Report on the conference 2009

Report on the tenth Agenda 21 NOW! International Internet Conference on 23 April, 2009

The tenth Agenda 21 NOW! conference for the first time was a conference on education, and it was of course a conference on education for sustainable development. “Education is Future – What is the Future of Education?” was this year’s theme, and we had estimated this to be of high interest for the international participants.

Our international internet conference “Agenda 21 NOW!” has taken place ten times now. Ten times a group of young students who had taken on the responsibility for the project, waited excitedly in the early European morning for our annual internet event to open its gates for the next 24 hours. Over the years Agenda 21 NOW! has developed a tradition within the international UNESCO school-network and the regional network of the UNESCO Baltic Sea Project schools.

As in the last years we opened “Agenda 21 NOW! Interactive” two months before the conference took place. Agenda 21 NOW! Interactive is a knowledge platform, containing a number of texts meant to allow students all over the world – hopefully together with their teachers! - to prepare for our conference. Moreover, this platform is interactive like a wiki, such as the well-known Wikipedia: Registered participants may edit the content as well as create and upload new content. (Any internet surfer may read any content, but full interactive functionality requires registration.) We hope that a lot of this year’s participants have used Agenda 21 NOW! Interactive to prepare for the conference.

As in the past years, we invited a broad number of teachers, educators, former participants, students and other potentially interested people to our conference. We received 642 registrations from 58 countries, with Germany, Bangladesh and Poland being the leading three in terms of participant numbers. Although we are of course happy about the large number of countries, the total number of participants was slightly lower than in the conference 2008.

The conference itself was a very harmonious conference since no big conflicts occurred, people from different corners of the world seemed to have astonishingly similar ideas on what schools and educational systems in general should look like two or three decades ahead from now. This is one of the results of the discussions that were collected in a resolution draft during the conference day. A couple of days later, the registered participants adopted the draft as the resolution of the Agenda 21 NOW! Internet Conference 2009. Here is the text.

Martin Jarrath

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