subject: Back to college for personal development [print this page] I was born in the Ivory CoastI was born in the Ivory Coast. I successively had academic, professional and cultural trainings after having succeeded in the French baccalaureate examination many years ago. Those trainings made me go back to college in most of the cases and they totally changed the nave young student with a general background that I was into a gentleman well-educated and firmly turned towards texts, documents or books, and their contents.
As a librarian and archivist, also as a part-time freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer - I am also a part-time consultant who has already worked for national and international organizations, especially UNICEF and the National Program on AIDS in the Ivory Coast - I am used to analysing and writing texts. Actually, these occupations, taken individually, are activities that generate texts to be handled or to be understood and managed, or else to be explained.
As a librarian and archivist, I am fully committed to the preservation of books and/or files comprising various and diversified lines of texts in English, in French, in Spanish, in Arabic, in Germany...
As a freelance journalist - I started out as one of the editors of the internal newspaper of the Abidjan Port Authority, and then I became a part-time freelance journalist - I need to be provided with information that is textual most of the time. According to the availability of the said information and the subject that motivated the article, I can be annoyed or troubled for the barrier of the language in which the texts provided are written.
As a lecturer, I have the duty to do researches and then get my lectures ready. Doing researches supposes that many texts and other sorts of sources, not only in French, are used.
Therefore, I became aware of the need and the necessity to learn and master other languages than French. In that way, my professional activities would be easier to accomplish. That is why I studied Spanish and English. Spanish is a language that I found easy when I learnt it for a time at grammar school. I liked the way it is spoken and I decided, since then, to go one day to Cervantes's motherland to read, speak and write fluently that language. The dream became reality in 2001. I went to the University of Alcala de Henares - Madrid - for three weeks intensive courses.
If French is my native language and Spanish my favorite, English is what I really studied sparingly. I got a bachelor degree in English at the University of Abidjan-Cocody, and I continued with a Freelance Journalism course at the London School of Journalism, which is a distance learning college. I also had the chance to improve my English with an anthropologist who taught for the British Council in Abidjan. Then, I went to Accra for intensive courses in English at the Ghana Institute of Languages. Afterwards, I registered at the University of South Africa commonly called UNISA for postgraduate studies. Within the framework of my studies at UNISA, I have to write a dissertation that will lead to a thesis.
The University of South Africa or UNISA, which had opened its doors for more than 50 years, is one of the most important distance education universities in the world. It has its campus in Pretoria and centres throughout South Africa. This institution has registered some 135,000 students, in major part coming from Southern Africa where UNISA is considered as the largest university. It offers internationally recognised certificate, diploma and degree courses up to doctoral level.
I sometimes look at the mirror and the reflect that I see and I like the image - is a maritime executive appointed to documentation and communication, and a student of communication, also a part-time communication lecturer, deeply interested in communication technology which, I think, is undergoing quite a boom thanks to distance learning.
In fact, I am fascinated by educational media, communication and teaching, as a part-time lecturer and also as a student, because of distance learning in its conceptualization and, above all, the technology that goes with it. I learnt by teaching experience that teaching is a communicative activity, "any act by which information is given to someone so as to educate him." As a former correspondent student at the London School of Journalism - now registered at UNISA - I have experienced the impact of communication technology deployed between the teacher and the distant learner. Because of the electronic and other media forms used in this process, the distant learner appears not to be directly "touched" by the teacher. Distance learning, even in tertiary education, takes place when a lecturer and students are separated by physical distance, and technology, often in concert with face-to-face communication, is used to bridge the gap. In other words, distance education is an educational process wherein knowledge is delivered to students not on the campuses, but directly to their homes or places of residence, this process wherein courses are provided to the learners by the trainers using electronic or other media forms.
Reasons such as the progress of information and communication technology, in general, and the Internet, in particular, explain how much media and educational communication in distance learning can be relevant to all communication professionals such as journalists, teachers, and executives, interested in continuing their studies without leaving their homes. Everyone will see that by allowing worldwide access to large amounts of relevant information, computers and the Internet diminish research costs and compensate for the shortage of books and scientific journals that often plagues university libraries. Computers send and receive information electronically in distance learning. That is why the term "data" is used to describe the broad category of instructional tools.
My aim now is to get the PhD in educational communication and become a full-time lecturer, and then contribute to adults' education when they go back to college.
