PASCAL Observatory’s 2018 International Conference in Suwon, Korea was a beehive of lively learners and lively ideas. PASCAL interest in place and learning cities is neatly captured by Waltraut Ritter’s reflection in PIMA Bulletin No. 21 on visiting Suwon City itself:

As a visitor to a city, how do you know whether you are in city that is a place where some collaborative thinking and knowledge-sharing is visible in how the urban space looks and feels? Can a learning city strategy save your city from being just a nondescript, soulless urban agglomeration?

Exploring the city on foot prior to the PASCAL Learning City conference in Suwon, a city where language does not help you to decipher your surrounding by reading (unless you can read Hangul), observation of street life can tell you a lot about a city.  

See PIMA Bulletin 21:1 for the full text...

Bulletin No. 21 also launches a discussion of the life-deep learning concept led by PIMA President Dorothy Lucardie. The subject surfaced in plenary sessions at Suwon. It is a term more often used than carefully analysed.

Reflection on… themes opened up discussion at the conference on what is meant by the term life deep learning. Does this refer to the spiritual dimension of learning as explored by Wong? Is it a term that includes the cultural dimension of learning and knowing? (Gumpanat Boriboon) - or indeed the application of knowledge at a deeper level (Areola)? Or by using the term Life-deep learning are we embracing the impact that empowerment and participation have on both learning and being?

Participants expressed keen interest in further discussion on life-deep learning; six responses to an invitation to contribute therefore appear in the first 2019 PIMA Bulletin.

See PIMA Bulletin 21:1 for the full text...

The Special Interest Group on Later Life Learning facilitated by Thomas Kuan from Singapore has produced a twenty-chapter report driven by co-editors Peter Kearns and Denise Reghenzani-Kearns. Towards good active ageing for all in a context of deep demographic change and dislocation includes case studies from nine countries in the European and Asian-Pacific regions. Among the six ‘Moving Forward’ chapters, Tom Schuller for example writes in Ch. 11 about Managing the Transitions:   

Our lives are, inevitably, a mix of continuities and discontinuities.  Human development is rarely a matter of passing smoothly from one stage to the next in a series of well-defined steps.  One of the weaknesses of many models of life-course development is that they present patterns that do not reflect changes in the external environment, in particular in the labour market and in the demographic profile of the population.  We need to understand better the major transitions in life, recognising that there is great diversity in how people accomplish them.

In chapter 15 Qing Xia and Dayong Yun write about Promoting Community Education in China:

The lifelong education system includes schools and other educational organisations outside the school.  Speeding up the establishment and development of specialised organisations for lifelong education is of great significance for the rapid development of lifelong education.  In Beijing, the state established open universities at the provincial, autonomous region and municipal level directly under the Central Government arrangements; community universities or community colleges at the district, county and municipal levels;  and community schools at the street and township levels to serve as specialised institutions for implementing and promoting lifelong education.  All kinds of lifelong education institutions at all levels obtain permission to run schools according to law, register them according to law, and carry out lifelong education activities within the scope of the approval obtained.  

See PIMA Bulletin 21:1 for the full text...