The variety of academic cultures and the proverbially cultural diversity in Europe are often bemoaned and if anything seldom taken as resources for innovation and future oriented developments. Also within the EERA networks diverse meanings of key words and key concepts are rather developed and used in parallel than put into networked relations. The key idea of this symposium is to make use of available tools and resources in order to map keywords, key concepts and key issues in learning, education, media and culture collectively and in comprehensible ways. Problems, debates, structures of relevance, and points of conflict all depend on the recognition and usage of key terminology which opens up discursive spaces and which enables certain kinds of understanding. Therefore it might be helpful for both novices and professionals to create a space in which interrelations and dynamics of the debates are reconstructed beyond marketing hypes and short-lived fashions. Instead, the symposium is working towards a multilingual, multicodal and multicontextual understanding.
In view of the ongoing differentiation of web-based reference works and encyclopaedias a wiki-structure might be appropriate not least it can be regarded as open to further development.
The symposia offer the opportunity to start taking stock of the research fields of the EERA Network 6 and its key terms, debates and central issues. Moreover, after a process of consolidation it could be extended in terms of collaboration with all EERA Networks.