Japan ICT Sessions

THIS comes as a rather late entry from me. I must have put this together earlier.

In the month of March, I got an opportunity to visit Japan as a part of Kaizen Study Tour for the year 2009, under the guidance of Dr. Shrinivas Gondhalekar (or Dr. G as we all call him, Founder / Expert at  KANZEN institute Asia Pacific ) and Dean (Operations) @ Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research, where I am currently pursuing my Post Graduate Diploma in Management.

This trip is a part of one the initiatives taken up by Dr. G to promote and enhance relations with Japan and make us aware of the Japanese way of living and working.

I had always been fascinated by the way japan has developed over the years after 2nd world war post which the japanese morale had been destroyed completely. Everyone knows about Hiroshima and nagasaki attacks. With my current post graduation, learning Japanese language (Nihon-go) not only as a part of curriculum but also a part of the relationship development.
Utilising ICT to have carefully charted out chat sessions with the students from Keio University in Tokyo is also a plan of this. We used to have weekly chat sessions with japanese students in groups, which focussed on specific subjects and engaged in constructive chat with a lot of information exchange. These used to happen on thursdays morning 8 AM.
A multitude of subjects like Education in Japan and India, World of mathematics, Beauty of two countries etc.
Pre-relationship building happened during  these chat sessions.
Prof Hasebe from Keio had facilitated these sessions.

These kind of sessions help in nurturing the following objectives:
Developing trust amongst the Japanese students and professors
Understand a bit about Japanese culture
Assess the level of english as a language in japan.

These sessions ran for a period of two months, each of which was followed by feedback to be submitted on the Keio blog.

Th students we interacted in these sessions were the same ones we would be meeting in our trip to Japan