In 2013, during an interview, co-founder of Apple Steve Jobs said “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think”. The European Initiative Code Week has joined this line of thought and so has ENoLL and our Living Labs. 

As part of the PELARS project, ENoLL will organise a Policy Workshop where we will show the participants how to programme with a workstation that was created as an outcome to the PELARS project and discuss with our panelists learning analytics in sciences. You can read more about the event here. 

This week however, Code Week was taking place in different European cities. To mark EU Code Week 2016 and in anticipation of the Commission’s ‘New Skills Agenda for Europe’, Public Libraries 2020 hosted ‘Generation Code: born at the library’ at the European Parliament. One of our adherent members – Library Living Lab from Barcelona  attended the event. As coding is becoming more important, Libraries are also encouraged to join the movement and incorporate coding in their work systems. 

An interactive exhibition was hosted at the European Parliament showcasing the top innovative digital exhibits from public libraries across the EU.This interactive exhibition demonstrated how Europe’s public libraries are meeting the digital age. The exhibition consisted of several interactive stations, showcasing the excellent work that public libraries are doing on all things digital from a range of member states – including coding, robotics, 3D printing, virtual reality experiences, tech advice workshops and digital making.

Library Living Lab, active from 2011 and adherent member of ENoLL from 2015, contributed with an installation for the re-valorisation of digital collections. In this case, a collection of more than one thousand unpublished visual poems from the Catalan poet Joan Brossa was offered to the participants in an interactive two-screen display. The participants had the opportunity to contribute with their feelings and emotions to their favourite poems. Both the poems and the annotations were then sent to the twitter account @BrossaInedit. The result is that the people themselves are now the actual curators of a brand new collection, which is being increased day by day by the people attending at the Library Living Lab.

Fernando Vilariño from the Library Living Lab had the chance to introduce the initiative to H.R.H Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands, UNESCO Special Envoy on “Literacy for Development” and founder of the Reading & Writing Foundation.

Library Living Lab representatives also had the chance to network with Members of the European Parliament, including Spanish MEP Beatriz Becerra (pictured in the photo holding the ENoLL sign) who is now a new enthusiast of Living Labs, and showed her interest in visiting Library Living Lab in Barcelona to know more about ENoLL and spread the voice at EU level.

Read more about the role of Libraries and how they can organise a Coding event at their facilities in the attached presentation.