New Team Member - Luke Hutchison

I am glad to have the opportunity to present the latest addition to our team. As mentioned, we hope to deliver our programs by centering it on OCW materials. Luke Hutchison is a great addition to our team and will help lead our efforts in this area. A very talented person, Luke hails from New Zealand, speaks Korean fluently and studies Computer Science and Computational Biology as a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Its only fitting that we have someone from the source of OCW to lead our work in this area!

Luke Hutchison grew up in New Zealand and is currently completing a PhD in computer science and computational biology at MIT in collaboration with Harvard Medical School. He is conducting research into cell division and tissue differentiation in C. elegans. He speaks both Korean and Chinese and has traveled within both North Korea and China to better understand the North Korean way of thinking and to gain insights into North Korea's relationship with China. He has been interested in helping improve the lives of North Korean citizens for over a decade, and is excited at the possibilities that Choson Exchange presents for improving the quality of education in NK and for promoting international goodwill.

Delivering Low-Cost Education Through OpenCourseWare

Our strategy is to incorporate a higher level of technology into our training model. A big development in higher education is a move towards OpenCourseWare - lecturers put videos, syllabus and notes online for anyone else to peruse. Yale and MIT have been big proponents of this.

Most of our costs come from flying in suitable lecturers from their home countries to Beijing. It would save us a lot of costs if we can pipe in lectures on certain topics, chosen by our lecturers, and have the lecturers come in at various points to discuss the materials, answer questions and interact with students. Since language will be an issue, we can also provide language assistance on-site for students trying to understand OCW materials. At the end of the course, we can use exams to screen students for future support.

This is something which we can design our current programs around. Kim Il Sung University has a new computer center and this could be a possible home to such an idea.

New Additions to Training Team and Our HR Manager

When Choson Exchange first began, it was small enough that I had the luxury to interview everyone who wanted to be involved and get to know them at a personal level: their aspirations, motivations and personality. However, as interest have grown, I find it harder to keep track of everyone's needs and whether we are helping them meet their goals just as they are helping Choson Exchange meet its mission. Hence, we brought on Soojin, who will be our Human Resource manager. She will be in charge of recruiting, tracking everyone's efforts and seeing how we can help them develop. Soojin will graduate from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School with a dual degree in International Studies and Economics this summer. She is a great addition not just because of her deep interest in North Korean issues, but also because she speaks Korean and Chinese and lived in China. This will allow her to coordinate our efforts to involve more trainers from the US and China.

I still try to take time to interview everyone interested in joining our team. The requests have been piling up and last week, I interviewed four more potential lecturers. We would like to welcome A.E. and Dominic Soon who will contribute their valuable experiences in our upcoming training session in Pyongyang this September. They bring exciting experiences to our team. A.E. has close to a decade of experience in the private sector as a commercial banker. A.E. also brings with him a wealth of experience from working in Latin American, Southern China, Taiwan and the USA. A graduate of Oxford's Politics, Philosophy and Economics program, A.E. was highly involved in his university's Asian Societies. Several years ago, A.E. visited Pyongyang and a highlight of his time there was the opportunity to join a picnic with Kim Il Sung University students to talk about their aspirations and interests.

Dominic is an economist in Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry and a recipient of the Singaporean public service scholarship. As part of a team that recently studied how Singapore's economic strategy should change, he can contribute valuable experience on designing an economic restructuring process as a means of attracting foreign investment. Dominic graduated from Cambridge University and received his Masters at Yale University.

I hope that their valuable time and experiences will leave an impression among the North Korean professors and executives we will train this September. Through expanding our training team, we hope to introduce more dialogue-driven sessions that will enable us to have a more dynamic discussion with participants.

Sponsoring Our Work

In order to ensure that our programs have an impact, we wish to ensure that lecturers receive some funding in the future. If we lose lecturers year after year because of the expense of flying to Beijing and then into Pyongyang, we lose a lot of experience built up from interacting with the North Koreans. Without this experience, we cannot deliver training materials in a relevant and effective manner. If you know people who would be interested in sponsoring our work whether in providing financial contributions or in providing overseas training programs, academic programs or internships to North Koreans, do send them this guide.

Meeting at the United Nations & Bridging the Knowledge Gap

I met with some very helpful people at the UN last week. Being well-versed in the European experience of dialogue with transitional economies, they pointed out one problem we face in building an effective training program. If we think of knowledge as standing on the shoulders of giants, there are building blocks of knowledge that has to be in place in order for advanced training in economics to be delivered. And this knowledge is also dependent on context - how do we transmit theories from one system to a vastly different economic and political system in a convincing fashion? We believe that our recent additions to our team goes some way towards helping us address this issue. Ruediger Frank is an experienced lecturer in Pyongyang. However, in the longer-term, the only real way we can tackle this is challenge is to devote resources to studying what they know about economics and to have lecturers who return frequently to build up relationships and in-depth understanding of their trainees. To do so, we need to meet fundraising goals in order to ensure that the travel costs do not impose too much of a burden on our trainers.

