International Network of Universities (INU)INU News - December 2007
INU Project Manager Appointed
The INU Executive is delighted to confirm the 12-month appointment of Dawn Koban as INU Project Manager from May 2008 to May 2009.
Dawn is highly experienced in the area of international eduction. She has worked for 8 years in the area and her roles have included Manager of Outgoing Programs International at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and Education Abroad Manager at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She has been actively engaged with industry peak bodies, government departments and other international organisations. She has been the New South Wales State President of ISANA (International Education Association of Australia), the Australian Secretariat for UNCEP exchange consortium in North Carolina, USA and has been an Advisory Council member for ISEP (International Student Exchange Program) in Washington DC, USA. Dawn regularly presents at industry conferences and forums (including NAFSA and EAIE) and earlier this year organised a very successful Mobility Forum at La Trobe University.
Dawn was introduced to members of the Executive at their meeting in May and has been to visit Leicester, Malmo and James Madison Universities last month also. She is looking forward to working with all partners and hopes to be able to visit other member institutions during the 12 months that she is in this position.
One of Dawn’s first key roles will be to manage the development of a Business Plan for the INU Masters Summer School, which forms part of the INU Masters program.
INU Masters Program update
The INU Masters Academic Committee met at La Trobe University for three days of intensive discussions in February 2008. Following these meetings a number of key appointments were made within the Committee:
- Professor Gi Bung Kwon, from Kyung Hee University became the Chair of the INU Masters Academic Committee;
- Dr Andrew O’Neil from Flinders University took over as the Chair of the Curriculum Sub-Committee from Dr Thomas Weber (La Trobe University) and
- Ms Gunilla Carlecrantz was appointed as the Chair of a new Sub-Committee: the Administrative Sub-Committee.
The Sub-Committees are now working towards the September deadline set in February to complete the development of the INU Summer School curriculum, a Business Plan for the Summer School and to iron out any administrative issues that were identified in February.
At the February meetings, a new Steering Committee was also created as a small working group within the Academic Committee. This Committee comprises the Chair of the Academic Committee, the Chairs of the two Sub-Committees and the INU Project Manager. This Committee is communicating regularly by email and will also hold monthly teleconference meetings to ensure that development remains on track and that the deadlines are adhered to.
The INU Executive has also agreed to a further face-to-face meeting of the INU Academic Committee, which will take place just after the INU Student Seminar on 11 August 2008. The purpose of this meeting will be to finalise the Curriculum and Business Plan and to sign off on the resolution to administrative issues identified.
INU Student Seminar 2008 update
Plans for the 2008 INU Student Seminar to be held from 4th – 11th August 2008 are developing well. The INU Seminar Organising Committee is delighted to have two new female academic coordinators on the team this year: Dr Vandra Harris, Director of Studies for the Gobilisation Program at Flinders University and Dr Devi Bhuyan, Postdoctoral Fellow at the IBAVI Institute at James Madison University.
Dr Harris and Dr Bhuyan are working with Dr Weber and Mr Larry Marshall from La Trobe University as well as colleagues from Hiroshima University to develop this years program on the theme “What is a Global Citizen?”.
The Organising Committee is delighted that Hiroshima University has secured Mr Jayantha Dhanapala, President of the Pugwash Conferences on Sciences and World Affairs as the primary keynote speaker for the seminar. Mr Dhanapala has a long history with the UN and has held such roles as Secretary General to the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process in Sri Lanka and Under-Secretary General in the Department of Disarmament Affairs. Mr Dhanapala.
Nominations for the international students to attend the Seminar have now been received and there will be 17 from members outside Japan. It is hoped that between 30-40 students from Hiroshima and Ritsumeikan University will also participate in the event.
Staff attending the seminar this year will primarily be the Academic Representatives on the INU Academic Committee, so that they can experience the Seminar as well as participating in the INU Masters meeting on 11 August 2008.
Research Managers Workshop
Research Managers from across the Network met for a one-day workshop in Liverpool, England on 15 June 2008. The workshop preceded the INORMS conference in Liverpool and provided Research Managers with an opportunity to discuss common issues and to consider best practice. It is anticipated that this meeting will stimulate the development of a Research Managers Special Interest Group (SIG) which will hold regular virtual and face-to-face meetings to progress the discussions held on 15 June.
Research Steering Committee meeting
The INU Research Steering Committee will meet in June, also just prior to the INORMS conference. The Committee will be look at issues of research collaboration and the development of 3 research workshops, to be funded from a generous donation to the INU by the Riady family of Indonesia.
INU Shadowing Program 2008/2009 round
At the May meeting of the INU Executive, the nominations for the 2008/2009 INU Shadowing Program were approved. Administrative staff will undertake their visits between June 2008 and June 2009.
The INU Secretariat would like to thank all member universities who have agreed to host shadowing program visitors in this round.
