Swasdee ka, everyone....again I was out of the office a lot and will be more in weeks ahead!
I was invited to moderate a session on the topic related to interdisciplinary studies on sustainable development at Kampangpetch Rajabhat University Again, I learned so many amazing things far beyond my own field and it made me feel great to increase my own awareness how much effort is out there in the world!
The organizer was able to get real experts in various fields, even all the five turned out to have solid science background, basically, engineering.
In the conference, we learned about the sub-topics relating to sustainable development leading developed countries have been pursuing, from Professor Dr. Peter Haddawy (A Fulbright alum currently working at the Faculty of ICT, Mahidol University). Even on several areas cited, namely, climate change to forestry and renewable energy, I realize the huge knowledge has been acquired in form of publications and statistics gave us many implications that could ignite lots of discussion and investigation.
Professor Mamoru Shibayama from Kyoto University, Japan is now Director of the ASEAN Center, based in Bangkok. His interest is in Area Informatics...something I feel so very distant from me. The very unique aspect that amazed me was how he linked this specialization with Archeology, especially to determine mobility of the monks in Thailand from ordination until leaving the monkhood, interviewing many and doing the monitoring for over 10 years. We discussed later how it would be so fun to jointly work on 'mobility of students in Thailand and ASEAN', good?
Three other were from Australia (Dr. Leisa Armstrong from Edith Cowan University), Canada (Dr. Patrick Chuankarn), and China (Assistant Professor Jinliang Wang from Changzhou University), sharing about e-agriculture to enhance productivity through increased useful content for farmers, sustainable marketing throughout the supply chain of raw materials to customers, and indoor air quality with its impacts on health, energy and environment.
Here are what I learned from this international conference:
1. Realize better how interconnectedness of our world has increased and how much more is needed for inter/multidisciplinary teams for research studies.
2. Give even more importance to General Education Subjects, especially the sharpening of worldviews, and learning skills.
3. Maximize the use of ICT to increase our understanding about the cross-cutting issues while trying to integrate crucial ones to make strong positive impacts.
4. Synergize efforts at every level from individual to international as sustainable development enhances our well-being and quality of life for us and generations to come. In some contexts and cases, development could mean 'Appropriate Development'....what will harm least and fit best for a country and the impact on its neighbors and the world!
5. See growth in academic conference business as there were almost 1,000 in the audience. Since graduate students are required to present their research, more outlets are needed. I seriously think that if there are several 'social enterprises' that hold international conferences to accommodate this demand, it would raise the quality of research sharing without much need for each university to exhaust too much energy on logistics and ceremonies. More importantly, all the conferences must be based on quality of the selection of themes, panelists, and research theses; not simply to satisfy IQA/EQA criteria or other related standards.
Bye+ bye ka!
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