Following the first meeting of the ACCESS TO CULTURE PLATFORM in Brussels on June 5th and an informal meeting of the Platform Secretariat with the Commission on July 4th, the Board wishes to submit to all its members the following information.

Output / results: The Commission has underlined the importance that the output of the work of the Platform should be in the form of a policy document with innovative recommendations. It should also include possible measures and actions to be taken up by the Commission but also by member States and other relevant sub national public administrations. The document should have a clear political message and possibly provide keys to measure the progress made towards the achievement of common objectives.

In order to prepare the first draft of the policy document, three main topics have been identified by the members of the Platform:

• learning / education,
• creation / production,
• participation / audience

Richard C. Longworth is a former Tribune foreign correspondent, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and author of the new book, "Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism" (Bloomsbury).

I grew up in a small town in central Iowa, a county seat called Boone, a safe and secure place, confident in its isolation. This was lonesome-whistle territory, where passing trains announced another world out there. In time, some of us got on those trains to seek that world. We knew it wasn't going to come to us. When a British newspaper proclaimed it the typical American small town and sent a reporter to write about it, he interviewed one local elder who said: "We are pretty well self-sufficient. We don't need the world."

At last, the Video Recordings of the invited speakers and some other material, from The 13th International Conference on Thinking, Norrkoping, Sweden, June 17-21, are now available from the conference web site.

At a recent HeLF (Heads of e-Learning) meeting at the University of Wolverhampton, there were presentations and discussions on Virtual Worlds and Second Life (SL) in particular.

Here's a link to the site where you can see the programme and download the slides:

http://asp.wlv.ac.uk/Level5.asp?UserType=11&Level5=5781#12

You may also want to look at some of the work at Edinburgh University.  The link includes many disciplines: http://vue.ed.ac.uk/