In order to apply for one of these scholarships, please write a blog post (referring back to this one) describing:
1. What you would “bring” to the conference? What can you contribute, be it a willingness to volunteer to moderate a session, some special expertise or project, an already accepted proposal…
2. What you see as the most critical issue facing you in your efforts around Open Education, and how you think the conference can help you address it?
The above paragraphs are from Open Education Conference :http://openedconference.org/archives/324 I got this news from a friend who received the award last year. He said this conference helped him a lot on his study, I make up mind to have a try--apply for one of these scholarships. I don't know what can I contribute, but I do want to know what's other countiies open education like in practice, What I can learn from their explorations and experiences, which can help China, a country who have 1/6 population of the would.
If I can make some contribution, I think I would make an introduaction of Teacher Education System and some related Policy in China and my recently pracitse on biology teacher learning community. Open Education can mean a lot to China, because China's 700 million population are presents, and most of the present families can not afford tuition fees for their children. University and the Chinese government now is pursuing a policy of free teacher training, students who participate in this program don't have to pay their tuition, they can also received living aid from the government, but after graduation, they must return to their home town and work as a teacher for 10 years. Is this policy a good way out? Is Open Education more suitable for China? If so, teacher education of course should be firstly considered and put into practise in my opinion, but how. I have recently done some practical work, the idea is very simple and the technology platform is very low-cost , I created a googlegroup, named BioTeaHouse , it is primarily designed for secondary school biology teacher and educational researchers to communicate and learn together. With the development of the community, I feel more and more the importance of curriculum development, and BioTeaHouse is more and more like a big school, everyone can participate in the discussing, learning, sharing, everyone is as a student and at the same time as a teacher. How can we let this community develope into a public free teacher education school, which will let more people have access to teacher training and make them becoming outstanding teachers or learning leaders in the network. It may effectively promote and popularize the education of all children, no matter he or she is poor or not. Any practice and efforts in this direction, I think, is worthful and significant.
At present, I am a PhD candidate in teaching and learning in College of Life Science in Beijing Normal University. And I am aslo an active member of the very innovative social network for open education and Web 2.0 education called SocialLearnLab. Xiuli Zhang and her friends are the founders and orgnizers of this social network.
