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Home > Vol.
2, No. 3 |
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Connecting the Dots: GLD Success Stories - Story 4:
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NAME OF DEAN
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REGION OR POSITION REPRESENTED
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HOMELAND
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| Teboho Moja | Africa Region | South Africa |
| Xenia Stanford | Canada & USA Region | Canada |
| José Brenes | Central America, Mexico, Caribbean Region | Costa Rica |
| Boris Sedunov (Dr.) | European Region | Russia |
| Neil Hynd (Dr.) | Gulf & Middle Eastern Region | Abu Dhabi |
| Isa Kocher | Gulf & Middle Eastern Region | Oman |
| Arun Mehta (Dr.) | South & Central Asia Region | India |
| Cristiana Assumpção (Dr.) | South America Region | Brazil |
| Cliff Layton | Dean-at-Large | USA |
| Edna Ophelia Ferguson Reid (Dr.) | Dean-at-Large | Singapore |
| Graciela Pascual | Dean-at-Large | Argentina |
| Mauri Collins | Dean-at-Large | USA |
| Michel Menou (Dr.) | Dean-at-Large | France |
| Perry Morrison (Dr.) | Dean-at-Large | Australia |
| Steve Downes | Dean-at-Large | Canada |
| Tom Bradley (Dr.) | Dean-at-Large | Japan |
| Norm Coombs | Dean Emeritus | USA |
Xenia
StanfordI already spoke to some degree of my educational experiences both as a student and as a teacher in the Special Views companion piece to this article. Also you may have read my bio and profile on other pages in KnowMap or the Stanford Solutions site.
Therefore, I will not go into those details but to offer you a perspective of why education is so important to me both as a facilitator and a recipient. When I started school I walked through fields and woods, along paths and over streams to get there. The assumption I often find is that if you come from a country that is not ranked in the third world that you must get a first rate education. It is not true. That is, if you think the first rate education comes from fine schools with large libraries, computers linked to the Internet and well-paid teachers.
My first education was at my grandmother's knee as she read me stories and taught me numbers and letters in two languages. She was my best teacher ever - she also taught me many other lessons of life so that when I started formal schooling I was already in love with learning. In the school setting I had some great teachers, some awful examples and the mainly mediocre. I found it did not matter what the setting or who was in it as long as I had the lust to learn.
That was my main goal when I became a teacher - to turn students onto learning. To whet their appetites - to teach them to observe, think and analyse - the rest and zest would take over from there. When asked what I taught my answer was "students". When the questioner protested: "no, no - I mean what subjects do you teach". I said "students". It mattered not whether it was an English class in a high school, science or math in elementary schools, outdoor education on an island off the coast of British Columbia or adults in organizations. The answer to me is always my subject is "people".
I taught students in every grade from kindergarten to first year-university and in the workplace. I conducted research projects for two different universities into the impacts of various methodologies and pedagogies on learning. I learned as much and many times more than I did in formal classrooms. I learned as much from those who learned as those who taught.
Now for those who look for paper credentials, I graduated with a Bachelor of Education (in English and Humanities for Secondary Schools) from the University of Calgary. I went on to complete all the coursework for a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English and a Master of Arts (Honours) in English at Macquarie University. Upon my return to Canada I continued my education by taking post-graduate courses in many subjects including Library Science, Business, Records Management, Computer Science, Knowledge Management and you name it.
Some refer to my change of topics and change of universities as dabbling. They are wrong. I have never dabbled - I have always been very serious about education and learning. That is because the most important subject in my own education has been me in order that I may do what the motto of Macquarie University professes (as adapted from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales): "Go forthe and gladly lerne and gladly teche."
More information about Xenia Stanford
Dr.
Boris SedunovMy childhood allowed me a very good education, in spite of living a very long distance from any cultural center. I lived in a small town, one thousand kilometers to the East from Baikal Lake, on a bank of the mighty Siberian Shilka River that gives rise to the Amur, which flows into the Pacific Ocean.
In our town schoolteachers were the most respected people. Their devotion to education gave us a more important lesson than the disciplines they taught. The level of our school was so high that I managed to pass through the most demanding entrance exams into the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (PhysTech) with excellent marks.
The educational system of PhysTech is recognized throughout the World and deserves to be studied and replicated. We had to spend three years taking a full program of University education just to be ready to spend the next three years in scientific institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Certainly, this method of education is affordable only for specially selected students and it requires a very high score on entrance exams.
