We are pleased to welcome Professor John Field Visiting Professor in Lifelong Learning, who will be delivering his professorial inaugural lecture. The idea of the learning region has become an important part of the debate over education and its contribution to competitiveness and inclusion. At its best, it represents a strategy for decision-making that engages a wide range of local actors who bring their knowledge, experience and expertise to bear upon shared problems and opportunities. It also has limitations, particularly in a context which involves the twin challenges of central governance and steering on the one hand, and the shift towards borderless communication on the other.

Digitization and mobile technologies are transforming the ways in which knowledge is communicated and exchanged, with considerable implications for education. This is highly visible in the rapid growth of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open access publishing, but it also has parallels in the development of open data, open educational resources, open source software, and other forms of ‘openness’. It is easy to reject these ideas as hype, or to dwell on their negative dimensions (such as predatory publishing), but taken together they represent a significant force for change. And in particular, they pose questions and challenges for place-based approaches to education and knowledge exchange, including strategies for the development of learning regions.

Monday 20 March 2017, 5:30 – 6:30pm, MC001 Millennium City Building, City Campus

Event details and booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/learning-regions-at-a-time-of-borderless-education-opening-up-new-challenges-and-possibilities-tickets-32351685763