Happy New Year!
Happy New Year!
One of SET’s goals for 2019 is to engage with our students and campus community on a more regular basis through a school blog, this being the first one. You can expect a blog from one of our faculty , staff, or students in the middle of each month offering you everything from School updates, different perspectives on topical issues, and resources you might find of interest.
There is usually great interest in whom or what is deemed a newsmaker of the year gone by. For 2018, depending on the genre of interest you have, the title of newsmaker was bestowed on a variety of people (politicians, celebrities, world leaders, victims and survivors) and events (world events, tragedies, natural disasters, and entertainment). Have you ever thought about what it takes to be deemed a newsmaker? Is it determined by how viral the story was? Is it the degree to which heart strings are pulled or frustration is maxed? It is something or someone that has changed human life as we know it in some capacity? I would propose that a common denominator between the newsmaker stories is the unexpected. Something happened or someone acted in a way that caught our attention or challenged us in some way to react, think or change, and more often than not there was no deliberate intention to be a newsmaker. The impact of the newsmaker person or event affects each one of us differently, if at all. There are often lessons learned that contribute to our knowledge and values and that of our society’s.
We each have the potential to be a newsmaker – whether or not we gain notoriety or our story goes viral. How we interact with each other, our conversations and shared experiences contribute to each other’s news story. Your news can be as private, public, small or grand as you choose it to be. What do you want your news to be in 2019? How do you want to contribute to others’ news? How can you make best use of your time as a RRU student to be a newsmaker of your own?
We want to congratulate all of the 2018 newsmakers within our own School. To name a few: students Nicole Johnson and Olga Belikov, who were awarded a Young Scholar Grant from the Ulrich Bernath Foundation for Research in Open and Distance Learning,(Full Story); the 108 SET graduates for 2018; Dr. Frederic Fovet who joined us in December 2018; MAELM China recognized with the Outstanding International Education Program Award (BCCIE); Associate Faculty Yifei Wang received the New Teacher -RRU Kelly Outstanding Teaching Award; and, Dr. Doug Hamilton and Associate Faculty Hong Fu, received the Team Teaching Award – RRU Kelly Outstanding Teaching Awards.
On behalf of the School of Education and Technology I wish you the very best for 2019 – seize every opportunity to build your own good news story for the year!
Dr. Tamara Leary, EdD
Director, School of Education and Technology