Joseph KK Ho's work diary

This episode happened around 1992. I was teaching students sitting for the exam of Institute of Administrative Management . Most of the students were secretaries. At that time, I was a quite popular teacher. Just as I was walking around the classroom while delivering my lecture, one student offered me a piece of chocolate. So, I took it. On seeing that, other students followed suit and started to offer me biscuits and peanuts. Suddenly, I found myself busy collecting snacks from the class, like a chimpanzee, though a happy one for that. Out of clumsiness, I dropped one of the snacks on the floor; on seeing that, one of the students wanted to pick it up for me but also carelessly dropped her set of notes onto the floor. My prompt response was to bend down so as to pick up the notes now scattered on the floor for the student. At this point, I noticed that most of the students were wearing skirts that were  not long...

I can see it in facebook: my friends and students are posting new year wishes for 2012. Some are frank enough to admit not having mood to work at offices right now. New Year wishes are mainly about happiness, world peace, success in career and study, and good health, etc. I would like to add that: Let's be able to make wise decisions on what to do in 2012 so that by 2022 and 2032, we will have said that we have made the right decisions and worked on the right ventures in 2012.

These days, quite a number of student treat final year dissertations as assignments; often, students said they had only 4 weeks to do a 4-month final year project (on a part-time basis). The project experience of students has often been described as stressful. There are many other problems of dissertation projects, notably the problem of plagiarism and the problem of English writing skills. Quite a number of Master Degree students also mentioned difficulties to read academic articles. Some of them reported that they could only read 1 academic article each week.. (and I could tell that they did not quite understand what the article said still.) Back in 1986 when I was a student doing my final year project at the University of Hull for my Master Degree (Management Systems), I had a different experience. My supervisor, Mike , brought me to a company in Hull, and I was introduced to the Managing Director of a company in Hull. For around 2 weeks, I was authorized to interview the managers

I am so happy today to have received a bag of gifts from a student. The most important point is, all the gift items, I can see, have been carefully chosen. The following is the gift card in the bag: Initially, I thought the student was passing an applicaion form to act as her academic referee (for further study purpose) or I thought it could be a thank-you card. As a teacher, to become a popular teacher is not my life-goal at all. Probably, the best way to describe my teaching activity is to try to deliver inspiring lectures to entertain my students and myself. If the students (or some of them) are not interested in learning at all, I am equally happy because I can still entertain myself via teaching. Most often, there are some students who are interested in my lectures; and I am very happy with that too. There is a motto in a movie recently from Taiwan, "to make a difference to the world, because of me". I can endorse this too via teaching, among other activities.

Having ordered Harvard Business Review  (HBR)for 2 years. I have not got time to browse through the articles; this I should be able to do during the new year. One of the problems now with this journal is that the journal is a bit too heavy to carry around when doing all the travelling to and from schools. And then, I do not have the pdf version of the journal so I will not be able to read it with my e-book. Finally, I do not carry my ebook with me when travelling because of my clumsiness. Mainly for these reasons, I now have a big pile of the journals in my bookself. Now is the time to give a fair hearing to what the HBR contributors have said over the last two years. Probably, I can browse through the all the stuff in 2 days.

I am so excited by the contemporary digital social media environment; I can foresee more exploration effort to learn how to conduct my work and professional development in such an environment. At present, I have adopted three tools: the linkedin platform: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/joseph-ho/31/2a6/274 . This platform I am not familiar with still; the facebook platform: https://www.facebook.com/#!/josephho33 . This one I think I am getting quite used to it by now. The third one is this blog http://josephho33.blogspot.com/ . It is also a new experience for me to do blogging.  I can imagine 2008 will be a year of exploration of this digital social media environment (or ecosystem). There must be some relationships among these three platforms. At the same time, I need to do more readings with e-books, with using e-library. And then, I just got rid of my mobile phone and need to learn this device called smartphone. I am not a fan with these technical stuff and gadgets and I am quite susp

First of all, during the new year, I need to get rid of the huge pile of paper documents in my study room; I am now getting used to using my kindle e-reader to browse academic journals. Due to the huge explosion of academic literatures in business and social sciences, I decide to use a chaotic approach to study, that is doing reading without any order or sequence... just keep reading and reflecting on the ideas.. it is so entertaining and stimulating to do so. Below was a photo taken during a tour to China some time ago: Over the last few weeks, I have done some organization of the various academic journals I came across and have compiled lists on them by subjects. I feel I have a basic grasp of the academic landscape and the magnitude of intellectual challenges ahead.

After reading all those dissertation reports, I now have time to do some reading on academic journal articles during the Christmas and New Year holidays. Start to use the blog as a tool on work reflection.