PASCAL, social media, and making more sense of what is out there

PASCAL's reach in social media continues to grow.  On Twitter (@obspascal [2]) we are now well passed the 8000 posts, and we have over 1800 followers, a number that continues to grow steadily.  PASCAL has been listed 128 times at the time of writing. Our tweets feed through to the PASCAL Facebook page [3] where we are also attracting an increasing number of fans. We hope shortly to develop more of a presence on Linkedin.

Posts draw attention to items on the PASCAL website and its associated sites such as Learning Cities 2020 [4], Learning City Networks (LCN [5]) and OTB [6].  Posts also highlight a wide variety of news, reports and research produced elsewhere, and relevant to the overall  PASCAL focus on place and learning, and more specifically on economic and inclusive social development in cities and regions, the contribution of higher education and the vital role of lifelong learning and social capital in these processes.

We can always do more to improve this key observatory role of PASCAL by spreading the net wider still and doing more to distill and synthesis the main trends and  messages which emerge from this extremely diverse material from around the globe in a readily accesible way for the benefit of both researchers and policy making in public agencies.

So a few ways in which you could help:

• Those readers wih Twitter and Facebook accounts - please follow PASCAL and re-tweet or share PASCAL posts you find interesting and worthy of a wider audience;
• Those who do not have such accounts, please consider opening one and follow PASCAL.  We usually follow back! You will find a lot of rewarding material there;
• Consider becoming a PASCAL correspondent.  We are looking for people who would like to periodically review material on a particular theme ( eg posts using a specific hashtag such as #learningcities, or #highered ) or from a specific geographical region, and then prepare short blog posts for the main PASCAL website highlighting important messages relevant to PASCAL themes for the benefit of readers who may have missed the original posts.
  
  Please get in touch [7] if you would be interested in working with PASCAL in such a role.