Blogs

Following an initial founding meeting held in Melbourne in February this year a Friends of PASCAL Association was formed on 4 July 2015, and is registered in Melbourne, Victoria, in Australia. This will be a valuable supplement to the work of the International Observatory. It sits very well with changes in governance arrangements under way with the Board, especially its new and wider concept of membership.

Delegates for the 12th PASCAL Conference are invited to propose Big Ideas linked to the themes of the conference in advance of the event: five of these ideas will chosen to be pitched in plenary session on Day 2 with a strict 5 minute presentation. There will then be a debate and vote for the best idea. That idea will then be developed into a longer presentation by the presenter and advocates from the conference, and debated further on Day 3.

The International Journal of Knowledge-based Development will one of the journals that will consider submissions of fully developed articles based on submissions made to the 12th PASCAL conference in Catania for a special issue.

This Friday 10^th of July 2015, international students attending the U21 Summer School 2015: Cities and Citizens in the Digital Age presented their visions of the future of digital cities.

The international conference hosted by the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (Sofia, Bulgaria) and International Research Center ‘Scientific Cooperation’ (Rostov-on-Don, Russia) from 15-18 June 2015 in Sofia on the topic “Worldwide trends in the development of education and academic research” attracted more than 150 papers in the form of oral and virtual presentations by the participants from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Great Britain, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Lithuania and Russia.