Saturday, May 27, 2006

IT education in Russia conference

Thanks to Andrey Filev (Murano Software) early awareness I submitted thesis on AHE to 'IT education in Russia' conference. 2006 is the fourth year of this conference. The event is organized by Russian association of IT business (APKIT) and supported by such companies as Intel, Microsoft, IBM, 1C etc.

Program committee accepted my work while my employer’s marketing department allowed me to participate under company's name and said they will compensate costs.

The conference took place near Sergiev Pasad - a town about 30 km from Moscow. The trip there began with meeting Ivan Grigoriev - vice-dean of physics dept at St. Petersburg State University. While on the road I talked a lot to Anrey Ivanitsky head of SW development at NAUMEN - one of the interesting IT companies in Russia (at least on my list - I trace their activities for a couple of years already).

The opening part of the conference was attended by Oleg Byakhov, director of the department for the strategy of building information society of Russia's Ministry of Information Technologies. And hmm... He is the second person of state representatives that makes positive impression on me (among those I saw directly without TV or whatever).

Stop here. The continuation will come sooner or later.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Mentoring Worldwide

One another internet-inspired educational activity!
In brief: Mentoring Worldwide is forming out of a group of people who want to
make a difference. 350 people signed a pledge to mentor people in
the developing world for free using internet technologies to communicate.

Here is the blog: http://mentoringworldwide.org/blog to tell the story of the project. It's started by Lucy Hooberman, she is at the BBC in New Media Innovation in London, but this is her free-time activity.

By the way. Thanks to this blog I've found CooperationCommons - a new project by Institute for the Future and Howard Rheingold.

Monday, May 22, 2006

Real example from advertising business

"Fresh Blood" is a competition organized to find new creative people (mainly students, but the limits are not too strong) for advertising business. The essence of the competition are real world tasks from real-world companies (well-known companies) and judgement by by prominent experts. The best works are published at the web-site, winners are honored there as well.

Quatation:
Every 90 days you will find a new brief on our website www.freshblood.ru (with product description, objective, advertising
strategy, target audience and executional mandatories) from a top
advertiser for existing brand.
Participants are to submit their works
within 90-days, and then the jury
will choose one or several winners.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

German Initiative D21 (their experince)

I contacted the German Initiative D21, a public private partnership for the information society, and have received a very positive responce from Katharina Ahrens (who is Head of Press and Public Relations of the Initiative) with useful comments and additional info, which I'd like to quote below:
The overall idea to combine partners from business and science to inform
students on future skills and to offer project work/training to them is
excellent.

However, the experience at D21 shows, that there is no
such thing as a “Self-Organizing” project.
You always need a few leading companies, that are interested in the project, commit themselves and are willing to finance.
Also, you need someone who coordinates the project, communicates
internally with all stakeholders, does the necessary research
and continually communicates externally with your target groups.

For your Education Environment Project, I’d say, you’ll need:
  • two or three leading IT-companies who have an interest in the CIS development (finance, project ideas),
  • a couple of local companies (i.e. from the university cities, that you may find most attractive)
  • a consulting company (organisation, including internal communication, research studies and PR),
  • a market reasearcher (to conduct an annual survey on the skills companies expect from students),
  • some universities (partners)
  • some political partners (local, regional and/or national/ promote the idea and help to spread the idea)

    Furthermore, it is essential that you define your focus area – do you want to reach “all” students or just students in a particular field (i.e. IT & Telecommunications)?

    Additionally, it might be furthering your project, if you organize it as a non-profit project. This is important for image reasons and will help you a lot to convince partners from the public sphere.

    Concerning a roll-out: The D21 experience shows, that it is
    helpful to start at a local/regional level and then spread the idea from there.
    There might be a high-tech area in the CIS where you find the top
    universities and successful local companies.

    There is a similar project in Germany, called E-Fellows. http://www.e-fellows.net/ It is an online-platform that was founded by three leading companies and it’s aim is to bring students together with companies.
    They do various training events, have a constant e-mail communication, comment on students’ cvs, publish job offers, help students to find partners or even placements in companies or other universities, etc. You may find some expert to talk to there (D21 is not involved in this project).