Today the UK Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts MP, announced the release of £14 million to fund the second phase of the ESRC's investment in Big Data. At a speech at the High Performance Computing and Big Data Conference, Mr Willetts outlined what steps are being taken to strengthen the UK’s competitive advantage in Big Data.

Subscribers will find attached a recent presentation at the 5th International Conference on World-Class Universities, 3 to 6 November 2013 in Shanghai, China made by Prof. Dr. Barbara M. Kehm of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change at the University of Glasgow:

Professor Michael Osborne, PASCAL Director at the University of Glasgow was very pleased to be able to attend the CityNet conference held between 3 and 6 November at Seoul City Hall and Global Centre. It was a pleasure for PASCAL as partners of CityNet to attend this event, which was full of excellent dialogue.

Today has been the first day of the 2013 Lifelong Learning Planet Forum hosted by the Gyeonggi Do Provincial Institute for Lifelong Learning (GILL) and the National Institute for Lifelong Education in Korea.

PASCAL Director Professor Michael Osborne was amongst the speakers focusing on European patterns in learning city development. Interestingly we have also discovered that Gyeonggi-do and Tampere City in Finland have been exchanging practices, during the course of a GILL staff tour to three Nordic countries, which had the aim of looking for insight and interesting case examples of LLL and adult education. This is quite a co-incidence since later this month PASCAL will be hosting a party of mayors from the Tampere area in Glasgow. So it seems a three way Korea-Finland-Scotland exchange is possible.

Details of two seminars being run by our colleagues at the University of Strathclyde have recently been published:

‘Impact of Lifelong Learning Strategies on Professional Higher Education in Europe.’ - 12th September 2012

‘Change management in Universities - The Case of Finland.’ - 21st November 2012

Of interest to colleagues involved in lifelong learning and in change management in universities these events are described fully in the attachments to this entry.