Here are some of the photos I take while doing work related traveling. Choose from the list on the right.

All this moving around is connected to the effervescence o the "Bologna process" or rather the construction of the European Higher Education Area.

It all started for me with Tuning I in 2001. The University of Coimbra was chosen to represent Portugal in the History subject area and the History department sent me. The reason I was chosen was that I had my students in computer methods for History do a web page with links to all degree programmes in History they could find. This was an idea that pop up in the middle of a class on web searching because we were doing a curricular reform at the time, and I thought it would be nice to check what the others were doing. Later I forwarded the information to the commission that was working on the reform. So when the Tuning call comes, the head of department, reading the objectives of Tuning, thought that I would be a good person to go.

Funny how a little thing, a task for students in a computer lab, that I decided in a second, triggered a series of events that really changed my professional life in a very significant way.

My first Tuning meeting was Roskilde in September 2001. Then came Gent in November, and Rome in March 2002 and the first grand finnale in Brussels at the end of May 2002. Unfortunately no photographs of the last two meetings. I think my camera broke down under warranty and took three months to be repaired.

In Tuning I met Estela Pereira, the Portuguese ECTS counsellor that later though that I could also do the job of ECTS counseling since I was in Tuning absorbing all the relevant concepts. And from that comes the photographs of the ECTS Series: The ECTS counsellors meetings in Graz (2002), Bilbao (2003) and Debrechen (2004) and the site visits in Nitra in 2004 with Volker Gehmlich, Turkey (ITU, Izmir and Gaziantep) in 2005 with Heikki Pekkarinen and Modena with Janerik Lundequist in 2006. Unfortunately I have no photographs from my training visit to Huelva in 2003 with Raphaela Pagani and Richard Levine.

Kathy Isaacs, who was in Tuning and also in the ECTS counsellors pool, suggested to me that Coimbra could participate in the TEEP-2002 project (now called the TEEP-I project), the first transnational evaluation based on Tuning, coordinated by the then little known ENQA. TEEP-I was my first contact with formal Quality Assurance processes in an International context. It was a very enriching experience, at various levels, that had long lasting consequences in my institutional activities. In TEEP I met Nick Harris of the QAA (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education of the UK) who later was kind enough to ask my collaboration in other QAA internal projects related to the Bologna area, always extremely stimulating and fun. So I went to London a few times for the QAA Tuning/Benchmarking project and more recently for Eurobam.

I started to follow CLIOHnet activities because they interacted strongly with Tuning, TEEP and later on CLIOHRES.net. I was in Cluj-Napoca in 2002 and in Sofia in 2004. It was in Sofia that I heard the news that CLIOHRES.net, the Network of Excellence in the 6th Framework programme had been approved and that I was the leader of one the six groups. CLIOHRES.net has been a challenging and fun project (see projects). For CLIOHRES.net I went to Pisa, Malta, Plovdiv and Iceland.

Meanwhile in 2003 I attended a meeting of the Coimbra Group, a network of historical universities in Europe, in Padova. The aim of the meeting was to promote the creation of Joint degree programmes inside the network. It was there that the idea came to move forward to create a joint programme in Humanities and Digital Media, an old idea that I had already discussed with my colleagues of Cologne and Lecce. I invited Turku because of their strong commitment to e-learning and three years later EUROMACHS was born, with a nice funding from the European Commission. The coordinating committee of Euromachs has met in Coimbra, Cologne, Lecce and Turku, where we saw our first students.