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.     

Experimenting with New Criteria for Recruitment into Engineering

A brief account is given of a recently established procedure of admitting students without advanced high school courses in physics and mathematics to the Tampere Universiry of Technology. As background there has been a need to broaden the recruiting basis for engineering education. This has also meant admitting a much greater proportion of female engineering students than usual. These students have partly different qualities compared to those admitted through the normal tests. However, despite this, there is no intention of changing the curriculum or the level of engineering education in the technical universities. So there must be methods of training the newly entering students and give them the same knowledge as traditional recruits.