May 30, 2011
Gone Fishing
filed in:
Life
We had an Asia Pacific Oracle Education Initiatives staff gathering in May 17-19, 2011, held in Singapore. It was my first time in this kind of meeting, because I'm normally in the back seat. This meeting was more for the "marketing" staff. I put an apostrophe because what we are "selling" isn't entirely about having monetary revenues.
I've been working for Oracle Education Foundation for three years, it's a wing of the whole Oracle Education Initiatives, a part of corporate citizenship programs by Oracle. We develop ThinkQuest as a free on-demand application for teachers & students to use to evangelise and facilitate project learning in the classrooms. This session in Singapore was an evaluation and a projection on next year's mission. I can say we had a generally successful year.
So, back to the fun.
I've been to Singapore numerous times before, but only for personal reasons, so this time was different. It's definitely the first time I went to such event after three years in Jakarta office, meeting staff from the Japan & Asia Pacific region and having a memorable team-building session.
It's also the second time I met Galvin Sng, a long-time ThinkQuest winner, which I am a pretty big fan of!
The first evening we also had a team-building session at a Clarke Quay establishment called The Coriander Leaf. I thought we were just going to have dinner. I was wrong. We had to cook our own dinner!
The next day involved an all-day meeting, concluded with a short night out with Lisa Siregar, Vanessa Lorein, Rika Safrina and Amudi Sebastian. Bliss!
Also, I got to feel like a bird viewing this from my hotel window!
