Adult education,lifelong learning and citizenship: some ifs and buts

This paper suggests that the dominant discourse of lifelong learning is a political rather than an educational discourse. On this view, lifelong learning enables the deconstruction of welfare to be effected through the reconstruction of citizenship. Democratic citizenship properly understood, on the other hand, depends on determined progress towards a more equitable distribution of material and cultural resources among citizens. Education on its own can do little to ensure that such structural change takes place. It is, nevertheless, the task of critical adult education, as distinct from economistic models of lifelong learning, to raise such questions as urgent issues for democratic deliberation and debate, and to expand our notions of what it means to be active citizens in a democratic society. The paper contains the text of a talk given at the annual study conference of the UK's National Institute of Adult Continuing Education in April 2002.     

What’s the value of an acceptance letter? Using admissions data to estimate the return to college

This paper exploits discontinuities and randomness in the college admissions in Sweden in 1982, to estimate the economic return to college in the 1990s. At the time, college admissions were highly selective and applicants were ranked with respect to their formal merits. Admissions were given to those ranked higher than some threshold value. At the margin, applicants were sometimes randomly assigned to college. Exploiting this Regression-Discontinuity design, individuals who were admitted in 1982 are estimated to have about 0.20 years longer college education in 1996. However, the earnings effects for applicants at the margin of admission are insignificant. Controlling for the college admission determinants, the OLS-estimates of the return to college is 1.4 percent in 1991–96. The IV-estimates are not significantly different from the OLS counterparts.     

CERN document server: Document management system for grey literature in a networked environment

Conclusion In this paper we briefly described the current status of research in the field of digital libraries interoperability, mainly with respect to federated data processing such as permitted within the Open Archive Initiative framework. We then presented the CERN Document Server Software suite that is a free software package main-tained by CERN providing an online digital library solution for mid- to large-sized document repositories. The set of CDSware modules was described and the differ-ences with other existing tools briefly mentioned. Finally we have mentioned a typical usage statistics illustrating the scope of grey literature and networked con-ditions of the CERN Document Server. We pointed out that the current trend in grey literature management goes toward institutional repositories build upon the distributed and federated model. Further research is going on within the CDS collaboration in this area, focused particularly on (i) semantic interoperability using ontologies in distributed and federated data processing and (ii) ranking technologies when searching grey literature in OAI compliant repositories.