Knowledge Economy and Sociospacial Polarisation

As you know, we're preparing our workshop here in Recife. The two groups of students are preparing their papers that will be presented during the workshop to key persons from popular production groups, both urban and rural.
Please finda a preliminary programme attached to our bog as a document.
Ana

Today Recife's groups will get together once again to discuss the construction of their papers. We will focus on each group's paper summary and main discussion points.
In paralell, Pia and I have worked on the little conference within which these papers will be presented. We've invited 5 groups of "popular production" to present their experiences and comment on the students' papers.
I want to tell you that this is a rich opportunity to bring together two dimensions of social and economic life that hardly have benefitted from scientific dialog between different fields and researchers. Hopefully, in the course of the present experience we can come across a theory - a good one - that can resemble to real life, especially concerning to Recife.
As you will see from the students' papers, Recife is a 1,5 million people, particularly polarised, city regarding income, education, life quality and, as expected, access to knowledge and innovation. In this way, how can we talk about a knowledge economy in such an unequal society in which knowledge and learning seem to be a matter for rather few people?
Hope you can help us to find answers to these questions.
Best regards,
Ana C

Dear all,

May I just draw your attention to the fact that comments are not visible on the immediate interface. This might make it a little bit difficult to become aware of them.
Therefore I would like to ask you to always have a brief look on the symbols below the texts you posted. You can see the number of comments that have been made to your contribution where it states "0/1/... Kommentare".
Alternatively, if you want to react to a certain posting, you could also make just a "normal" contribution via the conventional procedure, clicking on the button "Neuen Beitrag anlegen" and making sure that your contribution appears below the thread concerned.

Cheers, Thomas

email von christof stoik

christoph.stoik at bassena.at
Christoph.Stoik at fh-campuswien.ac.at

Dear all,

Thank you for the research proposals which are a good start for your research. I 'd like to give you some general and some group-specific recommendations:

General feedback:

- Due to the difficulties in oversea communication, you need not include trans-atlantic comparisons in your research paper. However, you should read the contributions of your colleagues and discuss/compare the results with them via mail, skype, weblog. The results and findings of your exchange with your colleagues from Recife should enrich our discussions in the seminar and be part of the final reflections.
- Concerning the structure of your research paper please follow the guidelines of the Research program, posted by Michaela on may, 8th. Two groups have done this already, for the other two groups it will be helpful to structure the paper.
- Please discuss within your group. Intra-group dialogue is important to improve the final result. It should be a group work and a final GROUP term paper!
- - The first presentation of your field research results should take place in the seminar in May, 29th. It will be an oral presentation. The research paper should be submitted before june 19th.

- Please adapt your research proposals according to this feedback and post it in the Weblog by next Tuesday!

Group specific feedback:

Group 1/ Knowledge economy:
good structure and method of data evaluation. Please post your research proposal.

Group 2/ Social Polarisation:
good structure; The research question !Inwiefern wird bewusst versucht, Polarisierung zu beeinflussen..." can be part of the final section of the paper, but should not be the research question. Please integrate this comment and then post your research proposal.

Group 3/ Alternatives:
Please be aware that it is a group activity which gains by working and discussing together. You should start with describing the initiatives, what they have in common and what distinguishes them. Whether the initiatives you explore ARE bridge-building, is still to be verified. It's part of the research work to find it out.
Please integrate this comment and then post your research proposal.

Group 4/ Sociospatial Polarisation:
Please add non-state and non-institutional planner, as mentioned in Diebäcker. I recommend Christof Stoik (I am trying to get his e-mail); Florentina Astleiter is another planner (Lukas Lengauer has her e-mail). Do you really need your “possible interview partner”?
You have three quite different questions in your proposal which is difficult to get a clear structure. I propose to adapt the third question: Do official and critical planners perceive learning and the knowledge economy as cause of or remedy for sociospatial polarisation?

The research programme should be a guideline for the field research and offers useful suggestions and examples. You can also find the different groups and the corresponding group members.
Research-programme (doc, 33 KB)

annexed an interesting UNESCO-report on Learning, coordinated by Jacques Delors.

Delors-The-treasure-within (pdf, 448 KB)

The research paper written by each group should cover 15 to 25 pages (without annex, like statistics etc.).

The structure of the research paper should cover:

1. Introduction
2. Literature overview (using joint literature and integrating furhter key references and documents)
3. field research (with key persons and institutions; inviting one key person to the joint discussion on june 19th)
4. linking theory and field research
5. comparative analysis (together with transatlantic group)
6. summary

Annex:
1 page each group member: What did I learn in this seminar? What did I not learn (but would have liked to learn)?