A group of us 12IMP from Networked Media Culture class were given the opportunity to attend European Youth Award Festival 2013 (EYA 2013) held in Graz, Austria. 5-day trip felt like a lifetime journey. For detailed coverage of the event and trip, read Cai’s posts here.

Virtual Project Collaboration
Way before the event started, we were already given tasks for making understanding about EYA 2013 and its 13 winner projects under the United Nation Millenium Development Goals. The fun started with Google Hangout: We are to interact with students from EAL Denmark, FH Kiel Germany and UVIC Spain depending on the assigned project and members. The task is to choose one project from the winning 13, and discuss with team members to give feedback on that project.

#Tweeting report
Our course tutor, Cai Melakoski has embraced the EYA 2013 theme “Young Digital Transformation” very much and urged us students to make report of this event via social media Twitter. This indeed is very effective way to challenge students’ summarizing skills: writing report each time with only 140 words. The interaction of such reporting method are fun and lively, both online and offline. Retweeting, following each other’s report among classmates brings much joy to the experience. #tweetisthenewreport

FH Joanneum
During this trip, we are glad to have visited the only university in Graz that has a fighter jet in their campus! Lecturer Thomas Radeke gave us a warm welcome and toured us around the campus after presenting a fantastic introduction video about FH Joanneum alongside with the many tips of best local bars to visit in Graz!

Tweet about FH Joanneum visit

EYA Festival: Keynotes, Workshops and World Cafe
First day of conference started with one of the highlights of this event Ten meters of Thinking by Paul Hughes. The morning got everyone’s attention on Paul’s 10 meters of wallpaper, rolling as he was speaking, drawing and telling stories. The storytelling has great interaction with the group as Paul was rolling his wallpaper, and even more interestingly, he would reverse rolling the paper and do quick summary of his presentation. It’s hard not to make this the topic of the day as it has one of the most creative way of making a presentation! The content, Circle of Innovation has made its way to my notebook as I was especially interested with the 3 degrees of changes. A video of Paul’s EYA presentation can be found on YouTube, thanks to Niki Ernst.

“Living on the learning edge” quoted by Mark Greenspan, another inspiring keynote “Bringing the World's Next 2 Billion People Online" that encouraged open source community, that everyone can be a maker using digital tools readily available. The stresses here resonance with Paul Hughes’ keynote of WHY. This also reminded me of Simon Sinek’s Start with Why. Everyone can be a maker, and everyone shall find out WHY to be a maker.

All eyes on Paul Hughes and his wallpaper (Photo taken from EYA 2013)

A good way to meet and learn from each other in the conference was via workshop and EYA world cafe. Round table discussions with international experts rotated among groups, based on topics surrounding ‘New Innovation Landscapes’. The first day conference ended with workshops which I attended to Paul Hughes’ “The three stages of transformation”.

Second day of conference was equally exciting. The morning started with red and green cards: audience are asked to show the cards to the presenters Matthias Haas ( SuperSocial), Niki Ernst, (planetsisa) and Adam Montandon (EAL University) if they agree with them or not. The discussion was facilitated by Prof. Dr. Peter A. Bruck on the topics of business experiences and adventures. Conference followed by World Cafe session 2 and another workshop with Kerstin Kollmann about Coding Literacy. I now learnt how to hack my own Google search button with javascript!

Student Projects Presentation
After lunch, EYA conference continued with students presenting their feedback project as well as other projects using various media including posters, tablet devices, handouts and videos. The presentation methods was in a beautiful chaos which students verbally presenting their work all in the same space and within limited time. I was glad to be giving feedback to one of the winning project under Go Green category: Jerry Do It Together. It was great learning experience understanding about the project and I had good conversations with the project’s team, Justine and Emilien!

Happy Photo Tweets with Jerry DIT team and student group: (clockwise: Justine Hannequin @haniju, Nil Grau Cirera @Neel_reraura, Teppo Nieminen @marginaalivirhe, Joanne nh Wong @jojojoannewong, Emilien Ah-Kiem @Em_hack )

...to be continued

Stories by 12IMP student Joanne nh Wong