Faculty and Administrator Testimonials
My association with WUN has been invaluable for starting lasting associations with elearning researchers in the US, UK, and Europe, and adding significantly to our understanding of elearning. In 2005-6, the WUN and ESRC supported a series of six workshops on elearning held across the UK.. This series, as well as WUN funded workshops in Orlando and Chicago, and grid-based seminars connecting the University of Illinois to universities in Bristol, York and Leeds, helped establish a network of colleagues actively engaged in researching and implementing online learning. My involvement in these seminars established a working partnership with the lead organizer at York University, Professor Richard Andrews (now at the Institute of Education, University of London).
WUN’s support for seminars and workshops made it possible for us to garner support for a collection of papers – many written by presenters at the elearning seminar series – addressing the state of the art in elearning. In 2007, this collection appeared as the Sage Handbook of E-Learning Research. Looking forward, WUN is an important infrastructure that continues to connect our efforts at UIUC to the wider world of elearning researchers.
Caroline Haythornthwaite
Associate Professor - Graduate School of Library and Information Science
I attended the Chicago and Leeds conferences of the WUN and unfortunately will not be able to attend their conference in China. These were great forums to meet individuals from very different disciplines from across the world and to listen to truly entrepreneurial ideas in a variety of realms. These conferences were intellectually stimulating and a great opportunity for networking with people from across the world from a variety of disciplines. The forums were about the right size and format to allow for productive interactions between participants. Thank you WUN and the wonderful people who put these conferences together!
Madhu Viswanathan
Professor - Business Administration
My association with WUN has been invaluable for starting lasting associations with elearning researchers in the US, UK, and Europe, and adding significantly to our understanding of elearning. In 2005-6, the WUN and ESRC supported a series of six workshops on elearning held across the UK.. This series, as well as WUN funded workshops in Orlando and Chicago, and grid-based seminars connecting the University of Illinois to universities in Bristol, York and Leeds, helped establish a network of colleagues actively engaged in researching and implementing online learning. My involvement in these seminars established a working partnership with the lead organizer at York University, Professor Richard Andrews (now at the Institute of Education, University of London).
WUN’s support for seminars and workshops made it possible for us to garner support for a collection of papers – many written by presenters at the elearning seminar series – addressing the state of the art in elearning. In 2007, this collection appeared as the Sage Handbook of E-Learning Research. Looking forward, WUN is an important infrastructure that continues to connect our efforts at UIUC to the wider world of elearning researchers.
Caroline Haythornthwaite
Associate Professor - Graduate School of Library and Information Science
I attended the Chicago and Leeds conferences of the WUN and unfortunately will not be able to attend their conference in China. These were great forums to meet individuals from very different disciplines from across the world and to listen to truly entrepreneurial ideas in a variety of realms. These conferences were intellectually stimulating and a great opportunity for networking with people from across the world from a variety of disciplines. The forums were about the right size and format to allow for productive interactions between participants. Thank you WUN and the wonderful people who put these conferences together!
Madhu Viswanathan
Professor - Business Administration
As director of the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives (WGGP) Program at UI, I have found WUN very helpful in promoting and extending our work with the Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership (AEL) on social entrepreneurship, gender, and China. In April 2007, WGGP and AEL brought Prof. Wu Qing, an internationally recognized social entrepreneur, politician and activist, from Beijing to campus for a public lecture and small group meetings. She is the first woman recipient (2001) of the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, considered the "Asian Nobel Prize." In addition, she was selected to join the Schwab Foundation network of exemplary social entrepreneurs. To an overflowing audience, she discussed many aspects of her work in China and others countries, including setting up training programs for rural Chinese women and helping groups in other countries set up programs. Prof. Wu describes herself as a verb, always in action.
The joint collaboration of WGGP and AEL with the WUN, stimulated interaction with some of the other member universities to discuss social entrepreneurship in China at Nanjing University and to address global issues at the conference jointly organized by AEL and WUN in Chicago in October 2007. The session on global gender aspects of social entrepreneurship that I shared with Ruth Pearson of Leeds allowed us to explore joint concerns about women’s work in Asia, migration, and remittances. Discussion with others attending the conference has led to new ideas for further work together. The involvement of WUN has encouraged us to start up collaborations and joint research agendas with several international partners that are challenging to keep going without support. Expanding on our work with AEL, WGGP is now building a network with several WUN partners to examine global gender aspects of the sustainable biofuels and food security debate.
