Recently Professor Bruce Wilson was interviewed by the Hume Global Learning Village for their quarterly magazine: Imagine, Explore, Discover (IED) Spring edition about the PASCAL International Exchanges (PIE) project, which PASCAL Observatory is currently running.  A copy of the interview follows and the IED magazine is also included.

CONNECTING THE WORLD
PASCAL INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGES

The PASCAL International Exchanges (PIE) project is connecting organisations around the world that promote lifelong learning within their communities. Schools, neighbourhood houses, learning centres, libraries and cultural and heritage institutes, that are contributing to lifelong learning, now have a web portal where they can share their resources and exchange information.

Launched as a major PASCAL Observatory project, PIE links nine learning cities located in five continents: Glasgow (Scotland), Vancouver (Canada), Hume City (Melbourne, Australia), Helsinki (Germany), Kaunas (Lithuania), Bari (Italy), Cork (Ireland), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Hong Kong (China). Australia’s learning city is represented by our very own Hume City and its Global Learning Village.

IED spoke to Professor Bruce Wilson, Pascal Observatory co-director, about the world’s learning cities and how PIE is connecting them to each other.

IED: What is a learning city?

Professor Bruce Wilson ("BW"): The idea of a ‘learning city’ comes from work done in the late 1980’s and 1990’s in cities where there was a significant decline in older manufacturing industry and mining, and a need to generate new kinds of businesses and job opportunities for people. ‘Learning cities’ put a priority on knowledge and skills which were becoming increasingly significant with the growth in importance of new information and communication technologies, so that their local economies would become ‘knowledge’ economies.

‘Learning cities’ were those where city leaders made a determined effort to plan and to invest in the political, social and technical infrastructure necessary to promote learning as a critical ongoing ingredient of city life. Hume City has been a classic example of a city which made that early commitment to seeing learning as a critical part of its strategy for change and development, and has invested in it.

IED: How did you identify the other nine learning cities and establish this partnership?

BW: PASCAL International Observatory has been going for close to 10 years and is built on a widespread network of researchers and activists involved with lifelong learning, social coherence and place management. The network is supported by RMIT University, the University of Glasgow and North Illinois University.

Hume and Glasgow have been the core cities involved in the PASCAL International Exchange dialogue since it was first proposed, and the other cities have become involved through either the contacts of Peter Kearns, a PASCAL Associate who is also the project leader of PIE, or of other members of the PASCAL network.

IED: How can these cities learn from each other?

BW: The Hume Global Learning Village in particular has been a unique initiative which has been an important forum for many different organisations and people to come together and share their perspectives on possible action on learning and to share their resources. There are also many practical things which Hume has done to build and strengthen HGLV partnerships, such as its Learning Together 2030 Strategy, which can be of interest to other cities.

Each of the other cities involved in the PIE project has its own unique history and strengths which offer folks in Hume some ideas of different ways of looking at things. Many of the same issues are important in several other cities, so sharing the different perspectives on those issues can prompt some innovative thinking about how people in Hume can think a bit differently about how they might try something a bit unusual.