Published Friday, March 23,
2001
Joint Forestry-UN course spans
globe
BY JANINE HUM
Contributing Reporter
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article | | | | A new Forestry School course is harnessing the power
of the Internet to share ideas about economic development with
students around the world.
The United Nations Development
Program and the Forestry School have joined forces this semester in
a high-tech course that collects, analyzes and shares methods for
using public-private partnerships to improve the delivery of water,
waste and energy services in developing countries. Most of the work
has been funded by the U.N. development program as part of its
effort to implement public-private partnerships in its client
countries.
Modern technology has made possible this
one-semester, 13-session course that encompasses 15-21 institutions
around the world, located in nations that receive funding from the
United Nations Development Program. These institutions are located
in countries such as Costa Rica, China, India, the Philippines,
Ukraine and Nepal, to name a few.
Bradford Gentry, who
co-teaches the course at Yale with John Gordon, said he believes a
number of universities in Africa have also joined but has not yet
determined the exact figure because of problems with e-mail
communications.
"Internet activity here, because of the
downloading issues, have not been so much to transmit all the
materials over the Internet but to make use of e-mails to
communicate more directly," Gentry said.
The Yale class
sessions are not recorded, but each week a student posts a summary
of the class' session to the Web page. Gentry sends his lecture
notes and charts to the instructors of the classes at the
participating schools. Each of the institutions has access to the
reading materials, and teachers and students at the participating
schools communicate over listservs.
The course was designed
not to have a strict hierarchy of schools, Gentry said.
"The
theory here is not to have a pyramid where Yale's at the top and
everybody else is salaaming," Gentry said. "Rather, we are giving
other institutions a way to think about these issues. They can use
our materials or they can plug in examples of partnerships that fit
their local circumstances better."
Gentry said he wanted his
students to have a breadth across countries, regions and
disciplines. Kim Thurlow FOR '02 is one of 13 students taking the
class who were chosen for their cultural and educational diversity
from an applicant pool twice as large.
"It's been
interesting to get other students' perspectives from other
countries," Thurlow said. "You're getting different cultural
perspectives as well as different technical
perspectives."
Students in the class come from or are
familiar with India, Chile, Ukraine, Britain, Ghana, China, Germany,
Trinidad, Somalia and Ethiopia. Their diversity enables them to
communicate effectively with students in participating countries
throughout the world, both Thurlow and Gentry said.
"The
class that's here is quite intentionally multinational," Gentry
said. "We need to make sure that the class is useful to the UNDP, so
I've got a mix of students who have a lot of relevant experience and
students who have none."
Although English is the working
language of the UNDP, the class at Yale is acutely aware of the
translation issues, and is trying to find ways to overcome the
language barrier.
"What we're doing sort of parallels the
difficulties the UNDP has with 140 offices around the world," Gentry
said.
Yale offered the course two years ago in order to test
the course materials. Participating institutions in the trial run
included the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and the
Center for Environmentally Sustainable Technology Transfer in
China.
Encouraged by the trial, the UNDP got some new money,
Yale made some adjustments to the course, and in January of this
year the current program started at Yale.
"This course is
very much a work in progress," Gentry said.
Copyright © 2001 Yale Daily News.
All rights reserved.
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