Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 12:51:47 -0400 From: Sean Gilbert Phil, Pat mentioned that you'll be meeting with MISTI again on Tuesday Oct. 11, 1pm. I believe this is what we scheduled during our last meeting 2-3 weeks ago. We haven't had the chance yet to talk about the 2005 China projects. You have all of our reports and photos, which I posted on our CIS server so that you can download them easily. Plus the China content on the Wiki site looks pretty good for any supplementary information not contained in the detailed reports we've provided. Also, as you know, the students from the Tsinghua, Xi'an Jiaotong, Dalian, and Qinghai projects (and I) will briefly present these EECS-related projects at the EECS faculty luncheon on Monday, October 17. We're looking forward to that. I'm holding a presentation rehearsal with the students on Friday October 14 to make sure their slides contain the pertinent points/photos and that the students don't go over the 10 minutes allotted them. In the meantime, we're aggressively calling for student applications for the 2006 China program. Student applications are all due at the end of this month. We'll conduct interviews in November and send out acceptances at the end of the semester. So we will need to speak fairly soon about what iCampus has in mind for China projects for next year. Also, if iCampus would like to continue working with a university like Tsinghua, and some of the other Chinese universities, you'll need to consider offering workshops or other training to Chinese faculty. Chinese universities will pay their own travel and accommodation costs; they just want some direct training opportunities with MIT faculty, similar to what iCampus has offered to some Mexican, African, Australian, and English universities. Chinese university faculty want a little of iCampus's time; not iCampus's funding. I've re-designed the 2006 China program so that ALL of the student teams will be working on iCampus/OCW courseware. I've eliminated teams that work exclusively with Chinese high schools because I want to use that MISTI-China funding to further support the university educational technology projects. However, I won't abandon the Chinese high school program, as it has been a popular program here at MIT amongst students and in China, and a good model for our university team program. Each summer team will now work for 4 weeks at two different Chinese universities (8 weeks total), and each team will also spend one or two weeks teaching a motivational "English through Educational Technologies" class at a Chinese high school that is attached to one of these universities. It is very common in China for high schools to be attached to universities. So the entire summer program will be 9-10 weeks per team with each team teaching iCampus/OCW related courseware at two universities plus a short high school project. This way we can reach out to more Chinese universities, as the demand in China for our student projects is HUGE. So many Chinese faculty at MIT (from many different departments) are now contacting me to volunteer their time to help set up iCampus/OCW projects at their home province universities. Everyone we encounter in China is moved by the work we are doing. Already, I can confirm the following universities for our 2006 program Dalian University of Science & Technology Kunming University of Science & Technology, Kunming Qinghai Normal University, Xining Qinghai University, Xining Shandong University, Jinan Sichuan University, Chengdu Tsinghua University, Beijing Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an Yunnan University, Kunming Zhejiang University, Hangzhou The 2006 China program is going to be enormously successful, and, hopefully, this should make us attractive to foundations such as NSF, Freeman, Starr, and Luce. I'm now approaching AIG's China and New York offices to try to attract their support. Of course I'm counting on iCampus's continued interest and support, and I'm hoping that Microsoft will recognize the value of what we are establishing in China. Come to China with us in 2006 and see for yourselves! :) Best Sean MIT China Program & MISTI Singapore Forum Center for International Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology 292 Main Street Building E38, Room 734 Cambridge, MA 02139 Phone: 617-253-5068 Fax: 617-258-7432 seang@mit.edu http://web.mit.edu/mit-china/www/ http://web.mit.edu/mit-ceti/www/