Editorial

Citation

Cervai, S. and Kekale, T. (2011), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 23 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2011.08623gaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: The Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 23, Issue 7

It is time to start thinking about attending conferences. There are many just after the summer holidays, actually, so it is a good idea to start to plan these now. We would like to recommend our co-operation partners, the International Conference on Researching Work and Learning (RWL) as one of the possible conferences to attend, along with 100 of workplace learning researchers from around the world. The Seventh RWL Conference will be taking place in Shanghai, China (December 4-7, 2011). More information about the conference can be found at: www.rwlecnu.org/and, as in previous years, we will publish a double issue with the best papers from RWL 2011.

One conference which took place last year was the Third World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS, 2010, Corfu, Greece, September 22-24, 2010). This was organized by the International Scientific Council for the Knowledge Society, and supported by the Open Research Society, non-governmental organization (www.openknowledge-society.org). The General Chair of the summit was Professor Miltiadis D. Lytras (American College of Greece, Greece). The summit offered a distinct, unique forum for cross-disciplinary fertilization of research, favouring the dissemination of research into new scientific ideas relevant to international research agendas such as the EU (FP7), OECD or UNESCO. The event attracted 245 submissions from 45 countries. We have selected the following two papers from the 2010 summit to include in this issue: “Building a community memory in communities of practice of e-learning: a knowledge engineering approach,” by Akila Sarirete, Azeddine Chikh and Elizabeth Noble and “Personnel performance assessment in information systems outsourcing environments,” by Cristina Casado-Lumbreras, Pedro Soto-Acosta, Ricardo Colomo-Palacios and Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos.

Conferences are important venues not only for exchanging ideas but also for journal Editors to find papers that address new ideas and approaches. However, the usual submission system is also a good way of letting us know about your research. This month, the two first articles in the journal have gone through the double blind peer review process of ScholarOne, our online submissions system. These two papers are “Workplace learning in Pakistani schools: a myth or reality?,” by Ali Nawab, and “Learning amongst Norwegian fire-fighters,” by Morten Sommer and Ove Njå.

In this issue, there is, as always, a wide variety of topics and a showcase of authors from a variety of geographical locations. In our opinion, this is the best thing about having an academic career, and a good reason for attending conferences – to meet people from faraway places who are researching distant but related topics in learning. The next direction in promising research can be found in the crossroads between one’s current research areas and someone else’s. So, to expand your research horizons, it is about time to start to make plans to travel to a conference, and location, you have not yet been to!

Sara Cervai, Tauno Kekäle