The future of HRD

What organizational, technological and training developments will become crucial in the coming years, and what consequences will they have for human resource development? These questions have led to a study carried out by the faculty of Educational Science and Technology at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. The ultimate aim of the study was to create an inventory of trends and developments which professionals deem to be influential with regard to the future HRD field. One direct catalyst for the study was the report of a similar study in the United States, involving HRD executives, carried out by the American Society for Training & Development. Following a brief explanation of the research plan and methods, this article describes the findings of the Dutch study an compares these with the results of the American research. It concludes with comments regarding the implications of the information obtained through this investigation.     

Regulating Academic Pressure: From Fast to Slow

This paper investigates the impact of publication pressure on the ethics and the scientific integrity in the domain of mathematics and of the arts. Both research fields are specific in their methodology, being that they do not start from a classical hypothesis and researchers in these areas are not knowing what the outcome will be. The research design is open, and creativity is a main part of the research investigation. Both research fields do not rely on empirical cases nor on data collection or data handling. This could be a reason why mathematics and arts seem to be less subject to scientific misconduct. After presenting the (inter)national regulations on ethics and integrity, we will investigate a philosophical analysis in which we consider possible influences from publication pressure that became widespread over all disciplines. We will clarify if and how mathematics and the arts are sensitive to scientific research misconduct or questionable research practices.     

Teaching as an Immortality Project: Positing Weakness in Response to Terror

Teaching as a profession can be read as an immortality project, a form of compensation to help resolve a certain kind of existential terror. Terror management theory can help us understand the ways teachers might compensate for their limitedness as humans by imposing prescribed attributes on their students. In response to the freighted reality of teaching as quasi‐missionary work, we suggest a new orientation, namely that the profession embrace the terror of the future that it cannot know. Through a theoretical engagement with Weak Theology in the context of Eugene Thacker's philosophical ‘doomcore’, we hope to re‐orient the educational project into one with lower stakes, a shift from immortality to more ‘goodness’. The desired result is to refocus on the relationships we develop with other humans as well as with the planet.     

The University of the Twenty-First Century: From Blueprint to Reality

During the 1990s, a typical theme of a conference on the role of the university was "the university of tomorrow". Now, however, tomorrow has arrived, and universities are undergoing very powerful stimuli to transform themselves. The principal driving forces are the development of knowledge societies and economies, the all-pervasiveness of the information technologies, globalization, and the debate on the public or private nature of higher education. These forces generate a myriad of responses that, while defying the elaboration of blueprints, call for constant change and diversity.