Bellcurve: Built Environment Lifelong Learning Challenging University Responses to Vocational Education: Lifelong University for the Built Environment

BELLCURVE (Built Environment Lifelong Learning Challenging University Responses to Vocational Education) is a European Commission funded research project conducted at the School of the Built Environment, University of Salford, UK, in collaboration with Department of Construction Economics and Property Management, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania and Department of Building Production, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. This project addressed issues associated with the mismatch between graduate skills and labour market requirements as this mismatch has been identified as one of the main factors behind graduate unemployment and employer dissatisfaction, particularly in the Built Environment (BE) sector. BELLCURVE considered ‘student engagement’ as a continuous through-life process rather than a temporary traditional engagement limited by the course duration. This through-life studentship defines the essence of the new innovative “Lifelong University” concept, whereby providing an opportunity for learners to acquire and develop skills and knowledge enabling responds to changing construction labour market needs on a continuous basis. This requires a reform in governance systems to respond labour market needs effectively while promoting the lifelong learning agenda

From ‘Heritage Adepts’ to Historical Reconstructionists: Observations on Contemporary Estonian Male Heritage-Based Artisanry

On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted between 2007 and 2013, the authors analyse the communities of male artisans that have had the most significant impact on the development of contemporary Estonian handicraft. A wide range of artisans were surveyed in the course of this research, from professionals who earn a living from handicraft to amateurs, small enterprises and handicraft instructors. The authors concentrate on the motifs and background of different categories of handicraft agent. Details of handicraft practice such as mastering specific items, local peculiarities and materials used will be also explored. The analysis is predominantly based on the artisans’ views on proper ways of making handicraft items, their marketing strategies and the needs of developing their skills. The study demonstrates that artisanal initiatives support the material reproduction of cultural locations through constant renewal of heritage ideology and practice

Steadfast in versatility : the substrate of a multi-modal practice

The research is about inventing ways to produce spaces of inspiration that catalyse curiosity and generous, resilient creativity which goes beyond the local, national or regional borders, enhancing public space, while operating in the transforming context of Estonia. The work evidences certain ‘joyful’ approaches to publicness in design activity, in which the search for functional realities not only incorporates but immerses itself in and builds upon other disciplines as well as on institutional, ideological and structural processes. When practice’s activities propagate through a multiplicity of expressions (simultaneous drawing, model-making, installations, construction supervision, texts, and so on), the set of ‘devices’ with, upon and within which the designer operates could be called the practice’s substratum (substrate). The research poses a question that to evolve a practice, is it necessary to transform its structure, purpose or agenda, or is it a question of how to renew its substrate? A closer look at an existing practice reveals how a practice’s substratum might shift in response to a contextual change. A multi-modal versatile practice bears within it the capacity to facilitate (positive) or to resist (negative) societal change. The research points to the potential for some specific open-ended ‘protocols’ to emerge from the observations offered

Erasmus in the Baltic countries 2007-2013

In 1981 the European Commission started a pilot-student mobility action in Europe, which became a predecessor to the Erasmus programme launched in 1987. During the first academic year 11 European countries with almost 3 244 students participated in the programme. In 1995 Erasmus was merged with other educational and training programmes and was named the Socrates programme. In 2000 the programme was prolonged to Socrates II. In 2007 a new programme called the Lifelong Learning Programme grew from the previous Socrates. This brochure provides a statistical analysis of the implementation of the Erasmus Programme’s decentralised mobility actions in the 3 participating Europe- an countries in the Baltic Area and covers the overall performance of all the different types of actions funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme (Student and Staff Mobility, Intensive Programmes, Erasmus Intensive Language Courses) in the period 2007–2013

The Education and Practice of Futures Studies in Estonia

The aim of this case study is to analyze the historical and current state of the education and practice of futures studies (FS) in a country that was once a member of the Soviet Union: Estonia. There are other countries in Eastern Europe which used to be or currently are in a similar situation to Estonia, but futures studies developed in different ways, because politics and economies were driven by different strategies or interests, and futurists emphasized different aspects of their research (either the theoretical or the practical, along different paradigms). In certain countries, like in Estonia, FS first achieved scientific (and educational) success after the political change of the early 90s, but this was followed by a long way down to a secondary (backing) position. It seems that an optimal share between education and practice may lead FS out from the pit in Estonia, and in other countries, too

Guided Interaction Exploration in Artifact-centric Process Models

Artifact-centric process models aim to describe complex processes as a collection of interacting artifacts. Recent development in process mining allow for the discovery of such models. However, the focus is often on the representation of the individual artifacts rather than their interactions. Based on event data we can automatically discover composite state machines representing artifact-centric processes. Moreover, we provide ways of visualizing and quantifying interactions among different artifacts. For example, we are able to highlight strongly correlated behaviours in different artifacts. The approach has been fully implemented as a ProM plug-in; the CSM Miner provides an interactive artifact-centric process discovery tool focussing on interactions. The approach has been evaluated using real life data sets, including the personal loan and overdraft process of a Dutch financial institution.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, to be published in proceedings of the 19th IEEE Conference on Business Informatics, CBI 201