A rapid response in the provision of high quality education at all levels is urgently required of educational communities and governments. Hence, universal primary education has been registered as a top priority on the agenda of the international community in the modern era. To this effect the United Nation’s goal is to ensure that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to and complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality (Unesco, 2000). Although the driving force behind the international community’s Education For All (EFA) initiative has been economic factors, more concern is now being placed on the wider benefits of education - for example, the creation of social networks which in turn reinforce people’s aspirations to learn. The benefits of education and, by extension, the benefits of educational technology, are now being seen with increasing awareness of the problems of focusing unduly on narrow interpretations of human capital and on investment on the supply side. Education For All can be viewed as a conscious effort by the international community to expand individuals’ participation in local social structures for achieving social capital - social networks, the reciprocities that arise from them, and the values of these for achieving mutual goals (Schuller et al., 2000). 

The issue of the engagement of universities with civil society, and inevitably within this with their local communities, is a generic concern internationally. All over the world we observe a huge emphasis being placed on the encouragement of a new set of relationships between universities and their communities. However, whilst we may represent this as a global trend, accelerated perhaps by an exchange of experiences and processes of policy imitation, the form of engagement retains considerable variation. Local contexts vary of course, but national institutional frameworks also differ, and university-community engagement reflects local cultures even whilst translating lessons from elsewhere into local actions.

The starting point of all thinking about the past and our relation to the past must be that it is irreversible. This sounds almost ridiculously self-evident. Nevertheless it is exactly this fundamental characteristic which is creating the problems as well as the possibilities in the use of history. 

The irreversibility of the past somehow plays with us. On the one hand it is in the nature of the irreversibility that we cannot get into the time which has passed. It has just gone. Finito! There seems to be absolutely nothing we can do about it. Then on the other hand we sense the traces of the past everywhere.

It begins with our own memories and normally goes on with family memories, and then the collective memories of the community, the country and so on. In this way the past becomes extended to time before our own and therefore also before our personal memories. 

To view Hot Topic with selected photos please click the following link:

Henrik Zipsane -  Local and Regional Development - with photos - November 2007.pdf (3.3MB)

We argue that adult and community learning provides untold opportunities across a range of parameters and locations to support optimal ageing – for societies, for organisations, for communities, families and individuals. We also argue that understanding the new demography and the impact of ageing societies in other areas such as public health, including opportunity and direct costs, will broaden and enhance the perspective of policy-makers and practitioners involved in adult and community learning.  

While the focus of this paper is largely on the Australian experience, the paper also points to some general issues relevant to other countries where international exchanges of experience through the Pascal Network would have considerable value. 

Aune Valk, a PASCAL Associate and Director of the Open University Centre of the University of Tartu in Estonia, will be the first author of a Pascal Hot Topic to be written from a country within the former Soviet Union or ‘second world’ block. Her areas of expertise embrace the Bologna process, lifelong learning including e-learning and the  accreditation of prior and experiential learning, and, most relevant to this HT, collective - especially ethnic – identity.

This Hot Topic analyses - through the lens of a case study from Victoria Australia – how the idea of community strengthening has been embedded into the institutional apparatus of a regional government. This is largely an insider’s account of the emergence of the community paradigm. The focus is on describing the key themes and the policy apparatus that has emerged to give public administrative form to the idea of stronger communities. Throughout the paper David Adams provides links to the key documents which provide the technical discussions of how the public policy and public administration of community is playing out in Victoria.

How can the capacity for creating and exploiting knowledge in the context of Regional Innovation Systems be developed as a means to constructing regional advantage? This Hot Topic addresses this question, in reviewing policies and developments in Japan and South Korea. As well as explaining approaches to regionalism and innovation in these two countries the paper also invites reflection on how these East Asian approaches compare, and what they mean in particular for the countries of Europe and North America.

Social cohesion depends on building bridging social capital. This Hot Topic paper asks what role schools can play in building it. Could co-location and other forms of collaboration between schools in different sectors and other public and private providers help to build bridging social capital and to increase the cohesiveness of communities?

UK governments are currently investing record levels of public funds in regeneration programmes. Given this level of commitment to the economic and social transformation of disadvantaged places and groups, it is hardly surprising that the government should scrutinise the outcomes with special interest. This study draws on national and local evaluation programmes to attempt to answer several questions. Can neighbourhoods and localities be transformed as government intends? What counts as success? What are the success factors? What are the implications for public policy in relation to place management, social capital and lifelong learning?