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"Gaia Education promotes a holistic approach to education for sustainable development by developing curricula for sustainable community design. While drawing upon best practices within ecovillages worldwide, Gaia Education works in partnership with universities, ecovillages, government and non-government agencies and the United Nations. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis I suggest you J-M to read the critics part, where we can see a "nice" example of tension between religion and science (just to connect to some previous topic) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology this is also very interesting to read when it comes to the principles of sustainable development

thank you for the link to deep ecology, "a contemporary ecological philosophy that claims to recognize the inherent worth of other beings aside from their utility. The philosophy emphasizes the interdependent nature of human and non-human life as well as the importance of the ecosystem and natural processes. It provides a foundation for the environmental, ecology and green movements and has fostered a new system of environmental ethics."

This article provides a conceptual account and empirical analyses of the development of boundary-crossing competence-the ability to function competently in multiple contexts-using representative cases from two after-school programs with immigrant and low-socioeconomic status students. Our findings suggest that organizational designs that create networks of related communities of practice can provide opportunities for nondominant students to develop boundary-crossing competences through participation in expanded, horizontal-rather than hierarchal-systems of what Moll and colleagues have called "networked expertise." These new directions in understanding competence have important implications for improving learning designs for nondominant students.

Make sure you're logged in Bibnet.lu.

"An empirical analysis of the creation, use and adoption of social computing applications IPTS exploratory research on the socio-economic impact of social computing Over the last few years, the take-up of social computing applications has been impressive. These digital applications are defined as those that enable interaction, collaboration and sharing between users. They include applications for blogging, podcasting, collaborative content (e.g. Wikipedia), social networking e.g. MySpace, Facebook, multimedia sharing (e.g. Flickr, YouTube), social tagging (e.g. Deli.cio.us) and social gaming (e.g. Second Life). The importance of social computing has been acknowledged by European policy makers. It is considered to be a potentially disruptive Information Society development, in which users play an increasingly influential role in the way products and services are shaped and used. This may have important social and economic impacts on all aspects of society. There is, however, little scientific evidence on the take-up and impact of social computing applications. The objective of this report is to provide a systematic empirical assessment of the creation, use and adoption of specific social computing application areas: blogging, podcasting, collaborative content, social networking multimedia sharing, social tagging and social gaming. In addition, the report offers a definition of social computing in order to clarify what is meant, in the face of many different angles, and points to the new area of mobile social computing. The dynamics of user participation in social computing are also discussed. Finally, extensive empirical data is presented in the Annex to this report. Research into social computing presents numerous challenges. Social computing is a moving target, with rapidly evolving technologies, markets and user behaviours, all of which have emerged and developed over just a few years. The measurement issue is a crucial, in particular in the context of policy imp

Thank you for sharing; not only does this article seem very interesting but I am also always happy to find sites that offer free articles for me to read.

Might be interesting in investigating development

This a report on a very interesting conference held in May 2004 at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) Conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Some keywords for those who might be interested: gender, technology and development. The report provides an interesting insight into several studies on this field. For instance, one of the papers discussed emphasizes the role of vocational training for migrant women regarding their negotiations with the workmarket. One of the aspects discussed: "how do young [migrant] North American women perceive and understand, hear and listen, to the voices of their sisters [native women] across culture, class, status, skin, and language?" It is definitely an interesting issue, where crossing boundaries is a factor of development.

I think you have to be logged in in portail bnu

This chapter describes the development of a Bahá'í international adult education program designed so that community service is both process and outcome. Particular emphasis is on the preparation of adult tutors.

"We promote, develop, supply and support educational programs, studies, products and services that could introduce and address a new system of integrated education in collaboration with individuals and organizations who are dedicated to providing a comprehensive education to children worldwide."

