Saturday, May 21, 2016

Takin: Wiki universities & schools in each of all of Myanmar, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Kazakhstan's countries' languages at World University, China World University in Chinese

Hi June and Xiangyan,

Great to meet you at Stanford, June at - "The New Great Game: China And South And Central Asia In The Era Of Reform" talk -https://events.stanford.edu/events/606/60613/ - and thanks for your fascinating questions to Stanford East Asian Studies' professor and China specialist Tom Fingar about most of the countries you email about! Greetings, Xiangyan. There's much creative education potential at wiki World University and School, which is like CC Wikipedia (in ~ 300 languages) with best STEM Creative Commons' licensed OpenCourseWare (accrediting on CC MIT OpenCourseWare in 7 languages and CC Yale OYC).

World University and School is seeking high school students from around the world to apply this autumn (from those countries and China, too) and matriculate online in autumn of 2017 for free Creative Commons' licensed MIT OpenCourseWare- and Yale OpenYaleCourses-centric undergraduate BA/BS degrees first in English - http://worlduniversityandschool.org/ - in Google group video Hangouts, for planning purposes. 

On WUaS's wiki side (which is editable like Wikipedia) and which complements WUaS's degree side, planned in all countries' main and official languages - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Nation_States & http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Languages) - it will be particularly great to cultivate wiki schools in each of all of Myanmar, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Kazakhstan's countries' languages, so that people speaking those languages can openly teach and learn. (Wikipedia is in ~ 300 languages with millions of articles because of the relative ease of wiki information technologies to enable people to co-create encyclopedia articles).

Here are the beginning - 

Bangladesh World University and School (not yet in Bangla) -

Burma_(Republic_of_the_Union_of_Myanmar) WUaS (not yet in Burmese) - 

Bhutan WUaS (not yet in Bhutanese) -

Kazakhstan WUaS isn't yet begun - 

(And here's China World University and School - 

And WUaS is planning an online law school in each of these countries - e.g. http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/China_Law_School_at_WUaS - in your countries' main languages, June, and on hiring nationals from these countries to become law faculty, for example.

World University plans to move to a new Wiki emerging from CC Wikidata/Wikibase (Wikipedia's 3.5 year old inter-lingual database developing with Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and machine translation in 300 languages), and hopefully this spring/summer. This will facilitate greatly the open-ended creativity of wiki teaching and learning at WUaS in many ways. 

Could your contacts, June, in Myanmar, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Kazakhstan, possibly help find online undergraduate students first in English? Where are you from Xiangyan and what languages do you speak? In what ways do you want to create education online anew? While World University and School is planning for students to learn from their high school rooms, engaging your ideas or your contacts' thoughts could lead to in-an-existing-school WUaS focus too. 

WUaS is planning to become the online Stanford / Harvard / MIT {Media Lab} of the Internet to offer free, CC online BA/BS, Ph.D., Law, and M.D. degrees, as well as I.B. high school diplomas, in all countries main and official languages, as well as with wiki schools in all 7,943+ languages for open teaching and learning. CC MIT OCW - http://ocw.mit.edu/ - in 7 languages -http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/translated-courses/ - is our/WUaS's starting place for the free CC degrees. 

Please let me know your questions, ideas, thoughts and interests in these regards and I can send you further information. 

Thanks so much for your email, June!

Best regards, Scott

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Dear Scott, 

Glad to hear from you. Thank you so much for reaching out to me first. 

I came from China in 2005. I have been in the U.S. for about 11 years. I grew up in Beijing. I can speak Mandarin Chinese. I also learned Korean and Japanese in college. I am interested in your work that tries to build an online global learning community. I love the idea of providing learning opportunities and educational resources to people all over the world for free. I appreciate and respect the work your organization has done so far. 

As you might have heard, K-16 schools in China are growing so fast and trying to catch up with the West in terms of reforming their curriculum development and teaching methods. Over there, students, parents, teachers, educational leaders are very starving to learn from the outside to improve their own system and everything. I went back to China two months ago and talked to some of my friends who are developing Apps and other platforms for online learning. Those friends are my peers in the graduate school of education in China. There is a huge demand for this type of learning methods and materials. Because of a strong exam-driven system, Chinese parents, particularly those from upper-class, and educators from magnet schools started to seek an alternative approach to provide educational resources and opportunities for the kids to complement what they learned at school. You can tell, kids in cities are in a rush to get prepared well. Also, there is a huge gap between kids in urban and rural areas in China. Lacking of access and networks to the technology-based resources, kids in rural areas cannot get the same level of education in terms of both quality and quantity as those in urban areas for education. After reading your email, I am thinking it would be fantastic if the open learning sources could be provided to those not only in urban but also to those in rural areas. This is just a quick thought. I believe innovation is not just creating something new from nothing, but also making something already there better. 

I would love to learn more from you about the organization. I live in San Jose. Do you live in the Bay Area? Please let me know how I can be further help. Thank you so much! 

Best, 
Xiangyan

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Hi Xiangyan (and June), 

Thanks so much for your email and your interest in reaching out to Chinese students, for example. In responding to your "I am thinking it would be fantastic if the open learning sources could be provided to those not only in urban but also to those in rural areas," and re CC MIT OpenCourseWare centric World University and School, I see the possibility here of translating this open course ware further into Chinese (than http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/translated-courses/traditional-chinese/) so that WUaS could offer these courses online for free CC university degrees in China in Mandarin. Access to this in rural areas would happen with broadband in China there, and possibly even with a kind of partnership with Google/Stanford/University of California if we could develop this.

So all of this would involve developing a team for translating some of the ~2,300 CC MIT OCW courses here in English here - http://ocw.mit.edu/ - into Traditional Chinese MIT OCW here - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/translated-courses/traditional-chinese/ (with these ~100 courses in Mandarin as models/examples for course translation - to the STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics' MIT standard), again for free Creative Commons' University degrees (BA/BS, Ph.D., law, MD and IB) for Chinese students in Chinese. This would involve probably organizing translation of this within a Chinese University (since MIT OCW didn't share contact information recently about the Chinese university which translated the already existing MIT OCW in Chinese).

We could explore developing some of these courses partly in the form of video games eventually even - and see too MIT Professor Dick Yue's quote here about getting started with CC MIT OCW ...http://ocw.mit.edu/help/get-started-with-ocw/.

I live in the east bay hills of the SF Bay Area, about and hour and 15 minutes from (excellent) Stanford, for example (where June and I went, and where June studied in college). Shall we 3 explore possibly meeting at Stanford to talk further about some of this (and the countries you're interested in, June) at some point soon?

I just came across this interesting Stanford education talk with President John Hennessy, Sal Khan, and Stanford Professors Sean Reardon, Linda Darling-Hammond - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0XG80yt-xo - which you might be interested. China is mentioned only a little. 

Thanks again for your email.

Best, 
Scott



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