20th Annual Conference

At the Annual Conference the AEHT Presidium team takes the opportunity to hold a meeting and to bring together the national representatives for the Executive Board meeting. Thus the AEHT Presidium met on Wednesday October 17th at 14.00 in the ‘Gold’ room to finalise its preparations for the Executive Board meeting which was held in the same room at 16.30 that day. These were two important events in that they were the opportunity to review all the AEHT’s activities and to discuss any problems arising among the membership.

Aimed at directors and teachers, a seminar had been arranged by the organisers, and its title alone was a guarantee that it would be interesting. This seminar took place in the ‘Platinum’ room and was chaired by former AEHT president Michel Gaillot. In front of a rather sparse audience, several speakers gave their presentations.
First Simonetta Bettiol from the University of Venice and Enrico Bressan, coordinator of the Eurotutor project, who spoke of the purpose of student placements in Europe, ‘a new way of learning in Europe’.
Mauricio Mancini, representing an association of SMEs, spoke of his conviction that innovation was vital for companies, and that a permanent international partnership should be set up. ‘We must work together to work better’, he said. (http://www.partenaria.it).

In his presentation, John Rees Smith again returned to the subject of the VIRTEX (Virtual experiences) project which is already now fully up and running (http://www.waicicu.com/virtex and http://www.waicicu.com/virtex/deutsch ).
The last speaker was Mikko Turunen, international coordinator from the Tampere school in Finland, who presented the BECULT project (http://www.becult.org ), an on-line multimedia programme for learning six languages (Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German and Italian) intended for future hotel and restaurant employees.