Winding down for a wonderful 2019

As 2018 is coming to an end soon, I checked to see how many email messages I've shared and the number stands at 44, excluding this one ka!

I also take this opportunity to reflect on this passing year to find the following:

1. Efforts and development of internationalization (IZN) of higher education in Thailand, GMS, ASEAN, and Asia are evident and I couldn't be happier! 

2. My keywords consistently used are 'Future Trends', 'New Normal', 'Autonomy', 'Vision and Missions', 'Generations', 'Quality', and 'Sharing'. Added ones are 'Purpose', 'Empathy' and 'Ethics' as part of the key attributes to focus and instill into our higher education and society. Obviously, I see the chance for IZN to help promote all these issues through its crucial mechanisms like exchanges and collaboration, which need at least semi-structured approaches.

From a few forums I attended, I think I'll strongly emphasize to our higher education the need to collaborate, not to compete among our own selves or even with others across our borders in order for us to sustain productively and healthily.  Since I just listened to another recent book summary on, 'Bring Human to Work', I also wish to urge our community to care for and enhance our own 'being human' especially in the era of AI and Machine Learning! 

By the way, owning 'Alexa' turns out to be my learning highlight this year too kaaa!

3. Volunteer activities have brought so much learning, hope, and joy. I hope to do more whenever I can with friends and networks.

4. Besides strong family ties that I always feel blessed, projects I've been involved and the US trip this year proved that decades of relationships with friends and networks have genuinely warmed my heart and soul!

My 2018 has been real busy yet rewarding in many ways. May I thank you all for the invites, advice, opportunities, cooperation, and friendship na ka. 

I hope 2019 will be brightened with our joint efforts and caring hearts to heighten quality of our own selves and the circles we belong, both morally and academically. 

See you all in 2019 ka.

Gen Y's world

Hello Thursday to everyone with a little story to share ka.

Two weeks ago, I had lunch with a Fulbright alum who stayed and taught in a school up north for 6 months. It was a fun to follow her thinking and life after she left Thailand.

In fact, it started from her keen interest in taking vdo's about her English camp and other related activities while teaching. When she went back to the US, IIE (representing the State Dept in recruiting Fulbright students and English Teaching Assistants -- ETA) asked her to help promote the ETA Program and so she flew to different States and attend some important functions. This has in part, increased her own passion in technology. 

She now owns a small company doing, 'Website Designer & Marketing Consultant and Women's Empowerment Speaker'!

We talked about the location of her office. She said, 'Pakistan'! My first surprise!

When asked how many times she has been there. She answered, 'Never'! My second surprise!

My Fulbright alum said she was lucky to find one young lady there who wanted to work with her and she was the one managing the office in Pakistan (very eager to learn more how this Pakistani lady has become so competent and excelled in her management in her country na ka!) Things work out well with long-distance leadership from the US! From time to time, she still gets online requests for her to offer advice or lead a camp. 

After our get together, she went to Samui to work with her team in Pakistan on their US clients from Thailand!! It turned out to be a real digital world of work ka.

Then we discussed family life and she asked me if I used, 'Tinder' a very popular matchmaking app. You can guess it must have been a 'No' ka. I told her I was afraid if any Fulbright kid found out, it'd become talk of the town:))! Seems it's something quite common for our Y gen.

Has our education been up to this form and other digital ways of work and life ka?

IZN of Higher Education Platform (final)

My last mail to summarize the IZN of Higher Education Platform ka. 

My own version of the overall learning is:

• IZN is here to stay and can be a great mechanism for mobility, partnership, collaboration, and benchmarking. Go for cooperation, not competition at all levels from local to regional and international.
• The speed of the digital world is much faster than imagined and our higher education institutions must adjust fast. Prof. Sacco’s emphasis on teaching students ‘to learn how to learn’ is crucial.
• Quality has to be integrated in all the IZN steps and processes.
• The sessions have also confirmed my talk in several key aspects ka.

1) There’s a real need to bridge the gap between national authorities and universities to build mutual understanding of the policy directions on IZN to ensure that the implementation will work for our younger generations and our more stable future. Universities need to have their autonomy to manage their IZN elements as seen most responsive to their respective contexts. 

2) Internationalization at Home (IaH) must be on our agenda to allow the mass to have intercultural understanding even when without any mobility opportunities. Virtual mobility should be seriously explored as well. 

3) While we see younger ones who are digital natives, the older generations (particularly faculty and staff) must turn themselves into Gen ‘C’ (Gen Connected) to keep up with them and the new normal world.

