Weaving a web of education
Posted on | January 22, 2010 | No Comments
In his New Year’s message, inaugurating 2010 as the Year of the Seafarer, Admiral Efthimios Mitropoulos, Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), identified three goals for the year:
1. Increased awareness among the general public of the indispensable services seafarers render to civil society at large;
2. A clear message to seafarers that we recognise and appreciate their services; that we do care about them; and that we do all that we can to look after and protect them when the circumstances of their life at sea so warrant; and
3. Redoubled efforts at the regulatory level to move from words to deeds to create a better world in which seafarers can operate.
There are specific ways, of course, in which the maritime industry, particularly the private sector, can link hands with the seafarers of the world. One of these is the internet. Another is the substantial training and teaching infrastructure that has grown up around shipping, and which exists in countries throughout the world.
Collaboration is one of the most important challenges that the industry faces in implementing the three basic points made by Secretary-General Mitropoulos. Education is the way to meet it.
With interactive technologies, a platform exists for the sharing of information. The web now allows people to see what others are doing, to communicate information, brag about their successes, and to have their work talked about by people they have never met. Seafarers can develop mutual understanding and respect that is frankly irrespective of their organizational ranking. By this means, as one master mariner pointed out, we can now establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment. We can also build on already growing teaching framework. And, we can give seafarers the respect and, above all, the RESPONSE they deserve.
What does the shipping industry get out of all of this? Simply put, an opportunity to learn what the “practitioners” are thinking. An e-bulletin board for actively sailing mariners, worldwide, linked to professional and maritime academy websites, organized by topic, can be immensely valuable to the framers of the revised STCW Convention. It is also a mind-boggling recruitment tool, acquainting school children with what a career at sea is all about. Seafarers can talk to us ashore, and we to them. Young people can talk to educators about careers, and we can reach out to them as well.
Such a “bulletin board” will contain links to maritime-related blogs, including this one. It would also be linked to maritime professional education and training offerings, both online and on-site.
For pre-cadets below the age of 18, there can be links to middle and high school programmes, which would offer great assistance to those educators tasked with developing pre-academy study regimes, aimed at preparing their students for admittance and success at maritime colleges and academies around the world.
This will, it is felt, prove to be a highly valuable access method in introducing young people to the availability of credit-bearing pre-academy courses at nominal cost, which could be certified by such maritime academies.
One of the most important factors would be the relatively nominal cost of such pre-college offerings, in basic proficiency studies. These are already beginning to be seen in the United States, at the Harbour School level, offering “approved” courses to prospective mariners at the pre-17-year-old school level. An offering of off-site courses would serve as an introduction to the young aspirant seafarer in the form of a training facility, online and at schools, in applied science in marine technology, small vessel operations (deck and engine) and leadership and ethics programmes.
All of this comes under the heading of raising the profile of maritime education and training, and making the industry, and what it does, a better-known quantity to young people around the world.
Particularly, a coherent information platform, built about one or more e-bulletin boards, would enable maritime academies in the developed world to partner with emerging maritime academies of the type now being built in, for example, the United Arab Emirates.
Governments, companies and the International Maritime Organization can do a great deal to help expand model courses and maritime education and training, particularly by supporting these training and teaching programmes for younger students around the world. The web makes this possible for the first time. Obviously, the industry has much to gain; not least, the ability to identify and encourage hundreds of thousands of young people who are interested in careers at sea.
We spend a great deal of time bewailing the risks and dysfunctions of the modern sailing era, but we have the opportunity to do something positive, add force to the IMO’s “Go to Sea!” campaign, and demonstrate to the public that jobs at sea and ashore are creative, meaningful, and worthwhile.
This blog will make its own modest contribution, by discussing, over the next 11 months, how interactive networking and the resources of the academic community will lead to better and more focussed feedback from those who work afloat, and to them as well.
Our industry leaders, if such they are, will be better educated as well: they will become acquainted with words like “donor” or “charity.”
It could happen.
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