There’s Kareem, a 16-year-old Chicago southsider, who loves robots and movies and naturally can’t wait to see the new Transformers film, especially because they shot part of it in his hometown. He struggles in school because he does not understand how those things apply to his interests or to real life, so it’s easy to get bored and tune out. Luckily, he’s been able to pursue his interests thro...

The Digital Compendium is a new concept in education, and is described here for the science of photobiology, a Digital Photobiology Compendium (DPC). Medical school is the start of a lifelong learning endeavor. Increasingly computerand web-based resources will facilitate this process. Yet there are currently few resources that span the range of knowledge from student through practicing professi...

• In May 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers launched an expensive built-to-last two volume International Handbook of Lifelong Learning: 878 pages with forty contributions following a lengthy introduction and overview, 460,000 words devoted to the lifelong learning phenomenon (Aspin et al 2001). Whatever its utility and longevity, this substantial landmark volume well symbolises a coming of age of ...

Despite the emphasis placed on physicians' lifelong learning, no psychometrically sound instrument has been developed to provide an operational measure of the concept and its components among physicians. The authors designed this study to develop a tool for measuring physician lifelong learning, to identify its underlying components and to assess its psychometric properties. A 37-item questionn...

The lifelong learning is a crucial element in the modernization of European education and training systems. The most important actors in the development process of the lifelong learning are the trainers, whose professional characteristics need new competences and skills in the current labour market. The main objective of this paper is to establish an importance ranking of the new competences, c...

Learning is as old as humankind, indeed curiosity and the capacity to learn are among the defining characteristics of what it means to be human. For many hundreds of generations, people learned only through their own experience, and to a lesser extent, through the observation of others. Gradually, however, as language became more complex and sophisticated, it was possible to codify what had bee...

Last year, I decided to edit this special issue because Technology and Lifelong Learning is the topic of our new five-year RTD programme at the Open University of the Netherlands’ Educational Technology Expertise Centre. This editorial begins by explaining why we are focusing on the development of new technologies to foster lifelong learning. This background information will help readers unders...

Due to de-institutionalization and open system, it is inappropriate to equate education with youth education. In the new century, education has been delivered electronically to accommodate lifelong learning. It has become a reality that the four walled classrooms have been used to complement and supplement E-learning. No need to argue that electronic education has become the norm for most unive...

We consider the problem of transfer learning in an online setting. Di↵erent tasks are presented sequentially and processed by a within-task algorithm. We propose a lifelong learning strategy which refines the underlying data representation used by the withintask algorithm, thereby transferring information from one task to the next. We show that when the within-task algorithm comes with some reg...