Gale Summerfield
Director - Women and Gender in Global Perspectives (WGGP) Program
Attending the WUN conference in Chicago was an important opportunity to gain a global perspective of entrepreneurship, especially social entrepreneurship. I already work with international, multicultural and multilingual aspects of social entrepreneurship in my course on Spanish & Entrepreneurship, but the attendees at the meeting were from all around the globe, thus enriching my viewpoints and the examples that I can use with my students. One attendee from Australia even pointed out that they don't use the word "entrepreneurship" with the same meaning that we do. An attendee from England presented on social entrepreneurship in Asia, and I was able to use the example of Burmese refugee/immigrant workers in Singapore as an example in my own class to emphasize that while we see "the immigration issue" as Latin America immigration to the US, in fact there are global immigration patterns that we need to be aware of. Finally, I even learned a great deal from my own colleagues from UIUC. I especially enjoyed listening to the people involved with the Institute for Genomic Biology explain the genesis and practices of that Institute. Even though I am from the humanities, their example gave me ideas about how to approach collaborations, identify external problems related to one's research field, and build economic sustainability into an intellectual enterprise.
Ann Abbott
Professor - Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
Entrepreneurship is a creative activity that extends across many areas of human endeavor. Both of those aspects were admirably displayed at the WUN Chicago conference that I attended last fall. Projects were presented by scholars with an interest in job training, in economic development, in media and social movements, in literature and culture as well as the traditional new venture creation. Such a disparate group was woven together skillfully by the organizers into a tapestry of approaches, questions, and solutions to pieces of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship. It was a rewarding few days.
Steven Michael
Professor - Business Administration
The WUN support for our project on Language Reform has helped build the international team for the study of prescriptivism in linguistics. Language, like many patterns of social interaction, has both rules and creativity, the restraining influence of social requirements for communication and the innovative actions of the individual agent. In this project we study in a scientific manner one of the types of linguistic behavior most often condemned as unnatural: the prescription of usage by grammarians, teachers and other self-designated experts on language. The WUN allows us to bring together experts from France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, so that we can examine both the nature and the effectiveness of language reform.
Douglas Kibbee
Director, School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics
Acting Director, Center for Translation Studies Acting Director,
Division of English as an International Language
There is a strong record of collaboration between faculty and doctoral students from UIUC and various WUN universities. Since 2002 a steady stream of graduate students from Illinois have gone to the UK and students from the UK have come to work with medievalists at Illinois. The benefits to our students are clear from the reports that they give upon their return.
Over the course of this exchange, research relationships between faculty and students at our institutions have deepened. As a result of discussions during visits and at conferences, Professors Anne D. Hedeman and myself organized a conference, “Collections in Context” at Illinois in 2007, that included WUN affiliated scholars Peter Ainsworth (Sheffield) and Craig Taylor (York) in a session focussed on a magnificent manuscript anthology, the Shrewsbury Book. Thus the WUN exchange has not only resulted in a new research initiative that will develop new e-tools for virtual manuscript study, but will also involve our students in cutting-edge research, enhance the Program’s visibility, and give us the opportunity to generate outside funding.
Karen Fresco
Director
Program in Medieval Studies
I have interacted with the World Universities Network almost from its beginning. I have found the various interactions with other universities through WUN to be definitely worthwhile and rewarding. My most recent interactions have been through the seminar series on global climate change including presenting a seminar myself on aviation and climate change. There have been many excellent seminars in the series, many of them associated with paleoclimate analyses.
My other major interaction with WUN has been as part of a group of U.S. and European scientists aimed at development of a joint research program on studies of the climate and environment of the Arctic. While we unsuccessful in getting this research supported financially, the associated meetings still presented an excellent exchange of science. Recently, I have been developing an interaction with scientists at Leeds University that we hope will lead to research towards developing improved metrics for use in climate policy studies – it is hoped we can develop a student exchange program as part of this research.
Don Wuebbles
Interim Director - Electrical & Computer Engineering
Professor, Atmospheric Sciences
The WUN-Spintronics network has unveiled new opportunities for interaction with European and Chinese colleagues of different expertise but with similar interest as mine in this new field of Applied Physics and Engineering. My direct involvement with WUN-conference organization on spintronics materials and technology has created the conditions for close scientific contact and exchange of ideas at a more personal level than ordinary conferences.
Jean-Pierre Leburton
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Beckman Institute
Member of the Steering Committee, World University Network on Spintronics: Nov 2005 - present