A full list of the staff members who will be undertaking shadowing program visits, as well as details of the Universities they will be visiting and their areas of interest is available from the INU Shadowing Program web page at:
Report from the INU Executive meeting 2008
The INU Executive meeting was convened in early May 2008. Members met for two days to discuss a wide variety of issues including progress against the 2007/2008 Work Plan, development of the 2008/2009 Work Plan and priorities for the new Project Manager.
In addition to its consideration of a number of major current activities (such as the INU Masters Program) which are reported separately in this Newsletter, other matters discussed by the Executive included:
- the re-establishment of the INU International Officers Special Interest Group and the appointment of Felix Wang (James Madison University) as its chair;
- options for increased student mobility in both traditional and non-traditional forms;
- goals, structure and specific objectives of the Network;
- criteria for the convening of official INU events.
- Student leadership programs: sharing of best practice.
The Project Manager (or Secretariat) will contact separately representatives of member universities regarding these activities.
Environmental and Sustainability Issues
The Executive meeting included presentations from each of the five universities represented on responses to climate change and sustainability issues from both an environmental and curriculum perspective. It was agreed that these presentations demonstrated that the Network offered members a unique opportunity to share a range of best practice and co-operation opportunities, and that all member universities should be invited to complete the template which had been prepared for the Executive meeting to form the basis of initiatives in this critical area.
The Executive endorsed a draft INU Environmental Policy which will be submitted to the full Council for consideration at its meeting in November 2008, together with a proposal to convene an INU Forum on the Environment to be held in 2009 in conjunction with a major conference which is being planned by La Trobe University.
The Project Manager (or Secretariat) will contact separately representatives of member universities regarding these initiatives.
News from INU Members
Flinders new Vice-Chancellor signals the way forward
Flinders University’s new Vice-Chancellor, Professor Michael Barber, has sought the thoughts of his campus community and nominated five major objectives for his stewardship of the University.
Four months after taking up the Vice-Chancellor’s position at the University in Adelaide, South Australia, Professor Barber published a major position paper – The State of Flinders University.
In it, Professor Barber said he had inherited a well-run university with an excellent record and a strong financial position. Looking ahead, he emphasised five themes which included:
- Positioning Flinders
- Making people a strategic priority
- Sharpening the University’s research profile
- Increasing the attractiveness of Flinders to students, and
- Maximising the use of available resources.
Professor Barber also said another objective was to strengthen the University’s engagement with South Australia’s growing resource and defence sectors and enhancing Flinders’ green credentials with a reduction in the campus’s carbon footprint.
“To effectively position any institution requires clarity of vision and purpose. The idea that we encourage people to cross boundaries - whether disciplinary, geographical, racial, ethnic or social - and to be comfortable in doing so seems to me to resonate well with our founding philosophies and ethos,” Professor Barber wrote.
“It is also vital to the future of Australia and the globe, since none of the major challenges we face are the preserve of any one profession or discipline,” he said.
Professor Barber took up his position on 1 January 2008, continuing a distinguished career that involved senior positions in three Australian universities and the CSIRO.
UK Teaching Awards go to Flinders finest
The United Kingdom’s premier tertiary education academy has awarded two of its teaching and learning Fellowships to overseas recipients for the first time, and both have gone to Flinders University academics.
Professor Mark Israel of the School of Law and Professor Iain Hay from the School of Geography, Population and Environmental Management have each been honoured with a Senior Fellowship by the UK’s Higher Education Academy.
On the first occasion that eligibility for the Fellowships was extended beyond Britain, Professors Israel and Hay were the only international recipients, claiming two from a total of six awards in 2008.
Both are former winners of Australia’s top tertiary teaching honour, the Prime Minister’s Award for Australian University Teacher of the Year, presented annually by the Carrick Institute.
In congratulating the two recipients, the HEA’s Assistant Director, Helen Thomas, said that the Senior Fellow status recognises “outstanding achievement and contribution to teaching and learning and is a significant and prestigious category of recognition”.
The HEA’s citation acknowledged Professor Hay as a leader of local and international cooperative teaching projects spanning two decades, and as a pioneer of teaching evaluation in Australian universities. He is also co-author of an internationally read transferable skills manual for students, Making the Grade, published by Oxford University Press.
Professor Israel was commended for his promotion of collaborative and interdisciplinary learning, with a focus on “improving learning and teaching, on integrating teaching and learning with research, and on transforming relationships at all levels within higher education”. He also seeks to build ethical awareness and qualitative research skills among students and academic advisers.
Flinders takes smart thinking to Beijing
Flinders University’s engineering ingenuity will be on show in Beijing during the Olympic Games when the most advanced version of The Thinking Head makes its international debut.
The product of an artificial intelligence research program at Flinders and three other Australian universities, The Thinking Head can talk, show emotions, maintain eye contact with visitors, and even compose basic poetry.
