Urges governments to expand quality education for all, increase community access to information and communication technology, and improve cross-border scientific knowledge-sharing, in an effort to narrow the digital and "knowledge" divides between the North and South and move towards a "smart" form of sustainable human development.

This report analyses all aspects of cultural diversity, which has emerged as a key concern of the international community in recent decades, and maps out new approaches to monitoring and shaping the changes that are taking place. It highlights, in particular, the interrelated challenges of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue and the way in which strong homogenizing forces are matched by persistent diversifying trends. The report proposes a series of ten policy-oriented recommendations, to the attention of States, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, international and regional bodies, national institutions and the private sector on how to invest in cultural diversity. Emphasizing the importance of cultural diversity in different areas (languages, education, communication and new media development, and creativity and the marketplace) based on data and examples collected from around the world, the report is also intended for the general public. It proposes a coherent vision of cultural diversity and clarifies how, far from being a threat, it can become beneficial to the action of the international community.

Revolutionary information and communication technologies are contributing to dramatic changes in the competitiveness of global and local markets and in the way people conduct their business and everyday lives. The potential benefits and risks these changes present for developing countries and the economies in transition are enormous. This comprehensive, authoritative reference book examines the ways in which these powerful technologies are being harnessed to development goals, helping to reduce the risk of exclusion and create new opportunities for developing countries. The report emphasizes the urgency of developing new social and technological infrastructures to help ensure that new technologies are used effectively. It also also offers guidelines and practical steps that can be taken by stakeholders to shape their future innovative knowledge societies.

This book studies how the knowledge society has created new conditions of marginalities while empowering people through new age connectivity.

In a world that is essentially digitizing, some have argued that the idea of the knowledge society holds the greatest promise for Africa’s rapid socio-economic transformation. Impacts of the Knowledge Society on Economic and Social Growth in Africa aims to catalyze thinking and provide relevant information on the complex ways in which the information age is shaping Africa and the implications that this will have for the continent and the world. This premier reference volume will provide policy analysts, policymakers, academics, and researchers with fresh insights into the key empirical and theoretical matters framing Africa's ongoing digitization.

Underlying the current dynamics of technological developments, their divergence or convergence and the abundance of options, promises and risks they contain, is the quest for innovation, the contributors to this volume argue. The seemingly insatiable demand for novelty coincides with the rise of modern science and the onset of modernity in Western societies. Never before has the Baconian dream been so close to becoming reality: wrapped into a globalizing capitalism that seeks ever expanding markets for new products, artifacts and designs and new processes that lead to gains in efficiency, productivity and profit. However, approaching these developments through a wider historical and cultural perspectives, means to raise questions about the plurality of cultures, the interaction between "hardware" and "software" and about the nature of the interfaces where technology meets with economic, social, legal, historical constraints and opportunities. The authors come to the conclusion that inside a seemingly homogenous package and a seemingly universal quest for innovation many differences remain.

The growing importance of knowledge, research, innovation and evolving perspectives on expertise with the usage of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) are changing the sociology of knowledge in the globalized world. Universities are the major institutions involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge. This book looks at ICT for education initiatives taken up towards building a Knowledge Society as emphasized in national education policy regimes for encouraging knowledge generation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge diffusion and the exploitation of knowledge. The research examines the present practice of ICT adoption in an existing framework of University of Hyderabad (UOH) and Tezpur University (TZU) through intensive case study. The research attempts to analyze issues of knowledge, governance and access using ICT; the application of communication technologies in Higher Education Sector that helps in fulfilling the goal of a Knowledge Society; the communication process and strategies in the networking of higher education into a Knowledge Society; existing ‘digital divide’ and the implications. The Stakeholder’s perspective further highlights the advantages and the challenges faced in the actual implementation of ICT4E. Based on the study, the research offers recommendations for management, human resources, processes and institutional culture in ICT4E implementation.

Developments within the “knowledge society,” especially those resulting from technological innovation, have intensified an interest in the relationship between different contexts and multiple sites of learning across what is often termed as formal, non-formal and informal learning environments. The aim of this book is to trace learning and experience across multiple sites and contexts as a means to generate new knowledge about the borders and edges of different practices and the boundary crossings these entail in the learning lives of young people in times of dynamic societal, environmental, economic, and technological change. The empirical research discussed in this book has grown out of a Nordic network of researchers. The research initiatives in the Nordic countries tend to avoid the more spectacular debates over the future of the educational institutions that tend to dominate and obscure discussions on education in the knowledge society, and which look to models of informal learning, whether in the “learning communities” of workplaces and families or in the new socio-technical spaces of the Internet, as a source of alternative educational strategies. Rather, Nordic researchers more modestly ask whether it is possible to envisage new models of teaching and learning which take seriously both the responsibility to social justice and social wellbeing, which, at least rhetorically, underpinned a commitment to mass education of the 20th century, as well as to the radical challenges to traditional educational models offered by the new socio-technical spaces and practices of the 21st century.