NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
EDITORIAL
By Kenneth King, University of Edinburgh/NORRAG
We now know a great deal more about the access to and readership of Norrag News than we ever did before. Thanks to the new, more accessible web-site, and to the work of Robert Palmer, Norrag Assistant for Development, we can tell which of our past 38 issues have been most frequently downloaded. We know how many visitors to the site there have been in the first six months of this year ? 67,000. And we even know that only 6% of our visitors have been robots!These are changed days from when we laboriously sent out hard copies of the red bulletin by post to a small band of some 160 folk, just a few years ago. We are of course delighted that we now have some 1,600 members, and we even know which countries they come from ? see article in NN39 by Palmer on Norrag numbers.
In the ?good old days?, of course, we actually knew personally more than 50% of the membership. Now the management group will only know a fraction of the 1600 members, but we have no idea about the bulk of the readership, the 60,000 who consult past issues of Norrag News, but don't need to register as they don't necessarily want to read the latest issue.
Some of these will be members, but many will be surfers and researchers of all sorts. However, in the countries where the management group come from ? Switzerland, France, Netherlands and the UK ? we probably know a large number of those who have enrolled.
But to get to know the membership and their wishes better, we shall be sending out a five-minute questionnaire in the next short while to all 1600 of you, to get a sharper sense of your organisational base, - whether academic, policy, development agency, consultancy, or civil society. This will also allow you to comment upon and make suggestions on the current and future issues of Norrag News.
We are increasingly aware that although we have had a French edition of Norrag News for many years, one of the reasons why our readership is so low in certain parts of the world, such as the Middle East, and Latin America, is language. We shall, beginning from this present issue, carry a policy brief (summary) of this issue also in Spanish, German, Chinese, Arabic and Russian. And from next issue, NN40, we shall experiment with carrying just a small number of articles, untranslated but with an English summary, in the body of the main NN text.
These are just two of a number of experiments we shall be carrying out in this coming year to see if there are better ways of encouraging an interest in NN.
Another of these initiatives, which we shall be trying out in Holland and in Switzerland where there are 61 and 86 current members respectively, is to organise a cluster meeting of the country?s Norrag membership back-to-back with another major meeting of likely interest to many members in those same countries. This cluster meeting could be for half a day just before or just after the main meeting, but it would allow our Norrag members there to be more aware of each other, and, more importantly, would allow the Norrag leadership to listen to the views of its members. We shall keep the membership posted of these developments, as we shall have others, possibly in Pakistan, China and Ghana over the next several months.
In addition to Robert Palmer (who received his PhD in Edinburgh this June, and is now on a post-doctoral fellowship), we now have a Francophone Norrag Assistant for Development, based in IUED. This is very good news! Stephanie Langstaff is doing her PhD there, and is keeping an eye on the Working Group for Skills Development, as well as Norrag. Her email is: stephanie.langstaff@norrag.org.
There was a very interesting Norrag section of the Oxford conference in September 2007, organised by Rob Palmer, Ad Boeren (of Nuffic, who is also on the Norrag Management committee) and myself, but with a link also to the Comparative Education Research Centre of Hong Kong University, through Bjorn Nordtveit. There were some 20 plus papers in this section, and we shall be considering an issue of Norrag News which re-explores this section?s theme of Education, Skills, Sustainability and Growth. This is a policy dilemma which is not going to go away soon!
The present issue of Norrag News is, we hope, a very good read. Following ?best practice? in Norrag News, we shall provide you with a broad diversity of critical opinion about the discourse about best practice and allow you to decide for yourself where you stand.
We look forward to hearing your views about the issue.
Kenneth King
21st October 2007.
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