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MENON Network is a European innovation and research network providing information and advice to policy makers, education communities, and the ICT industry on issues related to innovation and changes in Education and Training, Lifelong Learning and Knowledge Society developments in Europe and worldwide. MENON, established as a European Economic Interest Group (EEIG) since 1999 in Brussels, provides the necessary insight for all stakeholders in Europe to enhance a value-oriented and innovative use of ICT, and to develop useful ICT applications and services of better quality. The MENON Network is active at national level, through its member organizations, and at trans-national level, where the EEIG co-ordinates co-funded projects and consulting, as well as policy support activities towards the European Commission and international organizations.
The members of the MENON Network are the following: SCIENTER (Italy), FIM-New Learning-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany), HAEd - Hellenic Association For Education (Greece), UPC-CEPCEP- Research Centre of People and Cultures in Portugal - Catholic University of Portugal (Portugal), The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (United Kingdom). Moreover, MENON has Special Partnership agreements with: Budapest University of Technology and Economics (Hungary), FUSP - Fundacao Universidade de Sao Paulo (Brazil), New Technology for Learning (Germany), UAM – Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (Mexico), UNIBE - Universidad Iberoamericana (Dominican Republic), UNIR - Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (Spain), University of Nicosia (Cyprus).
All members and special partners have specific significant experience in the field of e-learning and innovation in education and training and overall deployment of ICT under an integrated perspective. MENON is active across all sectors of Lifelong Learning and has specific expertise in connecting practices from different sectors and in facilitating cross-fertilization across learning fields. MENON is active along its research activities in creating new links and in strengthening existing collaboration schemes, towards the creation of an effective and meaningful European Research Area in the frame of a broader international collaboration arena. In all the projects MENON is involved in, attention is devoted to networking and exchange of successful practices with all involved stakeholders.
MENON has a strong experience in coordinating community building and sustainability/exploitation activities in the frame of complex research projects. In Go-Lab, MENON coordinates the Community Building and Support work package WP6 and it’s involved in the development of the Go-Lab Pedagogical Framework (WP1).
MENON has participated in two projects strictly related to the Go-Lab goals. In particular, one of the projects, UniSchooLabS aimed to improve the quality of science education in Europe by promoting collaboration among universities and schools in the provision of remote access to science laboratories for primary and secondary schools through Internet-based services. The main outcome of the project was the UniSchooLabS toolkit. This tool aimed to support teachers in selecting a remote or virtual lab and developing a lab activity based on an inquiry model template. While working with the toolkit the teacher has access to 3 main features: the lab catalogue, the activities created by other users, and the tool for creating new activities or reusing an existing one.
The UniSchooLabS toolkit has been validated in 9 schools in Austria, Italy and Greece. MENON was in charge of the evaluation and exploitation work packages, particularly, for the monitoring and evaluation of the project implementation, as well as for conducting the feasibility study for sustainability of the project results and drafting the policy recommendations according to the project achievements. Furthermore, SCIENTER, the Italian member of MENON, was the project coordinator and in charge to the validation work package to organize and coordinate piloting activities in schools.
Another project involving MENON and related to the Go-Lab objectives was OSR – Open Science Resources. The project aimed to create a shared repository of scientific digital objects – dispersed in European science museums and science centres - to make them more widely and coherently available, searchable and usable in the Science centres and museums from across Europe. The main outcome of the project was the OSR portal - a highly accessible portal, equipped with state of the art searching tools, providing an easy and attractive interface to access the repository, and allowing users to navigate the finest digital collections in European science centres and museums, guided by attractive educational pathways connecting the objects with well-defined semantic metadata.
MENON was the Validation work package coordinator for planning, monitoring, collecting, and analysing data of and from piloting activities carried out in Science centres and museums.