Editorial on Tech in Ed Geneva Program
Posted by gweiss, Thu Aug 16 18:14:00 UTC 2007
Hey, neat editorial on MLive/The Flint Journal today on our Geneva program! Snip:
Seeing the internationalization at the University of Michigan-Flint unfold is fascinating, as it involves much more than new housing to accommodate foreign students. The academic transformation moving across the campus is proving to be the exciting development
An Internet feed from Geneva, Switzerland, featuring a new graduate program, makes clear that internationalization is being felt broadly, affecting the experience of Flint-based students and potentially drawing in new ones from across the world.
In this historic time for UM-Flint, some of its top officials, as well as the first students to enroll in its new Technology in Education Global Program, are reporting from Geneva. The students are the inaugural group in a master's program taught in good part online, but which also requires two three-week stays in Geneva. This city is home to a host of nongovernmental agencies, which are key to the program. It already has drawn students from far beyond Flint.
Graduates are to be prepared to transcend the mere creation of Web sites for use in education, so they might devise ways to use this method of communication to make learning and teaching more powerful. The focus on nonprofits will help students master the teaching of social justice and various societal reforms at a more dynamic level.
As UM-Flint struggled for several years to launch its internationalization program, the Flint community has traveled along vicariously, especially in the quest for student housing, which at long last is under construction.
But the new master's program places the student housing in a larger, much richer context. While the bricks and mortar are important to the campus and the city, they would mean little to a university in the absence of intellectual and pedagogical purposes.
The feed from Geneva demonstrates how far-ranging this commitment of internationalization is on the part of UM-Flint. We can only look forward with greedy anticipation to what will happen next.