Despite the huge amount of scientific and technological content available on the World Wide Web, most of it is closed behind paywalls, as with academic journals, or almost invisible, as with institutional repositories. Wikipedia can act as a chain-transfer agent, providing people with an accessible, organized structure containing both understandable content and links to original sources. In Wik...

The document The State of Education in Latin America and the Caribbean: Towards a Quality Education for All – 2015 was produced under the supervision of the UNESCO Bureau in Santiago, by a group of researchers from the University of Chile’s Centre for Advanced Education Research: Cristián Bellei (coordinator), Ximena Poblete, Paulina Sepúlveda, Víctor Orellana and Geraldine Abarca. The report i...

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that 'race' is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genet...

Web-enabled technology is now being applied on a large scale. In this paper we look at open access provision of teaching and learning leading to many users with varying patterns and motivations for use. This has provided us with a research challenge to find methods that help us understand and explain such initiatives. We describe ways to model the research and identify where pressures and contr...

This paper was commissioned by the Global Education Monitoring Report as background information to assist in drafting the 2016 report. It has not been edited by the team. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and should not be attributed to the Global Education Monitoring Report or to UNESCO. The papers can be cited with the following reference: “Paper commis...

This paper describes an interactive web-based near real-time (NRT) forest monitoring system using four levels of geographic information services: 1) the acquisition of continuous data streams from satellite and community-based monitoring using mobile devices, 2) NRT forest disturbance detection based on satellite time-series, 3) presentation of forest disturbance data through a web-based applic...

The use of traditional medicine and medicinal plants in most developing countries, as a normative basis for the maintenance of good health, has been widely observed (UNESCO, 1996). Furthermore, an increasing reliance on the use of medicinal plants in the industrialized societies has been traced to the extraction and development of several drugs and chemotherapeutics form these plants as well as...

The 2003 Unesco Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is addressed to States and assigns them several tasks. No State, however, can accomplish all these tasks without mobilizing a wide network of institutions, associations and individuals. The national ICH policies intersect, overlap and often transform the existing relationships among these actors. This pape...

The Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights (UDBHR) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was adopted unanimously in 2005 by the world community as a universal guideline, according to which members of the global community were accountable to each other. Research results from UNESCO show that the UDBHR has had little or no impact in South Af...

In preparation for the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, UNESCO communicated its conceptualization of education for sustainable development (ESD). This paper does not assume that UNESCO was ineffective in communicating its approach to ESD; rather, the premise is that UNESCO’s actual message was not well received by everyone, with some pushing back with alternative communicatio...