Learning & Education

This volume reports the results of the first phase of the Civic Education Study conducted by International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). During 1996 and 1997, researchers in 24 countries collected documentary evidence on the circumstances, contents, and processes of civic education in response to a common set of framing questions. They also solicited the views of experts on what 14-year-olds should know about a variety of political and civic issues. Each chapter provides a summary of these national case studies and highlights pressing issues or themes of current importance within civic education.

Have you ever wondered why universities still educate tomorrow's managers with yesterday's tools? Our contemporary higher education landscape is facing rapid technological advancements and the promises of web 2.0 to foster a new mode of knowledge production and collaborative learning among students around the world. We are always online, continuously updating and connecting to electronic information nodes in the globalised digital village of the web.

A central theme of the book is the implications of such diverse work for the learning and development of arts practitioners. It challenges Higher Arts Education institutions to re-order their priorities and to bring community engagement in from the margins.

What is geography’s essential contribution to the general education of young people? To what extent does this contribution match the geographical knowledge and skills that are taught in school? Are these knowledge and skills indeed instilled in young people by the end of secondary education, either through formal education, or along informal lines of learning?

Currently, most strategic information systems (IS) projects fail, as teams struggle to understand complex design problems, manage large-scale design processes, and negotiate design decisions in organisations. Multidisciplinary design teams need support to learn how to improve their skills and knowledge in design, and to manage complex processes more effectively.

African local governments play an important role in development, but with very different results. Why do some of their donor-supported projects produce sustainable benefits, whereas others stop as soon as the donor withdraws? Public administration literature argues that African local governments should learn, adapt and cooperate with others. But under what conditions can local governments learn? Are there general strategies for learning and for cooperation to produce sustainable benefits? Local Learning tries to answer these questions.

'I would very much like my child to grow up bilingual. But I am afraid that speaking two languages in the home would be confusing. Where can I get some advice?'

This study is aimed at how higher education might cope with the current and upcoming pressures of technology on education. Developments that have had or have an influence in the shaping process of higher education were addressed, a quantitative study on growth patterns and users' uses from 289 virtual learning environments was conducted, and elaboration on educational technology with gained insights was carried out to deliver a picture of the future educational practice, which we like to call Learning mall.

The need for developing innovative learning strategies in the life sciences results from the growing complexity of societal issues. Nowadays, complex societal issues are also called ‘wicked problems.’ Wicked problems are problems that do not have one single solution that is right or wrong, good or bad or true or false. These are problems in which many stakeholders are involved, each of them framing the issues in a different way. It is these kind of problems that require the development of innovative learning strategies.