Networking Thursdays - Volume 1

This story is from Julia Polshina, an associate professor at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia.

While attending a professional development event hosted by FEELTA (Far Eastern English Language Teachers Association), I heard about the chance to participate in Michael Kraus' online course on Web 2.0 tools. That experience got me to an EFL conference in Kazan because the online course was sponsored by the US Embassy and they wanted to show other EFL professionals how great that experience was for the participants, so they sponsored our trip to Kazan and asked us to present there, which we gladly did.  There, my friend and I met a professor from Saransk who attended our talks and liked the way we presented. We exchanged emails, and two years later she invited us to participate in a TEMPUS project on Language Testing and Assessment (T&A). Eventually, we won that TEMPUS grant and went to Great Britain to study T&A. There we made friends with professors from a lot of Russian universities, and met several internationally acknowledged experts in the field. A year ago, I was in UC Boulder writing a dictionary of testing and assessment terms, because of the contacts I made.  One things leads to another.


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