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The purpose of this report is to present the findings of a five-day course for AKEPT – the Malaysian Leadership Academy in the Ministry of Higher Education. The course was held from March 24-28th, 2014, for over 50 lecturers, professors, deputy deans and deans from Malaysian universities.

Senior lecturers and professors deliberated for the first three days on the futures of higher education in Malaysia. They presented their scenarios and recommendations to the deans. The deans used these findings to articulate their own preferred futures in the last two days. The future-oriented discussions were framed by the “six pillars” futures approach (Inayatullah, 2008; Inayatullah, 2015; Inayatullah and Milojevic, 2015).

The core of their recommendation consisted of a move by 2025 from the current fragmented university governance structure to a streamlined consortium model. Instead of the factory, a collection of linked longhouses or “rumah panjang” was offered as a way forward. This new model would have two immediate benefits: considerable cost savings and enhanced mobility for students and professors.

This case study presents scenarios and strategies. Limitations include the willingness of the Ministry to act on these recommendations. However, as this course was part of a number of foresight processes in Malaysia, even if these particular recommendations do not realize, they are steps in creating an ecology of foresight and of possible university transformation.

This study links causal layered analysis, scenarios and visions to recommendations in the context of a multi-year foresight process.

The study includes valuable discussions by leading Malaysian thinkers and administrators on the futures of the university.

This was one of the few workshop-oriented interventions used the anticipatory action learning “six pillars framework”. It is especially valuable as it is the third year of futures intervention in higher education. The study contrasts with traditional expert-based forecasting in Asia.

This quantitative study aims to examine background motives that navigate individuals to share their opinions, in the context of an individual’s post-vacation phase and its relation to the destination of Serbia, from the standpoint of age, gender and nationality.

The data were collected throughout six weeks via a self-administered Web survey. The survey was adopted and based on the scale developed by Bronner and de Hoog (2011).

Results indicate that the dominant driver to submit an online review after a trip is to help vacationers (altruism) and that men and women display differences in this, but not in other motives. Both age and nationality do not influence the particular motive to leave an online review.

The main limitation of this study is the total number of answers. However, sampling was rather purposive, which gives us a good indicator of the population behavior.

Understanding these drivers is essential in formulating strategies for managing the interaction with opinion leaders. On a larger scale, the results can contribute the market segmentation and customer communication approaches in Serbian tourism marketing.

Motives that trigger individuals to compose an online review have not been investigated and thematic studies are still missing, in the case of Serbia in particular.

The purpose of this paper is to present the scenarios, visions and strategies that resulted from a five-day foresight workshop for AKEPT (Higher Education Leadership Academy), the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia.

An anticipatory action-learning course/workshop with over 50 lecturers and deans framed by the “six pillars” futures approach. Methods given the most attention were: the futures triangle; causal layered analysis; and scenario planning. Lecturers deliberated for the first three days, and deans for the last two. After their debates, the lecturers and deans presented their findings and recommendations to each other, and to the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia. As well, they considered how they as individual scholars can also pursue specific actionable steps towards their preferred futures visions.

The recommendations by lecturers and deans can be systematized in the following categories: establishment of a pilot project; enhancement of digital teaching and learning processes; customization of degrees; changing of the culture in higher education; enhancing collaboration; supporting research activities; rethinking of dominant frames of reference; and anticipating upcoming futures trends.

As the process included lecturers and deans as key participants, and not, for example, students or the community, stakeholder perspectives are limited. Specific actionable steps, as per recommendations, are being pursued by the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia, as well as by individual participants.

Description of an action learning process in its second year. Year three will continue with a different group of participants who will reflect on the initial findings presented here. Description of the foresight process and findings of this case study may be of value to other ministries of higher education in the region and elsewhere.

Two trends mark the contemporary international scholarship on conflict and resolution. The scholarship on conflict has begun to look systematically at intra-state conflicts and track the role of non-state actors, along with the more established trend of analysing inter-state conflict. Conflict resolution has also moved beyond looking at states and national and global-level NGOs to the role of local, non-state actors in preventing and/or minimising conflict. While the “mainstream” scholarly work emphasises a linear process of reaching resolutions in the aftermath of a conflict (e.g. Burton, 1990; Galtung, 1965), a range of “related” scholarship has begun to focus on factors that prevent conflict and their rapid diffusion over wider areas, as well as factors that contribute to longer term, peaceful, resolution (e.g. Das, Kleinman, Lock, Ramphele, & Reynolds, 2001; Sabet, 1998; Varshney, 2001). These related literature look beyond political solutions such as conflict management, boundary adjustments, and treaties, and the role of international and national formal bodies to resolve and manage conflict; their emphasis is on conflict prevention, the healing of conflict victims, and building and sustaining peace. With the recognition, in the 21st century, of the escalating production and spread of weaponry, the power of non-state actors to generate significant conflict, as well as the rapidly growing proportion of people who suffer from and cope with the aftermath of such conflict, the expanded frames for understanding conflict and resolution, requires further attention.

