingrid.Halbritter(a) dadalos.org

We have managed to overcome many barriers during the last few years, some of them real with barbed wire and some of them less tangible, but we have also come up against other more immovable obstacles in the shape of frustrated teachers, hardly able to feed their families, indifferent government officials, power cuts and strikes, corrupt customs officials, inactive bureaucracy and hard-line head teachers. Our work so far and the challenges that face us in the future might be summed up thus: Yes, we have found a successful way of using the potential offered by the Internet and the computer for the good of education and democracy. But we also understood that there is a need to complement this by new approaches and traditional forms of education that allow personal contact and the “human touch”. We are now trying to reach and support those persons who are truly motivated and have the potential of making a difference in their respective environment. The obstacles are still there, but by joining forces we can overcome them!

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