The 17th PASCAL Conference will take place on from 4-6 July 2024. It will be hosted by the University of Taipei, Taiwan University of Education and Datong Community College of Taipei City.
Under the general theme of the conference, “New Challenges for Higher Education, Cities and Regions: Addressing SDGs in Changing Contexts,” key issues address both the larger international dimension of the mission of universities and colleges with the aim of contributing to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and their role for the development and well-being of cities and local communities.
The SDGs have been an important benchmark for the development efforts of policy makers, academics and practitioners for almost a decade now. Yet, many structural changes and major shocks have altered their context since 2015 when they were first decided upon as a plan to be reached by 2030. The global COVID-19 pandemic brought traditional classroom-based face-to-face education to a sudden halt and sped up the process of online teaching and learning and, generally, the digitization of many other functions of society. Wars in Africa, Europe, and other regions, and the increasing waves of migration forced by wars, political repression, famines and environmental crises add to the list of challenges that societies and their education systems face. International co-operation is no longer the most obvious way forward.
Another challenge - not only for education and learning – is the artificial intelligence revolution. The launch of the latest ChatGPT algorithms, which have all the cognitive abilities indiscernible from human behaviour, yet still lack the human emotional and moral intelligence, pose many challenges for learning, and the development of a world respectful to aims of the SDGs with their economic, social and moral dimensions.
At the Taipei conference we shall discuss what have learned, and still need to learn in order to harness these challenges successfully as we move to 2030. Putting knowledge to practice means knowing more about how to implement change.
The call for submission is currently open.