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All change: global education sector meets in Doha to look to the future

More than 1,200 people working in the global education sector have descended upon Doha, in Qatar, for the second annual World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE).

 

The summit’s theme, “building the future of education”, was introduced by His Excellency Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, chairman of WISE, who warned that “one summit a year is not enough”. He urged delegates to connect with the organisation year-round to try to further global education goals.

 
The summit’s opening session was also addressed via video message by Nancy Pelosi, the current Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who said that the challenge for 21st-century education was “to unite our technology with our humanity”. 
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The European Convention on Human rights 60 Years on: What about Youth rights?
The 4th November marked the 60th anniversary of the signing of the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950. The Convention, which then came into force on 3rd September 1953, guarantees a range of political rights and freedoms of the individual against interference by the state. To this end, the Council of Europe has been widely congratulated in its work as the engine for the creation of a Europe based on the respect of human rights, peace and tolerance. 
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Universities lead the way to the 'big society'
When David Cameron first launched his idea of the "big society", which would see citizens work together to run libraries, post offices, transport and more, the biggest criticisms were practical ones. Would people really give their time for free? And would volunteers have anything close to the necessary skills required to run local services?
 
Three months on, the big society is still in gestation phase. But if the prime minister needs inspiration, he might like to check out Britain's universities, where the pro bono philosophy (literally "in the public good"; in practice it means free) is thriving. Take the University of the West of England, where 200 law students and academics run a legal clinic with the Bristol Citizens Advice Bureau and practising barristers. The undergraduates interview and advise local clients supervised by a dozen academics and, when required, practising lawyers. 
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Graduate careers: How to tap into your inner entrepreneur
 It should be a happy coincidence that a record number of bright graduates have been unleashed into the jobs market just as the UK struggles to master the recession. However, a recent survey has found that two-thirds of UK businesses reckon that graduates are ill-equipped to help turn around the nation's fortunes.
 

"We are in danger of failing our young people by not providing them with the necessary business skills and experience they need to succeed," says John May, chief executive of the education charity Young Enterprise, which carried out the research. "A workforce lacking in business acumen simply cannot drive an economic recovery." 

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A university's soul is its freedom of ideas
Can a university have a soul? Can it lose it is more to the point. And can it sell it to the devil? I still remember the moment it dawned on me as a very young man that Catholic intellectuals had something in common with thinkers from the Soviet bloc: they spoke in code, for fear of being silenced.
 
Those of us who have worked in the humanities and who have not required an imprimatur from an official censor nor had to worry about who was sending summaries of our lectures to the authorities take this freedom for granted as informing the animating principle – the soul – of a university. And where this freedom is absent, as in certain distant institutions with which we nowadays form smiling partnerships, the distinctive life of a university is not found there and though its students may be instructed and trained, they are not educated – or not by their teachers, and not at the university.
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Bologna slowly does it not doing it for students
Progress towards the goals of the Bologna Process is far too slow and in some areas almost non-existent, according to the European Students' Union (ESU).
 
The European Higher Education Area, conceived by the Bologna Declaration in 1999, was formally launched by the Budapest-Vienna Declaration in March this year. Implementation of the reforms is being tracked by the Bologna Follow-Up Group, which met for the first time in late August and which includes the ESU as a consultative member.
 
Robert Santa, a member of the ESU's executive committee, said the discussions "did not bring much new" to the table, adding that there was "clear evidence that unresolved issues in the Bologna implementation are piling up". By way of example, he pointed to "problems with getting studies recognised across borders and financial and administrative barriers for students who want to study in another country".
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Universities are blind to open-learning train set to smash up their models
Open learning and new technology are about to smash the structure of the modern university - and higher education is too distracted by its funding problems to notice.
 
Peter Smith, the senior vice-president of academic strategies and development for private US firm Kaplan Higher Education, said online access to university courses would end the model of higher education based on "scarcity" of places. "Faculty and people who run universities are no longer in control," he told an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development conference in Paris last week.
 
Dr Smith, a former assistant director general for education at Unesco, the UN cultural and educational body, challenged the focus on the financial crisis at the event, titled Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More with Less. Given huge growth in access to information, Dr Smith argued, the real challenge facing universities is "doing more with more". He added: "The only 'less' is the resources available to traditional universities to do what they have always done." 
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PhD: the Gateway to Employment
The time and effort spent gaining a PhD is repaid handsomely in excellent career prospects, according to research presented at the Vitae researcher development conference today.
 
A study of doctoral employment carried out for Research Councils UK found that doctoral graduates are highly employable – under 2 per cent of those with a PhD were out of work three years after completing their doctorates.
 
Although more than half (54 per cent) of those questioned are employed outside the academy, 94 per cent say they use their research skills in their work and about 40 per cent say they carry out research “most of the time”.
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Use the next year to improve education mobility
The United Nation's International Year of Youth started on the International Day of Youth (August 12). "Students and youth in general are a crucial part of every community and deserve an investment into their personal learning paths to become active citizens. In particular, we hope to see better possibilities for people to move freely between education systems, in order to shift towards a real open-border Europe", says ESU Chairperson Bert Vandenkendelaere.
 
"In Europe, we need a stronger effort to improve the access to and quality of our higher education for the benefit of the future society. We hope that Youth on the Move can be the start of a bigger contribution, both political and financial, from all the European member states to that open-border education area", says Vandenkendelaere. 
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Youth Work Convention places the emphasis on cooperation and knowledge sharing
The official declaration of the first youth work convention underlines the great importance of cooperation and knowledge sharing for the youth work sector. More than 400 youth workers and youth policy makers reflected on and debated the future of youth work at the convention. On 10 July 2010, the convention set out its conclusions in an official declaration.
 
In the new framework for European cooperation in the youth field (2010-2018), youth work is included in an official EU document for the first time. The aim of the convention was to take the first step towards a future agenda and action plan.
 
The convention’s official declaration is addressed to the European Commission, national ministers with jurisdiction in the youth field, the Council of Europe, and youth workers and policy makers in general. The principle conclusions of the convention are as follows:
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Students 'let down' by the academic Luddites
Survey finds that academy is failing to capitalise on new technology.
Research from the US Department of Education suggests that students studying online tend to outperform those receiving face-to-face tuition; The Open University in the UK has topped 20 million downloads on iTunes U; and, worldwide, social media has overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the web.
 
However, recent statistics from the US show that the academy may be failing to capitalise on the potential offered by new technology. The Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, conducted annually by academics at Indiana University, Bloomington, last year included questions on the use of technology by lecturers for the first time.
 
The results show that while 72 per cent of respondents used course- management systems such as Blackboard, many did not use any other technology in their academic lives. Some 70 per cent did not use plagiarism-detection software and 84 per cent did not use blogs. In each case, a small percentage claimed not to know that such things existed.
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