September 04, 2009

 September 2009 Newsletter: Yumi's Monthly Note

I am writing this in Kyoto where the dragonfly season has begun.

We held the Pangaea Seminar& Workshop 2009 on August 22- 23 in Tokyo. It had been a long time since we last had this kind of event in Tokyo. Some folks, who had gotten details of the event on our website, told us how excited they were to learn something new from our seminars and workshops as they registered for our event. Last year, we invited mainly our volunteers. But this year we asked non-members as well as our members to attend our seminars and workshops. We appreciate that many people joined us to expand their knowledge. Especially, we are thankful for those who participated in from Mie and Kyoto, for they needed to spend extra time and money on traveling to Tokyo. For more specifics, please go check out Toshi's blog. He has more interesting stories to tell.



Personally, I learned a lot by attending our seminars and worships. We invited three super experts, Mr. Inoue, Ishida, and Machino, as our guest speakers. They shared their viewpoints regarding communications, information, and/or social business. To be honest, I am somewhat "allergic" to lectures because I have a hard time with lecturers who love to hypnotize me by making their lectures hard to follow. However, I didn't experience any allergic reactions this time. Rather, I was captivated by the lectures delivered by our guest speakers. Their lectures were very clear and easy to understand. They truly know how to communicate with their audience. That's why we call them experts. After the lectures, I received feedback from our attendees: "Those lectures were worthy paying!" Actually, the comment made us feel relieved because we had had mixed feelings about asking a fee for attending our lectures- for the first time.

In the evening, we all dined out at a "fishing restaurant," where we can enjoy fishing and tasting the fish we catch, in order to offer a fun- filled social gathering to our event participants, staff, and guests. I tried fishing and hooked a sea bream less than 5 seconds. Yup, I can be a qualified fisherwoman! So did Mr. Inoue. He caught a sea bream. Dr. Ishida got a giant flatfish. The chef at the restaurant cut the fish we caught to make "sashimi" for all of us. We all enjoyed not only our dinner, but also our conversations as well regardless of age and career. It seemed that everyone experienced a real social gathering at the restaurant. I definitely want to have this kind of event next year again. Hope you will join us next time!

Currently, "H1N1" virus has been active in Japan. I am hoping our activities won't be affected by H1N1 flu. Don't forget to wash your hands and gargle!

Mr. Hitoshi Susano is our Pangaea Ring writer for this month. Currently, he is serving as professor for Mie University Integrated Center for Education Research and Practice. He has been an active liaison between Mie University and Pangaea since this academic year started. We thank Mr. Susano for his contributions to our project: we now have many new facilitators at Mie University who were recruited by Mr. Susano.

Yumi

Posted by: kumakinoko | 3. Newsletter | Permalink

 September 2009 Newsletter: Pangaea ring - Mr. Hitoshi SUSONO

Mr. Hitoshi Susano is our Pangaea Ring writer for this month. Currently, he is serving as professor for Mie University Integrated Center for Education Research and Practice. He has been an active liaison between Mie University and Pangaea since this academic year started. We thank Mr. Susano for his contributions to our project: we now have many new facilitators at Mie University who were recruited by Mr. Susano.



I am a faculty at Mie University and I teach courses such as “The Methods and Techniques of Education”. I experiment and research how technology can be best applied to provide the elementary school children and junior high school children with better and more pleasant way of learning.

I used teach math and English at a junior high school teacher before becoming a university faculty. It was over twenty years ago, when I started international on-line correspondence in 1988. I met John D’Auria, who was the Dean of a junior high school in the suburb of Boston in the United States, then.

I felt like putting my experience of e-mail correspondence with him into practical use in teaching my own students in my English class. For those junior high school students who have just started studying English, writing up sentences in English was not an easy task, however, John attentively answered each one of their questions such as “How much do the hamburgers cost?” and “How long is the summer vacation?”. Rather than trying to improve my students’ English ability, what I wished was to let them correspond in English in order for them to be connected with the people overseas and to nurture their “heart” open enough for international exchange. Time went by, the internet has become accessible, and now the “window” to the world has widened.

All this time, ”International exchange for children” has always been my passion and interest.
Four years ago, as I was watching NHK morning news on TV, I learned about Pangaea for the first time. On the news, they introduced Pangaea’s “Pictons”. I knew instantly that the Pictons would be a very useful tool for the children to be connected with each other over the language barriers. After my encounter with Pangaea on TV, I happened to be given the opportunity to work with the Pangaea staffers under the “International Education Promotion Plan” at Mie University and it has been my pleasure to observe the monthly Pangaea activities since then.
I talk to my students during my classes at university about Pangaea activities as an example of practical education of international exchange, and the bigger number of students seems to grow their interest in children’s exchanging “Picton mails” for their communication. I am personally impressed with how the children make use of their drawings in terms of communication with the other participating children. When it comes to “International exchange using ICT-International Communication Technology”, it is often the case that we talk more about computers and internet. Pangaea activities, however, place the children’s bond and their communication with each other as the priority and technology is considered as the supporting tool. In this regard, I do believe Pangaea’s principal shares the solid ground with what I have been personally interested in and working for over 20 years.

Hitoshi SUSONO
Mie University, Faculty of Education
Professor

Posted by: kumakinoko | 3. Newsletter , 4. Pangaea Ring | Permalink