Eric's Beijing Diary

As I mentioned last Friday, I have obtained a position at a Chinese university. I am awaiting the final paperwork for my visa, so that I can go to Beijing in January. The college where I will be teaching is part of the new “software colleges” initiative by the Beijing government. As such, the college where I will be teaching is new, even though the university it is part of has been around since the early fifties.

I currently teach Information Systems at a small, private university here in Tempe. When I came to this university almost four years ago, I was a Microsoft specialist. But I have slowly been making a shift to the Oracle database system. Of course, I am still very interested Windows as a server platform, because it is much easier as a training platform. But when it comes to the systems that ride on that platform, I have narrowed my focus almost exclusively to Oracle. My objective in China, is to develop curricula which will facilitate the teaching of complex systems in English, to students who are not native speakers of English.