Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

Amsterdam and Ljubljana are the currently existing entities that have been the mostactive. Utrecht has been a successful diffuser of the EGEA idea.The role of the receptors is important. They need the ‘courage’ to start an entityand to join an activity for the first time. The sustainability of an entity depends onthe enthusiasm and the skills of the adaptor: do they manage to ‘institutionalise’EGEA at their home university? If it remains a social network the entity is likely toend if the adaptors leave university.Spatial distance is not the reason why some countries show very little activityin almost the whole period. The local context that Ormrod (1990) has brought upas explaining factors for innovation diffusion seems to be important here. French(geography) students have a considerable degree of organisation in associations at thenational level but there is a language problem and a lesser interest in going abroad.In Italy, geography in higher education is less developed than in other countries inEurope. Students in the United Kingdom are maybe less focused on Europe andmaybe have less time to join extra curricular activities. Except for Slovenia it tooksome time before entities in former Yugoslavia have been set up, the local contextof the war played obvious a role here. Nowadays there are relatively strong linkagesbetween the entities in former Yugoslavia (mutual exchanges, organising congressestogether).The Internet plays a major role in the organisation. Communication within thenetwork increased and became faster and easier. The Internet forum made EGEAmore a community where people communicate with each other on a daily basis. TheInternet contact is not a displacement but a stimulus for face-to-face contact.In the dispersal of the network the Internet plays a role, but face-to-face contactremains the most important way how new entities start to know about the organisationand decide to join it. Geographical distance still plays a role in the communicationand the expansion of the network, because of students studying temporally in anothercity, because new entities have close contacts with entities nearby or in the samevernacular region, and because of already existing national geography networks.References:1. DE PATER P. AND VAN DER WUSTEN H. 1996. Het Geografisch Huis: de opbouwvan een wetenschap. Bussum: Couthinho.2. GASPAR J. AND GLAESER E. 1998. Information Technology and the Future of Cities.Journal of Urban Economics, 43, pp. 136−156.3. KOBAYASHI K., ROY J. AND FUKUYAMA K. 1998. Contacts with Agreements:towards face-to-face communication modelling. The Annals of Regional Science, 32,pp. 389−406.4. ORMROD K. 1998. Local Context and Innovation Diffusion in a Well-connected World.Economic Geography, 66(2), pp. 109−122.201