One of the UN staff we met also suggested international internships as a possible program for North Koreans. Not only do we meet our objectives of providing international experiences and learning, we can also obtain corporate sponsorship for this. I know this has been done before under other arrangements and hence is feasible. If you know any company willing to sponsor such a learning opportunity, do contact us at CEteam@chosonexchange.org.

New CE Advisor - Ruediger Frank

I am glad to welcome a new advisor, Prof. Ruediger Frank, to Choson Exchange. Ruediger brings with him a wealth of experience teaching economics in North Korea and will advise us on designing our training materials for relevancy and effectiveness. It is a double-blessing since Ruediger is not only experienced in this area, but served as an inspiration to this project. I still remember my first semester as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Ruediger was giving a lecture about changes in the North Korean economy as well as his interactions with North Koreans he had trained in Pyongyang. "Experts" on North Korea who impresses me most are the ones who not only talk about what they know (or think they know), but are willing to concede what they do not know and couch their analysis in these terms. Professor Frank was such a person. I have attached his bio below. Do check out his webpage too.

Professor of East Asian Economy and Society at the East Asian Institute of the University of Vienna, Austria. M.A. in Korean Studies, Economics and International Relations, PhD in Economics. Teaching and research on East Asia's Economy and Politics with a focus on North and South Korea. Previous positions include Mercator-Universität Duisburg; Humboldt-Universität Berlin; Columbia-University New York; Korea University Seoul. Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Korea University Seoul and at the University of North Korean Studies (Kyungnam University); Research Affiliate of the Modern East Asia Research Centre of Leiden University. Since July 2007 Director of the Vienna School of Governance. Co-editor ofKorea: Politics, Economy and Society (yearly) and of the European Journal of East Asian Studies.

New Courses at Kim Il Sung University & Sungkyunkwan University

According to the Russians in Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung University will be adding the following programs: programming, dialectology (I think this is the study of dialects - I had to look this up myself), semantics and law.

Programming is unsurprising, given the emphasis on IT training in North Korean propaganda. I don't know what to say about the other fields though. One conscious decision we took when we set up Choson Exchange was to avoid the IT field. On one hand, there are many people involved in this area and who do a good job and are definitely able to do a much better job than us. On the other hand, IT training does not fit well with our mandate or the academic fields our teammates would like to share.

That said, the North Korean interest in IT seems to have roots that go very far back. When I was in Seoul in 2005, a friend at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) told me that they had a sister relationship with a North Korean university of the same name and heritage. I laughed it off then. I visited SKKU in North Korea in 2007 and it turns out that SKKU lecturers had given talks on IT in North Korea in 2002 - they had signed an academic exchange agreement in 1998.

Visit to the Paektusan Academy of Architecture

Part of the upcoming trip in September will include a visit to the Paektusan Academy of Architecture where our architectural coordinator, Calvin Chua will be holding a discussion on recent and future architectural and urban development in Pyongyang and strategies in efficient spatial organization within the city. The Paektusan Academy of Architecture is the center for architectural research in Pyongyang where architects engage in designing buildings of national importance, such as the Yanggakdo International Hotel and the Central TV Broadcasting Hall, etc. The academy is currently involved in several sustainable construction initiatives which include the building of 50 new dwelling for a self-sustaining community at Osan-Ri in collaboration with The Fuller Center for Housing; and the recently concluded conference on “Aspects of Sustainable City Development”, jointly organized by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and the Workers’ Party of DPRK.

Global Korea Roundtable: Mapping North Korea

Curtis Melvin, an advisor to Choson Exchange, will speak at the Korea Society this week on his North Korea mapping project. For those of you in New York City, feel free to attend the session.

In this talk, Melvin will demonstrate the latest version of his mapping project and discuss the untapped opportunities that mapping offers in the study of North Korea.

Thursday, April 8, 2010 5:45 PM Check-In (pre-registration required) 6:00 PM Program

The Korea Society 950 Third Avenue @ 57th Street, 8th Floor (Building entrance on SW corner of Third Avenue and 57th Street)

Call for Speakers - International Financial Institutions

We are in the midst of putting together our complete roster of speakers and topics for this year's training session in Pyongyang, which is likely to be hosted at Kim Il Sung University. Our chosen topics are based partly on the survey we asked our counterparts to conduct, what we see as relevant to their economy and what we are able to deliver in a high quality manner. We do not cover all the topics they suggest to us. One of the topics we wish to include is a look at the role of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund or Asian Development Bank in supporting the financial sector, and more broadly economic development. This is to introduce IFIs to North Koreans who might not be entirely familiar with the work of these organizations.

As such, we are looking for speakers who are familiar with these institutions and will be able to speak persuasively about the merits of working with the IFIs. If you know anyone with such a background, do drop us a note at CEteam@chosonexchange.org.