VIRTUAL MOBILITY AND DISTRIBUTED LABORATORIES - SUPPORTING COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH WITH KNOWLEDGE TECHNOLOGY

Virtual Mobility and Distributed Laboratories (VMDL) is a pilot project in the European Commission, Directorate DGXII programme, Human Capital and Mobility. The project builds upon recent experiences of the Just-in-Time Open Learning project, JITOL, which was part of the DGXIII DELTA programme. The latter undertook field trials of various information and communications technology (ICT) tools and methods for the support of knowledge exchange between professionals. Such exchange can be considered as part of continuous professional development or as simply an aspect of working in a professional community. Zn either case, ongoing learning is involved. Based on JITOL experiences as well as others involving the support of distributed collaborative work among professionals, the VMDL Project is looking more closely at the processes of distributed collaboration and the technologies and instrumentation that can profitably support those processes.