Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Dutch Connection Blogcast


Although the forum has been quiet, the core members of the Dutch Connection have been busy behind the scenes. We transfered the forum from Ecademy in the UK to Open-BC because there was no way Basic members (the majority) could take part in the forum discussions.

Our experience with the forums in OpenBC is that they are perhaps too "business" like, and it is not easy to change the layout or add photos. This, we are told will change. In the meantime, the plan is to organise 4-5 meetings in the period September 2005 - June 2006. Traditionally these have been in Amsterdam and run from 1900-2130. They are combination of networking plus a topic - last time it was looking at effective use of social software like wikis and blogs. I get the impression that Tuesday evenings are better than our experiments with Thursdays in 2004/5. Agree?

One of the topics we'd like to raise (and do something about) was highlighted in the magazine section of this past Saturday's NRC Newspaper. The article talked about the poor educational standards of many Dutch school leavers, especially the 112,000 who have not achieved any formal qualification. This is 13% of the workforce between 15-25 years. In contrast to Germany, there seems to be little contact between businesses and academic insitutes/ "polytechnics". It reminds me of the atmosphere surrounding the Dutch Consumer Association - any contact with the companies who'se products they were testing was seen as talking to the "enemy". It is possible to have contact with business without being sucked into its clutches. Dutch Connection has amibitons to help in this bridging role.

In the case of journalism schools, many of the ones I have seen in the Netherlands are VERY traditional, assuming there is no such thing as cross-media production, and so producing journalists who are mono-media and have little chance of employment 5 years from now. Again, there is a lot to be learned from over the border - UK, Germany and Scandinavia. This isn't complaining - it is a wake-up call.

Please take a few moments to visit the forum at Open-BC (if you're a not a member, just sign-up) and share your thoughts about what you'd like to see covered in our "pow-wow" sessions this coming season. We'd also like to find out more about the people who have joined since we switched from Ecademy.

Hope you're enjoying the summer.