Description

Last year, we predicted it to be only a fun social event with four interesting guests, but it turned into a learning event about the culture, physics, sports and art, co-designed by a world champion, a comedian and a translator, a CERN scientist, and a musician. Three of them joined us virtually, the fourth was with us in the studio. We were supporting the idea of the Open Space Classroom: it is what and how we learn that is important, not where.

This year we will host two guests: we invited one distinguished and one very interesting guest, who will teach pupils, students and teachers and at the same time learn from them. The first “mysterious” guest is a teacher of civics, human rights and democracy; the other one will teach us about music, words, motivation, communication, expression of opinion and you can follow him on Twitter @Trkaj.

In half an hour the guests will first present the topic, and then children, pupils, students, teachers and other educators from ten schools will be able to bring up their questions via video conference link. Of course, the SIRikt 2015 participants will have an opportunity to send in their questions, too. Moreover, at the end our guests will also deal with questions sent to Twitter during the event, which will be live-streamed.

Open Space Classroom will be open on 28th May, between 15.00 and 16.00.

How to participate

You can take part as a school, connected with the guests through a videoconference system, or as audience, joining us by sending questions and opinions via Twitter. The Open Space Classroom will also be live-streamed.

To participate via videoconference, you can apply as a school by May, 15th 2015 by sending a message to jaka.banko@zrss.si.

Ten schools will be selected. Schools with H.323 videoconference systems (LifeSize, Tandberg, Aethra, Vcon, Polycom, Cisco, etc.) are preferred. Schools not having a videoconference system will be able to join the event with a PC, a web camera (USB) and a web browser (Google Chrome). On selecting the schools, the geographic distribution and level of education (primary/lower secondary/upper secondary) will be considered, too.

To participate via Twitter you can use the hashtag #sirikt.

The aims of the event are:

• to check if distance learning is possible,
• to find out if a virtual contact can be equal to a live one,
• to prove that a virtual contact can be democratic and bidirectional,
• to present the guests’ activities, opinions and points of view.