Sustainable tourism as a method of forming a tolerant society

The article concentrates on potential capabilities for the development of sustainable tourism, as well as its role in the formation of tolerant social relations. The authors revealed the profound impact of sustainable and hike tourism on emergence of the phenomenon ‘new tourist’. They also offered the description of levels of tolerance and their influence on the sustainable tendencies in modern tourism. There is a growing trend for tourism in modern international community to act as a high-powered regulator of socio-cultural relations and, simultaneously, as the crucial factor of counteraction to that xenophobia. A head-on clash of local and foreign cultures, which is an integral part of the very notion of tourism, is not supposed to assume itself in highly extreme forms, with the air of predominance of any of them, moreover, to be based on national, racial, religious, linguistic or educational differences. To put the idea across more efficiently, the authors resorted to exploiting such useful tools as the analysis and synthesis methodology, as well as that of comparison and prognostics. What is produced in the outcome of this study is revealing and emphasizing the levels of tolerance, characterizing the uneasy interrelationships between the so-called ‘new’ tourists and local community. The research findings could find practical applications for designing of new tourist products and elaborating of new networks of footpaths for walking tours

Well-being as a Phenomenon: Research Paradigms of the Fifth Age

It is established that active longevity is connected with the intense intellectual activity at any age. Nowadays a man uses only a part of his/her intellectual capacities and it leads to reducing the storage capacity of mental memory. Globalization processes, medical and public health achievements have a positive effect on human longevity. Due to this, there is a problem of transforming “survival probability” into the active part of the human life activity known as “The Fifth Age”. As the subject of research is complex and multidimensional, it requires multifaceted study. In the study different methods such as analysis of information resources reflecting recent data about seniors' well-being, analysis of websites providing medical and social support to seniors, study of scientific papers about seniors' well-being are used. As a result a hypothesis about the conflict between the study of seniors' wellbeing problem and the lack of study of effective methods creating positive path of active aging based on senior's personal memories is formed. Summing up the results it can be concluded that seniors' well-being greatly depends on their participation in cultural memorial practices

Soft skills and Moodle

At present, technical university graduates are expected to acquire a set of not only hard skills but soft ones as well, which are in the first instance communication skills that can be developed through active and interactive methods during in-class learning. The issue related to communicative skills development is being discussed in different countries throughout the world. This problem is faced by university graduates from Europe, the US and Russia, and in the East. The learning process exploits a variety of electronic platforms, which, on the one hand, significantly increase the pool of students, but, on the other hand, hinder the development of communicative skills. This poses the question about blended learning which combines active and interactive teaching methods with e-learning. Consider a good example of these two types of combined student activity obtained using interactive methods in the Moodle course "Professional training in English" designed for the Bachelor's Degree Programs, Tomsk Polytechnic University (Tomsk, Russia). This paper considers the main types of tasks used in the e-course. It is shown that the teacher's first aim is to be not a scientific knowledge translator, but to foster a creative educational environment by selecting an optimal teaching strategy through modern educational technology; an e-course is a good teaching aid to build hard and soft skills