OST - Post Melbourne

[Artur Ferreira da Silva]

Dear Janet:

Thank you very much for your marvelous story.

I will make here some comments and put some questions that I think can be
of interest to the all group. And maybe we can afterwords discuss through
private mail other details that probably are not so interesting to the all
group.

First I have conducted during 3 years (from 1996 to 1999) a somewhat
similar experience. I was teaching a 2 Semestre course on Management to
Informatics Enginnering students at the Universityof Coimbra. I have not
formerly used OST (as I didn't even had heard about OST when the experience
began), but I think that many OST concepts where present in the experience.

I later wrote a paper in English to an International Congress... In
retropect I have framed my previous experience based on a lot of models -
OST, Communities of Practice, Schon's Reflective Practice and Learning
Organizations (de Geus' and not Senge's views). The paper is called
"Teaching Managemnnet to Engineering Sudies - Acting as a Learning
Organization". I will send this paper to you by separate mail (and if there
are others that what to receive it, please ask).

The interesting point is that, in trying to understand "methods" and
"theories" that could be used to explain the experience I was conducting, I
came to discover OST and through readind Harrison's book and lurking on
this list, I concluded that OST was the most close model to explain what I
was already doing.

And when I have discovered that Harrison decided not to copyright or
trademark the method (which would include, by the way, any subsequente
"derivative methods"), because he thinks that it belongs to all humanity
and anyone that has "a good mind and a good heart" can use it, without the
need to be "certified" by him (or any other person), this ressonated
tremendously with me - as I was already using part of it, without even
knowing it existed ;-)

And that is the reason why I have decided to confirm if all this was true
by going to OSonOS in Berlin, in 2000. And, like in your case, my
experience of participating in OSonOS transformed a lot of my personal and
professional experiences after that.

Now some questions about your experience that I think can be of general
interest:

At 07:23 23-08-2003 +0530, Janet Pinto wrote:

>I teach a 2- semester Course in Organization Behavior at a Management
>Institute in Mumbai.

If I understood well you later described only one semestre. Is this true?
If yes, what have you done (or plan to do) in the second one?

>The class, consisting of 50 students, includes classroom lectures and
>Group Projects that involve a study of practices in business Organizations.

These Goup Projects are mainly research-and-lerning Projects or do they
include "real" organizational work (like organizing events, to give an
example)?

Thanks and congratulations, Janet

Artur

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