Educational Technology Scholar to Give Darden Lecture in Education Nov. 7
October 26, 2012
Yong Zhao, an internationally known scholar, author and speaker whose work focuses on the implications of globalization and technology on education, will give the 2012 Darden Lecture in Education on Nov. 7. The title of his talk is "World Class Learners: Can China's Education System Produce a Steve Jobs?"
Sponsored by Old Dominion's Darden College of Education, the lecture will begin at 7 p.m. in the Big Blue Room of the Ted Constant Convocation Center. It will be preceded by a reception at 5:30. Those planning to attend are asked to RSVP by Nov. 2 to 683-5349 or rsvpdcoe@odu.edu.
Zhao currently serves as the Presidential Chair and associate dean for global education in the College of Education at the University of Oregon, where he is also Weinman Professor of Technology and a professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy and Leadership.
For his ODU lecture, Zhao, will begin with the premise that entrepreneurship drives 21st century economic success and discuss the following:
American educational reform is moving toward more standardization to catch up with China and be more competitive economically.
China's educational reform movement is trying to rework a system that produces high test scores but not the entrepreneurship it covets.
Zhao has designed schools that cultivate global competence, developed computer games for language learning, and founded research and development institutions to explore innovative education models. He has published more than 100 articles and 20 books, including "Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization" and "World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students."
He is a recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association and was named one of this year's 10 most influential people in educational technology by Tech & Learn Magazine. He is an elected Fellow of the International Academy for Education.
Until December 2010, Zhao was University Distinguished Professor in the College of Education at Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute and of the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence.
Zhao was born in China's Sichuan Province. He received a B.A. in English language education from Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages in Chongqing, China, in 1986. After teaching English in China for six years, he came to Linfield College in Oregon as a visiting scholar in 1992. He then began his graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993. He received an A.M. in education in 1994 and Ph.D. in 1996. He joined the faculty at MSU in 1996.