A Web of Learning Opportunities

For at least two decades, politicians, academics and other stakeholders have advocated cooperation across sectors, administrative layers and other institutionalised boundaries to achieve objectives of what are called ‘learning regions’ and the ‘lifelong learning perspective’. Boundaries between geographical, institutional and sectors are becoming more porous. Regions and cities may be seen as complex adaptive systems (CAS), and hence do not necessarily follow the logic of formal institutions. While formal institutions have innate interests in regulating interaction and communication between their members, networks develop according to evolutionary or selectionist dynamics, in that the processes of change can be seen as analogous to natural (Darwinian) selection. Networks may be seen as the architecture of complex systems. Research on networks has been relatively extensive in the last 20 to 30 years in mathematics, sociology, anthropology, and biology. There is an emerging science of networks that studies the structure and function of systems. There is also substantial research on the features in the interconnectedness or interdependencies within the system that contribute to explaining the functionality of that system. In this perspective, we may view a learning region as a web of learning opportunities.     

Athletic injury,psychosocial factors and perceptual changes during stress

In this study, we measured changes in state anxiety, visual perception and reaction time during stress among 196 collegiate athletes participating in 10 sports. The athletes also completed measures of life events and social support at the beginning of their seasons. Measures of life events stress, social support, perceptual changes and changes in reaction time during stress were used as predictors of the number of injuries. For the entire sample, the only significant predictor of injury was negative life events stress (R= 0.45, P < 0.001). Following the suggestions of Smith et al., simple correlations were performed for those with least social support (bottom 33%, n=65). Among this group, those individuals with more negative life events and greater peripheral narrowing during stress incurred more injuries than those with the opposite profile. Our findings are in line with the model of Andersen and Williams, in that those individuals who were low in a variable that buffers stress responsivity (i.e. social support), their negative life events and peripheral narrowing under stress (large and medium effect sizes, respectively) were substantially related to their number of injuries.