International Education II

If the student asks us:

Is there online information available about education in the Pacific region?

Our answer would be:

Pacific Archive of Digital Data for Learning and Education (PADDLE) provides full text access to a collection of Pacific education material.

This includes publications from the participating Ministries of Education including strategic plans, education legislation, curriculum frameworks and school policies. It also contains national development plans, statistics and budget information for the fifteen Pacific countries.

PADDLE shares practice and experience among fifteen Pacific countries, providing access to relevant education policy, planning and development material. Most of the documents involved were previously unavailable in digital form.

PADDLE also includes material from international and regional organizations including The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Asian Development Bank, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Commonwealth of Learning, Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL), and the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat.

The student may have a further request:

As part of my comparative academic research project, I am also looking for information about education in China.

To offer assistance, we might say:

In that case, we might look at The Chinese Educational Resources Information Centre Project (Chinese ERIC), a free electronic database of educational studies in Chinese communities.

As its website notes,

• Entering the twenty-first century, educational practitioners and researchers are facing the challenges of meeting the new demands of a fast-changing educational world. For example, life-long education and distance education are two major educational recommendations to prepare people for leading a competent life in the next century. In order to keep Chinese educators and practitioners in step with these demands, it is opportune to review the existing needs of scholars in Hong Kong and other Chinese communities.
• We have witnessed an increasing number of Chinese scholars across Chinese societies engaging in educational research in the last decades. Fruits of serious research are abundant. A few regional attempts were made to put the findings together. For example, in the eighties in Hong Kong, educational researchers such as Chung et al. have conducted a research into Hong Kong education and published “An Annotated Bibliography of Studies on Hong Kong Education (1946-1982)” in 1991. However, this valuable work had no records of the work of Hong Kong between 1983 and the present, no document from the Chinese Mainland, and only a handful from Taiwan. Moreover, it was not designed for publishing on the Internet. In recent years, owing to the rapid development of technology and electronic database, Taiwan collects indexes of her journal articles and publishes them in CD-ROM. Although it allows greater library access and wider readership, charged services are hurdles for users. Many other individual Chinese institutions also published their publications and news on the Internet.
• Nevertheless, individual endeavors tend to be either thin on education, or weak in giving an overall picture of the cycle of changes in the field of education in Chinese societies. Educational practitioners and researchers still have to do physical search in the libraries or reading rooms of universities, colleges, government departments and voluntary agencies.
• The Faculty of Education and the Hong Kong Institute of Educational Research of the Chinese University of Hong Kong felt that there is a great need to collaborate efforts of scholars across Chinese societies, and to provide a Chinese-oriented educational information resource to serve Chinese communities. The Chinese Educational Resources Information Center project (hereafter C-ERIC) began to be developed by the joint effort of our Faculty and Institute in December 1995.

The student may wonder:

Who is the information presented on Chinese ERIC directed towards?

The reply would be:

Educational researchers, policy makers, teachers, practitioners, administrators, media staff, and students, among others.

Finally, the student may wonder:

Since we have mentioned UNESCO, does UNESCO provide international information about education?

The answer would be:

Yes, on its education-related website.

UNESCO defends the universal right to education as a basic element in human, social and economic development.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)