On graduation I came to a brand new city Zelenograd (a satellite of Moscow), oriented towards the microelectronics development. Here I met a modern Western approach to research and development. After ten years of my work in Zelenograd I launched a very effective idea in optical electronics and my quickly growing innovative department became a center of gravity for young graduates and students. I directed diploma work and doctoral dissertation preparations, participated in the dissertation scientific councils, gave lectures on subjects of our scientific work and headed the State Attestation Committee in theoretical physics at the Moscow Institute of Electronics Technology.
In spite of demanding economic conditions in Russia this work gave me useful skills for future transition to a market economy: business responsibility, competition with rivals, innovation and strategic approach, vision of perspectives, team building, motivation and inspiration, conflict resolution, business documentation, computerization in research and technology works.
In 1992 I visited the USA for joint work with the SEMI (Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International) association of electronics technology companies. What struck me most this time - I saw more socialism in the capitalism citadel than in a declared socialist country, USSR. In 1995 I participated in the on-the-job training in Europe according to the TACIS Program Management for Russia. During this short time we received a comprehensive knowledge in modern management, saw its effectiveness in practice and its impact on the Western corporate culture.
In the recently opened Zelenograd College of Business Administration I started a course in Innovation Management. The main problem was how to apply the methods of civilized management to a current criminal situation in Russia. And it forced me to think about the ethics in business that resulted in a number of scientific articles both in Russian and in English.
As the teacher in Management I grew along with my young institute. Soon I became the head of the Management and Entrepreneurship chair, headed the Business Informatic's chair and became a deputy rector of our institute in the Informatisation technologies.
Now I am working on a new manual of Foundations of Management, where I put my own views on profit origin, market saturation role in management development, interdependence between strategic and tactic plans, management role in contradictions resolution, orthogonal nature of business contradictions, and so on.
In 1996 I was involved in the USA Program Business for Russia. I studied distance education technologies and state of art in the St. Louis area and in Utah. I gained many friends in distance education and on my return back home we engaged in a very active E-mail exchange. I saw that in America interactive television is being substituted with more flexible on-line methods and it gave me hope that we can start development of our own on-line educational system.
We consider our institute as a laboratory developing educational courses for the distance system. Now I am the manager of this project. We understand that business people, who are going to be the MBA students, do not have extra time to attend courses in our institute. So we plan to suggest to them a hybrid - an on-line system of education, leaving for face-to-face only the part of the educational process that requires a direct contact between a trainer and the group. My participation in the Global Learn Days provides me with very useful experience in the distance educational system development.
More information about Boris Sedunov
Isa
Kocher (Christopher Isa Kocher)It is hard to sum up in a few short sentences, but my life has several important threads in it. From the earliest years I can remember, there have been three main concerns that have been the controlling interests of my life.
One is learning and science. The second is the whole universe of art. The third is taking care of other creatures.
I was lucky that I grew up in an unusual family where we were all taught from our earliest years the importance of being responsible. It was a large family with many chores, and many pets to take care of, and many books, and my brothers and sisters were all involved in one way or another with creative expression. I grew up in the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains where the Hudson River School of painting and art was the first major movement in US art history and closely tied with the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Further, the countryside I grew up in is one of the most overwhelmingly beautiful and interesting natural environments in the world. I would say that my intellectual and artistic life have very much been in that tradition.
My own education has included both formal degrees and informal experience of every kind. I studied anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and at Rutgers University, with a special interest in language learning and consciousness. Much later I obtained a degree in teaching English and did other kinds of language teaching training. My professional life has been almost completely in the non-profit sector of education and social service. My professional experience has included such disparate elements as social service for elderly disabled, youth sport, FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) football, freelance photography, fund raising, poetry, public relations, and teaching.
For more information on Isa Kocher see www.geocities.com/isa786/
Dr.
Cristiana AssumpçãoAfter teaching middle and high school Science and Biology for 13 years, I went back to school myself to get two masters and a doctorate at Columbia University in New York in Instructional Technology and Media. While in New York, I continued to work with colleagues and students in Brazil developing distance learning projects and testing the limits of what can be done with technology in education.
The most important lesson we learned was that the technology has empowered us because it brought people together. We can tap into experts and information that were not available to use before. Students can now work with students across the room or across the ocean. We also learned that technology changed our roles as teachers. Even though we no longer are the sole source of information, and this may frighten some teachers, we now have a greater responsibility. We have to help students become independent life-long learners, just as we ourselves must do. Teaching skills and competencies is harder than passing on information.
I am back in Brazil as the Coordinator for Educational Technology at Colégio Bandeirantes in São Paulo, and we are now working towards the next step: building a professional development program for teachers to work on readjusting our role and curriculum to take us into a new era of education.
For more about Cristiana Assumpção, see http://users.voice-alert.com/gld5/5080.html and www.earth2class.org/photos.htm
Read more about John Hibbs.
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