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Lifelong learning is the concept that "It's never too soon or too late for learning", a philosophy that has taken root in a whole host of different organizations. Lifelong learning is attitudinal; that one can and should be open to new ideas, decisions, skills or behaviors. Lifelong learning throws the axiom "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" out the door. Lifelong learning sees citizens provided with learning opportunities at all ages and in numerous contexts: at work, at home and through leisure activities, not just through formal channels such as school and higher education. Lifelong education is a form of pedagogy often accomplished through distance learning or e-learning, continuing education, homeschooling or correspondence courses. It also includes postgraduate programs for those who want to improve their qualification, bring their skills up to date or retrain for a new line of work. Internal corporate training has similar goals, with the concept of lifelong learning used by organisations to promote a more dynamic employee base, better able to react in an agile manner to a rapidly changing climate. In later life, especially in retirement, continued learning takes diverse forms, crossing traditional academic bounds and including recreational activities. One of the reasons why lifelong education has become so important is the acceleration of scientific and technological progress. Despite the increased duration of primary, secondary and university education (14-18 years depending on the country), the knowledge and skills acquired there are usually not sufficient for a professional career spanning three or four decades. Contents

"Individuals are forced to consider more information and opportunities than they can effectively process. This information overload is made worse by ‘data smog’, the proliferation of low quality information allowed by easy publication. It leads to anxiety, stress, alienation, and potentially dangerous errors of judgment." Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control by Francis Heylighen. Even when we’ll have much better summarizing and other meaning-making tools than we have today, no amount of technology will give us peace of mind when we will need it most - in the midst of rapid technological changes which affect how we live, work, learn, and play. To rightfully trust our capacity to learn as fast as necessitated by the pace of changes which affect us--individuals, communities and organizations--, we need to learn how to learn faster together. Recommendations and pointers to resources, emailed by friends and colleagues in our social and knowledge networks, are some of the signposts that many professionals and managers use for navigating in today’s fast-moving landscapes. If none of us is as smart as all of us, then creating shared resources, shared social and knowledge capital, is one of the smartest things we can do. The intent and core idea of Collaboration Campus™ is to provide a space for mastering the arts of collaborative learning, and building valuable social capital just by participating in the life of the campus community.

Dweck’s next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.)

You can't get much more basic than the lead finding of Poynter's EyeTrack07 study, presented this morning to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C.Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly.And there's a twist: The reading-deep phenomenon is even stronger online than in print.At a time when readers are assumed to have short attention spans, especially those who read online, this qualifies as news. RELATED RESOURCES -- Marketplace report on Poynter's Eyetrack research -- Editor & Publisher report That was the predominant behavior of roughly 600 test subjects -- 70 percent of whom said they read the news in print or online four times a week. Their eye movements were tracked in 15-minute reading sessions of broadsheet, tabloid and online publications. Evidence from these sessions revealed how long readers spend with the stories they pick, as well as a host of other details about reading patterns.This first look at EyeTrack07's headline findings is presented here in four formats:A video produced at Poynter last week, that replicates the presentation Sara Quinn and Pegie Stark Adam gave this morningA text version of that presentationThe slides [PDF] used in this morning's presentationA brochure [PDF] summarizing both the findings and the methodology of the studyAlso, be sure to take a look at this video, produced by Poynter's Al Tompkins, and included in the ASNE presentation this morning.The study, which was planned more than a year ago, tested readers in Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and St. Petersburg, Fla., last summer and fall.But analysis of the readers' eye movements was just completed recently. The project is still a work in progress. Deeper analysis is ongoing, and more findings are slated to be released later this year.The application of these initial findings to print and online design is just beginning.Discussion continues at a major Poynter conference April 10 through 12. That conference is full, but you can still sign up for a hands-on EyeTrack workshop to be held at Poynter in September. Click here to learn more and register.A book with complete results, pictures of the materials test subjects viewed and a full account of how the research was done will be available in June.

Flexible manufacturing systems, team work with decentralisation of decision-making, integration of tasks and multiple allocation across functional barriers demand a skilled work force prepared for continuous learning and adaptation. It is common to see a younger, well-educated and trained work force as being required for such a production environment. A closer empirical look at most of the internal labour markets in this study shows that existing labour market structures do not match this image. Existing labour markets consist very often of an older (and ageing) labour force with relatively low skills and with resistance to continuous training. These structural features have, over the last ten years — despite the existence of costly early retirement measures and new entries into internal labour markets — not much improved, and in many cases have even deteriorated.

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Young people's views on work and careers Future Innovators commissioned DEMOS to undertake a short study examining young people's attitudes to the future of work. It is based on a survey of 15 and 16 year olds, who are about to make decisions regarding their future, such as the careers and qualifications they are going to pursue. The study The study explores young people's attitudes towards work and skills and argues that a wider set of skills and personal attributes are likely to be required from them when they reach the workplace. The study paints a picture of a generation that understands the value of hard work: 90 per cent believe if you work hard you'll usually succeed. However, with more employers identifying skills like creativity as key to the workforce of the future, it warns of a disconnect between employers' demands and young people's skills and perceptions. It suggests that they may be entering the workforce lacking the full range of skills, which will allow them to contribute to the expansion of the economy. The study also examines some of the key influences on young people, to understand how their world views are shaped and where successful interventions might be targeted in the future. 'Parents and family' were identified ahead of school, showing the importance of both formal and informal learning. 'Ready for the future?' Full report 'Ready for the future?' Executive summary

George has been designing, facilitating and hosting online communities for 20 years. Out from that experience, he developed his Community Design Architecture (CDA), that he refined and tested during his work at INSEAD. He provides consulting and virtual community architecting services to organizations in the private and public sectors. George is also known for his first-of-its-kind, virtual or hybrid (online/off-line) events he designed and facilitated, which were attended by from 30 to 6,000 participants. George designed and leads an innovative, highly interactive, executive workshops on “Collective Intelligence 2.0,” in which participants are learn to upgrade the collective IQ of their organization, by applying the principles of CDA.

In recent years online and blended communities have become a popular topic among educationalists. In this paper we present a framework that supports the analysis, development and maintenance of online and blended communities. This is applied to two community case studies that differ along several key dimensions such as type of membership, the purpose of the communities, their policies and size. The analysis draws attention to the differences between the two types of communities. It also highlights the advantages and weaknesses of the framework with respect to these two case studies and suggests areas for future development. In the discussion that follows we highlight some key differences between this framework and Wenger’s work on Communities of Practice (COPs).