The Thinking Head will be featured at Synthetic Times, an art and technology exhibition staged by the National Art Museum of China in association with the Beijing Olympics.
The Olympic outing for The Thinking Head coincides with plans to launch five new Bachelor of Engineering courses at Flinders University for 2009.
Flinders Vice-Chancellor, Professor Michael Barber, said the ground-breaking nature of The Thinking Head research program highlights the skills and knowledge that Flinders will bring to its new robotics, biomedical, electronic, computer systems and software engineering courses.
Kyung Hee University
Kyung Hee University has announced the sad passing of Chung Myung Oh, the wife of Young Seek Choue, the founder of the University. An obituary is attached for futher information.
La Trobe University
La Trobe University palaeontologist, Dr Ben Kear and his colleague Neville Pledge of the South Australian Museum have discovered the fossil of one of the oldest ancestors of the modern kangaroo, which reveals the incredible resilience and flexibility of the animal in the face of constant environmental change.
The fossil, named Ngamaroo archeri after the renowned Australian paleo-animalogoist, Professor Michael Archer, is different, but startlingly similar to the modern kangaroo, and clearly shows the genesis of the iconic Australian marsupial 25 million years ago. Unearthed in 1981 in the Ngama Quarry in the Lake Eyre Basin of central Australia, the fossil was only recently examined using advanced techniques of analysis.
Another recent study by Dr Kear and colleagues, Professor Mike Lee, Wayne Gerdz and Professor Tim Flannery, examined the limb bone proportions of kangaroos through time and showed that hopping has been around for a lot longer than originally thought. The previously favoured hypothesis has been that the true kangaroo hop evolved in response to the aridification of Australia only around 10 million years ago. Examination of the Ngamaroo as well as other specimens now shows that some very early kangaroo species were hopping around 25 million years ago, while others still used a bounding gait – and it was these non-hoppers that eventually died out.
Dr Kear's paper on the Ngamaroo is published in the May edition of the Australian Journal of Zoology. The study on the evolution of kangaroo hopping has been released as a chapter in the new book Mammalian Evolutionary Morphology (Springer).
La Trobe Centre for Dialogue
The Centre seeks to specialise in the theory and practice of dialogue in all its cultural, religious, political and economic dimensions. The function of dialogue is to enhance knowledge and understanding of other opinions and values by increasing levels of empathy for, and sensitivity to, the ‘other’.
For information on the recent activities undertaken by the Centre, please see the links below:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/2008/mediarelease_2008-38.php
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/2008/mediarelease_2008-31.php
Leicester opens new GBP32 million library
Following a three-year construction project, the University opened its new GBP32 million (USD64 million) David Wilson library on 1 April.
The new library has:
- study spaces for 1,500 students
- group study rooms
- increased IT facilities
- a 200-seat postgraduate area
- seminar rooms offering flexibility of space
- a 500-seat lecture theatre – the largest on campus
- a café
- bookshop
- careers library
The new library was featured in a recent article in the Independent newspaper, which focuses on all the improvements to the facilities which have already impressed students - including the new toilets! Click here to read the article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/a-new-library-with-spectacular-lavatories-is-wowing-students-at-leicester-800902.html
Leicester leaps up rankings
The University of Leicester has leapt up the rankings of two national league tables of British Universities.
The Good University Guide, published in The Independent newspaper, has placed Leicester at 12th, and in The Guardian newspaper Leicester has climbed up five places to 15th out of 117 institutions.
The University of Leicester - Celebrating 50 Years as a University
The 2007/08 academic year is a historic time for the University of Leicester. Exactly 50 years ago the University College of Leicester was granted its Royal Charter, on May 1st 1957, and so became the University of Leicester.
To mark the anniversary, a year of public events has been planned. The University was very pleased to welcome Professor Stephen Hawking in May to deliver a public lecture, discussing theories on the Origin of the Universe.
For more information, please see: http://www2.le.ac.uk/institution/50-years
Universitas Katolik Parahyangan
Parahyangan Catholic University will host the 16th ASEACCU (The Association of Southeast and East Asian Catholic Colleges and Universities) Conference 2008 and 10th ASEACCU Student Conference 2008 from 28 – 30 August 2008 in Bandung, Indonesia with the theme: The Role of Catholic Higher Education in Promoting the Civilization of Love and Solidarity as Responses to Economic and Cultural Globalization. The Association of Southeast and East Asian Catholic Colleges and Universities (ASEACCU) is a regional association of Catholic Universities in countries within this geographical area. The purpose of the organization is to promote Catholic higher education and to be a support for the local Churches. ASEACCU also aims to contribute to educational dialog on an international level beyond the Southeast and East Asian region. Today ASEACCU has grown into a network of 58 colleges and universities.