An individual can have a dream or vision that is not just personal but expresses a deep need of the zeitgeist. It has been my fortune to conceive of such visions and, if only of modest influence, to create new realities.
In a 1998 article for the Journal of Online Education at New York University, I wrote that educators concerned with online education in the broadest sense, like so many nomadic masterless samurai, needed a real organization. My 1998 TCC online conference keynote address from Japan proposed the World Association for Online Education, to turn online education into a new professional discipline.
In mid-2023, I was asked to organize an Indo-Japanese research group towards a bi-national grant for 2024-2026. With members' input, I created a proposal, which we submitted to both governments, on Indo-Japanese Collaboration to Humanize Online Educational Experiences.
2/2 A bit further to my post introducing the Indo-Japanese research grant proposal, I have a question to linguists, Indians, or other British English users. Because it was submitted to the Indian government, I used British English spellings, and with academic vocabulary there were many cases of spellings like -ise instead of -ize. Yet younger Indian scholars would use -ize, and I didn't know if they were trolling me as an American or what.
With a team of top educational technologists and social scientists from Tokyo and New Delhi, the main challenge was herding those cats to get all the difficult steps done on time. Yet I wonder if the proposal was more persuasive with British English, or can I dispense with that distinction from now on?
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