Unfortunately, this is not the article about the original incident, but I'll explain what happened, I think it can relate to our topics: one area of downtown Seattle is known for its large numbers of transient Native Americans, many of whom are homeless or appear so. Sadly, they are often drunk in public and associate with a drug-using underbelly of the city. Of course this is a stereotype and not all the Indians in the area are like this, but many are. A few months ago, an older First Nations male from Vancouver Island who was a respected woodcarver in his community and was known among this "drunk/drugged out" crowd in Seattle was shot and killed by a Seattle policeman. Apparently the cop approached him and asked him to put down his carving knife. He did not obey, supposedly because he didn't hear because he was listening to music and was deaf in one ear. The cop opened fire and killed the man. Obviously, this generated a lot of controversy and protest especially among the Native American community of Seattle and North America. The man had some psychological issues according to some friends, but is that a reason to have opened fire on him? Do these tragedies have to happen for us to rethink our intercultural comprehension? This opens up wounds and old racial conflicts that have been going on for 150 years. The cop's previous experience with Indians of the area coupled with stereotypes led him to act, in my opinion incredibly irrationally, which resulted in the death of a respected wood carver. Sadly, the boundary present at this conflict was crossed by the cop in a brutal way, and this has resulted in the creation of more boundaries and perhaps a further divide between law enforcement officers and the people of the area. This will create fear and mistrust among the transient community and perhaps the Indian community as a whole, which in turn could lead to even more violence and further propagation of stereotypes. If handled poorly, no positive de

This young lady has a very interesting view of bounderies and how to go beyond them. She instigates us to take control of our lives and fight for our dreams. Bounderies can either stop us or challenge our imagination. Up to each one of us to decide!

It is interesting to see how social networking has transformed the communication in office setting.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

I think we cannot just look at the education system alone to consider if it is successful. The overall environment and peoples' effort in making equality works in their country are also important. If education system is just a mean to an end to achieve high score in PISA, it is not so difficult to do so. However, what exactly is the function of an education system in society is important.

I admire Finland's intensive teacher-training and union collaboration. I think it is one of the important keys to the educational success. Of course, equity for students is very important. But, it is not enough to make the success. I would like to share a link which shows what Finland's Minister of Education says about their excellent teacher-training and union collaboration. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-snider/keys-to-finnish-education_b_836802.html

A "cultural interpreter" is an active participant in a cross-cultural/lingual interaction, assisting the provider in understanding the beliefs and practices of the client's culture and assisting the client in understanding the dominant culture, by providing cultural as well as linguistic links. This model of interpreting service was developed out of an awareness that communication is seriously impaired by insensitivity to the role of culture in the content and manner of communication, particularly in formal interactions (Cairncross, 1989). There are certain ideas about what it means to be a good interpreter. Perfect knowledge of at least two languages, good memory and general knowledge are some of the skills people see as fundamental. However, one of the most important skills seems to be the ability to bridge the gap between two cultures, or in other words, to be aware of certain boundaries, which need to be crossed.

Because of the multiple issues caused by the American health-care system, researchers have though to find a solution to help the communities in need (such as for example old persons or homeless people or families): a community-academic partnership. Two nursing schools would work for one year with a non-profit social association in order to provide health care to those in need as well as a good practice for the future nurses. But how to manage in an efficient manner for everyone a community-academic partnership? Researchers and members involved have faced many boundaries during the implementation and the existence of this partnership.

I found this while googling: development across boundaries bahai

"Here we present findings from the "Religion among Academic Scientists" study, a survey (N=1,646) and initial in-depth interviews (N=150) with natural and social scientists at twenty-one elite US research universities. We examine the attitudes academic scientists at these universities have about the perceived conflict between religion and science and their personal cultural construction of the boundaries between science and religion. Using survey data, results show that field-specific differences, being in the natural or social sciences, are not significant predictors of adopting the conflict paradigm, refuting previous research. Attention to in-depth interviews reveals three mechanisms of boundary-crossing, where boundaries between religion and science are transgressed: institutional pull, boundary pioneering, and environmental push. These results contribute key mechanisms of boundary change and boundary crossing between the specific knowledge domains of science and religion to the growing sociology of culture literature on boundaries."

Werner Heisenberg. Der Teil und das Ganze: Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik. (Piper, 2001) This book is written by one of the foundator and leading scientist of quantum mechanics and physics and is a very light-speaking, anecdoting story telling about Heisenberg's life, education, personal life and development. When he mentiones his awakening interest in physicsm he talks a lot about Platon and it is very interesting to read about his attitude towards religion and the principal questions of religion. It is also him we attribute the famous sentence: The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

merci Dora, let us look at religion & science as two sources of knowledge. In my case, I would be most familiar with the Bahai Faith (www.bahai.org) and I do believe that this Faith has a new contribution in the task of transforming society.

Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have "Wikipedia ambassadors" tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. Even Ferriero's office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a "Wikipedian in residence" in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums.

Interesting! If it is a good piece of work,it doesn't matter whether it is judged by one professor/public. It does matter what students learn during the process and how they can improve their work further.