Understanding universities and entrepreneurship education: towards a comprehensive future research agenda

Understanding the potential and dynamics of entrepreneurship and education requires better understanding of how universities function as knowledge communities, and the role of students in such milieu. This can reveal how universities’ teaching activities influence the development of students’ entrepreneurial orientations and competencies. This article argues that entrepreneurship education has not yet fulfilled its potential partly because of a poor fit with other knowledge activities of universities. It proposes that a future research agenda for universities’ entrepreneurship education should focus more upon how entrepreneurship activities fit with universities’ core knowledge community activities. This would allow a coherent understanding to emerge of the potentials and limitations of universities’ contributions to the inculcation of entrepreneurial attitudes

External stakeholders, collaborations and partnerships in WBL with Higher Education Institutions in the UK: context and cases

No abstract available

External stakeholders, collaborations and partnerships in WBL with Higher Education Institutions in the UK: context and cases

No abstract available

Big Data, Lifelong Learning and Learning Cities: Promoting City-Discourse on Social Inequalities in Learning

The Key Features of Learning Cities, published by UNESCO (2013), laid out possible indicators through which learning communities, cities, and regions could support and evaluate learning engagement and urban success, within a context of international collaboration. This briefing paper presents an overview of Learning Cities from the perspective of operationalising a range of indicators, illustrating the role of ‘Big Data’ in in this pursuit. We also argue for public engagement opportunities to be embedded within social science research. Such discourse and debate regarding individual motivations, decisions and ambitions, may highlight where lifelong learning opportunities are needed, and for the wider value of active citizenship. The present work, of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) at the University of Glasgow, is a key investment for researchers to more easily access the potential of big data for addressing city challenges, such as learning inclusion. UBDC exemplifies how novel, open, big data can be applied to assess learning engagement in an urban context, embedded in place and with considerations of demographic and deprivation changes. The principles of our research relate to Learning City frameworks, and have been inspired by the PASCAL Observatory’s Learning City Network, as well as the existence of a Memorandum of Agreement between PASCAL and the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning. Using Learning City Frameworks and applying innovative Big Data approaches offers educationalists avenues for exploring learning engagement in our own regions, as well as future global comparisons of Learning Cities. More importantly, novel and interdisciplinary approaches can help us use our city data, to open discussions about learning inequalities, specifically promoting lifelong learning and lifewide literacies for more engaged citizenry

COOPERATION IN WORK-ORIENTED LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The paper reports on preliminary findings from an EU funded project on collaboration and partnership between external stakeholders and universities to deliver work-related learning to adults with existing labour market experience in order to increase skills and competences for the knowledge economy as envisaged in Agenda 2020. The paper engages with debates on the professionalization of vocational education and consequently the vocationalisation of university education. It reports relevant data for the six partner countries of the LETAE project and EU averages to provide some context to debates about relative levels of attainment and labour market position. It briefly introduces some data drawn from cases studies of work-related learning in higher education delivered in partnership or collaboration with external stakeholders including local authorities, trade unions, and individual enterprises. Finally, it compares in detail the cases from the UK and Spain as illustrative of specific national responses to work-related learning initiatives

Preparing for the Worst: Integrated Drought Planning for a SC Water Utility in the age of Water Scarcity

2008 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Addressing Water Challenges Facing the State and Regio

Timing and causes of North African wet phases during the last glacial period and implications for modern human migration

We present the first speleothem-derived central North Africa rainfall record for the last glacial period. The record reveals three main wet periods at 65-61 ka, 52.5-50.5 ka and 37.5-33 ka that lead obliquity maxima and precession minima. We find additional minor wet episodes that are synchronous with Greenland interstadials. Our results demonstrate that sub-tropical hydrology is forced by both orbital cyclicity and North Atlantic moisture sources. The record shows that after the end of a Saharan wet phase around 70 ka ago, North Africa continued to intermittently receive substantially more rainfall than today, resulting in favourable environmental conditions for modern human expansion. The encounter and subsequent mixture of Neanderthals and modern humans – which, on genetic evidence, is considered to have occurred between 60 and 50 ka – occurred synchronously with the wet phase between 52.5 and 50.5 ka. Based on genetic evidence the dispersal of modern humans into Eurasia started less than 55 ka ago. This may have been initiated by dry conditions that prevailed in North Africa after 50.5 ka. The timing of a migration reversal of modern humans from Eurasia into North Africa is suggested to be coincident with the wet period between 37.5 and 33 ka

The relevance of university adult education for labour market policies

Lifelong learning now plays a key role labour market policies within the EU. Against a background of increasing rates of highly educated people and changes in graduate labour markets, universities have started to become involved in adult learning and active labour market policies. The article presents the results of 21 nonrepresentative case studies of university adult learning programmes from seven EUcountries with particular focus on people in mid-life, who are becoming more and more socially vulnerable. One of the main features of the case studies was the social effectiveness of university adult learning programmes in terms of access to jobs and quality of work/life. The results of the case studies together with a review of the results of other European lifelong learning projects made it possible to draw up a scheme of the core dimensions of socially effective university adult learning