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The purpose of this chapter is to investigate students’ qualitatively different ways of understanding the learning object in three undergraduate courses in the discipline of accounting. The theoretical framework of variation theory, a general learning theory, is applied. The lecturers chose a learning object which is investigated under two different teaching conditions – the conventional lecture model and the variational method. Two student groups were identified as a comparison group and a target group, comparable in various relevant parameters. All students took three required accounting courses. In the comparison group, the lecturers used the conventional lecture model and in the target group the variational model. The results indicated significant differences between the two groups’ examination results in the three courses, with students in the target group performing much better. The educational implications and limitations of the study, and areas for further research, are discussed.

The digital technological revolution offers new ways for classrooms to operate and challenges the concept of whether brick and mortar schools should exist at all. At the same time, the changes to society as we move from a knowledge-based economy to an intelligent and innovation-based economy challenges us to reassess the purpose of education. This chapter investigates an overarching counterfactual question, “What if compulsory schooling was invented in the twenty-first century”? We used a foresight methodology, based on “anticipation,” to conceptualize possible models for a future system of compulsory schooling arising from an analysis of contemporary catalysts for remodeling. While anticipation does not predict the future, the concept is that when a current system and a model of a system interplay, they impact each other to change both the present as well as possible futures. The design principles of cities, such as Freiburg (Germany), Poundbury (England), and Christie Walk (Australia), which have been developed around the idea of ecologically sustainable and decentralized cities, are focused on approaches to living that can provide a springboard for exploring the impact of changing employment, economic, technological, and social change on future schooling models. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has opened up a new field of study to investigate neuroscience, which can inform teaching practice. Postmodern and indigenous ways of thinking provide different insights about how schooling might be reconceptualized. Alternative models of future schooling are conceptualized about (i) the role of the learner and teacher, (ii) design of a school, and (iii) the purpose of compulsory schooling. For each area of remodeling, deviations to current practices as well as paradigm shifts are framed as part of scenario building. Related questions include: how schooling might be different if it had been created today for the first time? How might it better meet the needs of contemporary society? What aspects of schooling now might be lost if it was only invented in the twenty-first century? What are possible side effects from any change ideas as part of research practice? A vital aspect of this chapter is to explore the concept of learning as a general concept versus the more specific concept of schooling. We are at the precipice of a new vision of schooling based on a counterfactual way of thinking about the future of schooling as we have known it in the West.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

Informed learning can be enlivened through explicit and persistent attention to using information to learn during collaborative design activities. The resulting information experiences and accompanying information practices in the workplace, when combined with systems principles, can produce transferable individual and group (and, ultimately, organizational) capacity to advance knowledge in ever expanding professional contexts.

In development in North America since 2003, the Informed Systems Approach incorporates principles of systems thinking and informed learning though an inclusive, participatory design process that fosters information exchange, reflective dialogue, knowledge creation, and conceptual change in workplace organizations. It also furthers expression of collaborative information practices that enrich information experiences by simultaneously advancing both situated domain knowledge and transferable learning capacity. Integrated design activities support participants’ developing awareness of the conceptions of information experience and informed learning, in a cyclical and iterative fashion that promotes and sustains continuous learning.

A shared learning focus evolves through intentional use of information to learn, including collective reflection on information sources, collaborative practices, and systems functionalities, which further participants’ topical understandings and enrich their information experiences. In addition, an action-oriented intention and inclusive participatory disposition ensures improvements of real world situations.

This chapter extends the phenomenographical research method by arguing the merits of engineering the outcome space from these investigations to effectively communicate the outcomes to an audience in technology-based discipline areas. Variations discovered from the phenomenographical study are blended with pre- and post-tests and a frequency distribution. Outcomes are then represented in a visual statistical manner to suit the specific target audience. This chapter provides useful insights that will be of interest to researchers wishing to present findings from qualitative research methods, and particularly the outcomes of phenomenographic investigations, to an audience in technology-based discipline areas.

A characteristic feature of economic development is the ever-changing structure of consumption patterns. Reducing the explanation of this phenomenon to changing prices, ultimately caused by changes in the availability of goods (or characteristics), would neglect a major force driving this change, namely, the variation of consumer wants and consumer knowledge. The present paper sketches an evolutionary framework for the analysis of consumer behaviour that takes account of these features.

For this purpose, Carl Menger's theory of goods is taken as starting point. Whereas economists after the ‘marginal revolution’ were almost exclusively concerned with the determinants of exchange value and developing price theory, Menger puts as much emphasis on user value as on exchange value. Focusing on how user value changes establishes a connection between Menger's 19th-century theory of goods and 20th-century learning theories. The problem of how to get from individual learning processes to aggregate consumption patterns is approached by recollecting the genetic underpinnings of human learning and its dependence on certain physical and social conditions. Taking into account that these conditions are also dynamic, we are able to interpret collective learning processes as historical events, which renders them useable for the analysis of economic change.

The aim of the chapter is to develop some approaches to turn education, predetermining the quality of human capital, into the most important factor of national inclusive development. This problem is titled by the World Bank Report (2018) as “Learning: to realize education’s promise.” There has been revealed a fundamental contradiction between the two processes: the training technology is improved, the treasury of knowledge is enriched, the scientific progress accelerates, on one side, but on the other side, according to the international Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study (2015), about 28% of the Russian 15-year-olds, for example, did not master the minimum necessary skills in at least one area of the three (natural science, mathematics, and communication in their native language). Meanwhile the correlation between educational and economic “failures” is high. Reduction in school failure in half (up to 15%) corresponds to the growth of the country’s GDP by 2% at the perspective of 10 years, by 5–6% – in 20 years, and by over 10% – in 30 years. The authors identify and substantiate the most important factor of the low basic knowledge of schoolchildren: it deals with the phenomenon of stable psychological and cognitive barriers in their minds. As a result of this theory, a model of educational consciousness has been developed, which makes it possible to overcome educational failure and to form algorithms for successful learning.