4) We need to nurture the attributes of ‘empathy‘ and ‘ethics’ before the third generation (ASI— Artificial Super Intelligence) of robots take over the mass! In other words, retain our human qualities not to be robotized as robots are being developed to be more and more humanized!

On another matter, I felt upset to see many empty seats after the morning of the first day and again the second day. It was such a great opportunity to have the Platform organized in Thailand for us to benefit but I guess priority given to IZN wasn’t high enough along with other reasons.

Anyway, it means much more work has to be done more seriously before we run out of time and in fact, time is limited ka!

Let’s keep learning and fighting!

IZN of Higher Education Platform (3)

Happy Monday na ka. 

On this Platform, there were many invited speakers from international/national organizations, national authorities, and universities, whose contributions enabled us to see their thinking and focuses. 

It's really obvious that mobility stands out when discussing IZN and it could mean different things to different countries, e.g. for Unesco, it links with SDGs while Australia could see it on the more commercial side and DAAD sees it as friendship and peace. 

In this gathering, it was great to discuss research and how each country/university has been striving to excel in more collaborative research projects. China, Japan, and Malaysia seem to have a strong grip on them. I'm glad to learn more about a Unesco project on IZN that is being undertaken with Japan and Mahidol has also conducted quite a bit about it. We should see some common IZN indicators we can pick and choose from.

Another speaker I really liked and in fact had talked with him personally was Professor Tan Tai Yong, President of Yale-NUS college. Both institutions agreed to create a liberal arts college from scratch to produce graduates for the future world. It isn't like many others that are set up with domination of one institution or to serve as a satellite campus or franchise type of thing. The college has been extremely particular with recruitment of faculty and selection of students. For students (all required to stay on campus throughout the 4 years), potential applicants are asked to write 5 essays and the college interviews each and every student they've pre-screened (face-to-face, skype, etc.) Half of the students (250 for each class) will be Singaporeans and the rest will be for ASEAN and others (not sure if it's around 25% each). Students are required to take 1/3 of the courses both in science and social sciences that the college finds needed, 1/3 electives, and 1/3 for their majors. The designs of curriculums and facilities is all to promote learning which go along with the college's vision on 'A Community of Learning....'. Students design their projects together with their professors that can include study abroad too (80% of students go abroad). Professor Tan said the college tries hard to inculcate desirable attributes especially empathy and to lessen their egos and entitlements. How I wish I could visit his college some day soon!

Two more issues I'd like to share here too ka! Many sessions mentioned ranking with frustration. As the ranking race needs abundant resources, some universities jumped in or had to (because of their national standing) for funding support and didn't think it was favorable. It confirmed Jamil's belief to go for benchmarking, not ranking. 

When a Japanese speaker shared that the IZN related  funding support  has led to unnecessary competitions among local universities, I thought about it a lot and the role of ministries has to be reconsidered in terms of the use of funding that could cause backfire.  

Will be back with my reflection as the conclusion for this Platform tomorrow ka.

IZN of Higher Education Platform (2)

Let me now share with you what Dr. Jamil Salmi, the second keynote speaker talked on 'IZN of Higher Education toward World-class Universities' na ka.

Jamil Salmi worked at the World Bank for over 25 years and I always love his presentations as they're always concrete with simple yet powerful analogy and pictures. This time was no difference ka. Simply fantastic and insightful.

He touched on the meaning of 'world-class universities', which could be defined by 'self declaration', 'reputation', and 'rankings'. He used his three overlapping circles to explain his thoughts about it, saying that the cores must be 'top graduates', 'dynamic knowledge', and 'leading-edge research'. To reach those three core results, universities need talents, governance (with management autonomy and freedom from civil service rules), and resources. He showed stats to compare endowment funds of leading universities and GDP of Thailand along with many others (113 countries have GDP lower than Harvard endowment).

On IZN, he said it could serve as an accelerating factor for development and leadership is important to inspire communities with its new vision, yet, it needs to have proper duration of leadership terms to make it work.

Jamil cautioned the audience about 'rankings', pointing out that 'it's totally useless' (against multidisciplinary research, pointless to focus on academic reputation......my own version na ka). He urged that we focus more on 'benchmarking' which would heighten quality of higher education.

He said universities must dare to be different with niche programs, to challenge themselves with the sense of urgency, and to have their strategic planning with managerial innovations and the use of benchmarking.

I just got a link to his blog from my former colleague:

http://blogs.worldbank.org/team/jamil-salmi

in case some of you are interested to learn more about his perspective and insights ka. 

To be continued kaaa!