homoLudens

Dong Hui High’s principal, Li Wei Liang, has been on the job for all of
one week. During the unavoidable meeting to review the school’s
statistics, he read the brochure along with us foreign guests. Dong Hui
opened in 1965 and went through a major renovation and restructuring in
1985. It’s  close to being the largest vocational school in China,
with over 7000 students taught by 300 staff, and was one of the first
schools in the country to develop a full technology program. They’ve
got two international cooperative programs started, with Japan and the
UK, though neither involves much in the way of digital
communication.  We toured facilities, but not classes. Tech set up
seems adequate, but how everything gets used is an open question. 

While the rest of the group buses off to Yangjou and environs, I’ve
been invited back to Dong Hui to spend some in-depth time with the
librarian and the tech staff. A small group of us visited  East
China Normal University’s International College of Chinese Studies. The
teacher training program there appears quite popular with foreign born
instructors of Chinese, drawing students from all over the world. For
the last four years, they’ve had central government support to develop
online instructional materials for Mandarin study. The sampling we saw
involved lots of flash effects and video downloads, but I didn’t hear
much about actual class to class exchanges.  I know that one of
Gal’s teachers, Mindy Chiang links to some of their online materials.

Perhaps there’s a basis for building something with one of these places.