Committing to the iSchools Project

“You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!” Words from the song Hotel California by the Eagles were tagged as the favorite line the speakers and even the program hosts uttered when they saw the participants’ faces trying to grasp the topics of the commitment setting and planning workshop for iSchools writers conducted at UP Hotel last month.

The SUC iSchools writers from LUZVIMIN were aspired to fulfill the training objectives that will make it easy for them to prepare for the activities of the year. Strategize and schedule major activities of the content development components of the ischools project, and how knowledge management and development concepts and principles can be applied. Other objectives they aimed to fulfill were on how to obtain SUC writers’ commitment to meeting the objectives and how to facilitate the drafting of SUC specific communication plan.

Knowledge management basics, framework, tools & techniques were well discussed by the human resource expert Joseph Torrecampo. His discussions focused on the purpose of KM to capture knowledge, gain new skills in writing and to generate knowledge not only through the writer’s outputs but through the sharing of such outputs among their group. Sharing of knowledge led to the writers’ professional development while working on the iSchools project and their own professions. Another point is to value the writers’ practice and outputs not just as tasks to be done, and deadlines to be met, but as writing for higher purpose– writing from a shared knowledge towards productive, measurable output. Knowledge to be gained and expressed through writing should not be seen as benefiting oneself only, but should grow to benefit peers and students, and ultimately, it means writing with the aim of being contributory to the nation’s development.

Developing media relations was dynamically and effectively delivered by journalist Jose Torres Jr. The key points were given profound attention associated with the rules of media relation objectives.

Drafting and presentation of individual and cluster communication plan were the required outputs. These plans were presented and reviewed by the resource persons and the participants as well. At first, some participants were doubtful as to where they would start working as writers particularly the freebies. “We were hold-out!” one participant humorously said, because she was not supposed to be sent in the training. She was just told to take the online exam and unexpectedly find herself traveling going to the commitment setting and planning workshop. However, with the speakers’ knowledge to persuade and their ability to let other people understand the complexity of some topics, participants lucidly recognize the role of SUC iSchools writers.
These writers can always go anywhere, can work on anything and since they were sent to be the iSchools writers, they can never ever leave especially when they started to feel and ready to shout out that they were committed to do their tasks as writers.

Written by Ms. Jenniffer Sabugaa