My encounter with ‘interculturality’ was partly occasioned by the fact of being born in Belgium at a period in time where growing up with multilinguality was a matter of normality and partly by then living and working in eight countries across all continents. Working in local communities and later in academic contexts sharpened my awareness about the importance of language in the transference of knowledge and interlinguistic exchanges of knowledges. Especially knowledges pertaining to the underlying ontological and epistemological differences and shadings of meanings and that require contextual understanding of these meanings are at the core of the chapter. The regular mistranslations occurring from social science texts originally written in other-than-English languages caused original meanings to get lost in translation. Some of the consequences of such mistranslations are examined, focussing on education and possible futures in our ‘pluriverse’, especially in the present epoch where global conversations are ever more important to address our predicaments, facing ecological disaster, extinction and the potential un-liveability for humans and so many other species of the earth. Including the non-human in our relational considerations for a possible future enlarges the need for new and interculturally understandable knowledge systems and the positivist and other epistemological inclinations in the dominant West will not make this any easier considering our rather sad record during the past four centuries.

Ageing is a fundamental issue for the future of the planet. An ageing society challenges basic assumptions of modern culture and political economy. This paper explores alternative futures of ageing in Queensland, understanding that certain assumptions about Queensland’s future are given. It is also focused on probable futures, and not on every possible future. Based on this map of the future‐developed through causal layered analysis and scenario planning – policy recommendations are developed for the Queensland Government.

Higher education and universities have faced unprecedented and ubiquitous changes. The University of Tehran or “UT,” as the leading university in Iran, is not immune to these changes. The purposes of this study is to investigate the current situation and future of the UT and gain insights and possible responses to changes that suit its strengths and potential to progress in an increasingly competitive, complex environment with uncertainties. It identifies deep fundamental underpinnings of the issue and highlights them for policymakers to formulate strategies and future vision of the UT.

Causal layered analysis (CLA) was applied as a framework and the data collected from different sources such as literature reviews, content analysis of rules, regulations and master plans of the university and coded interviews of four different groups of university stakeholders were analyzed. The current system of UT, as well as hidden beliefs, that maintains traditional perceptions about university was mapped. Next, by applying a new recursive process and reverse CLA order, new CLA layers extracted through an expert panel, the layers of CLA based on new metaphors to envision future of UT were backcasted.

The results from CLA layers including litany, system, worldview and metaphor about the current statue of UT show disinterest and inertia against changes, conservative, behind the times and traditional perceptions, and indicate that the UT system is mismatched to the needs of society and stakeholders in the future. The authors articulated alternative perspectives deconstructed from other worldviews so there are new narratives that reframe the issues at hand. The results show that to survive in this fast-paced revolution and competition in higher education, UT should develop scenarios and formulate new strategies.

The authors had limited access to a wide range of stakeholders. As the UT is a very big university with so many faculties and departments, to access a pool of experts and top policymakers who were so busy and did not have time to interview inside and outside of university was very hard for the research team. The authors also had limitation to access the internal enactments and decisions of the trustee board of the UT and the financial balance sheets of the university.

In this paper, by mixing different methods of futures studies, the authors have shown how to move forward while understanding the perspectives of stakeholders about the future of UT by a new recursive process and reverse CLA order. A supplementary phase was added to improve CLA and to validate the method and results, which were ignored in previous studies.

This article seeks to reflect on the role of key concepts in foresight and futures work. The goal is to explore a set of concepts and link them to the effects they have in the world of foresight practice. It is argued that concepts order foresight practice and that though each foresight context and practitioner is unique, concepts bring a sense of order and coherence to foresight work and futures thinking. This reflection is placed in the context of a set of first principles the author acknowledges as his starting place for futures thinking and foresight practice.

The paper takes the form of conceptual analysis.

Concepts have effects and these can be assessed based on their ability to increase social and personal resilience in contexts characterised by change, complexity and uncertainty.

Foresight practitioners clarify their own values and ethics through reflection on the concepts they use and the processes they deploy when working with clients.

More reflective foresight practice; greater conceptual clarity when reflecting on and communicating/teaching foresight and futures thinking.

This paper offers a basis for orienting foresight work towards the broader social goal of resilience through a deepened appreciation of how concepts inform process and structure meaning.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodology for automatic annotation of a multimedia collection of intangible cultural heritage mostly in the form of interviews. Assigned annotations provide a way to search the collection.

Annotation is based on automatic extraction of metadata and is conducted by named entity and topic extraction from textual descriptions with a rule-based approach supported by vocabulary resources, a compiled domain-specific classification scheme and domain-oriented corpus analysis.

The proposed methodology for automatic annotation of a collection of intangible cultural heritage, applied on the cultural heritage of the Balkans, has very good results according to F measure, which is 0.87 for the named entity and 0.90 for topic annotation. The overall methodology enables encapsulating domain-specific and language-specific knowledge into collections of finite state transducers and allows further improvements.

Although cultural heritage has a significant role in the development of identity of a group or an individual, it is one of those specific domains that have not yet been fully explored in case of many languages. A methodology is proposed that can be used for incorporating natural language processing techniques into digital libraries of cultural heritage.