Sri Lanka Education Forum

What does S&T capacity mean for a small developing country such as Sri Lanka? My conversations with distinguished scientist and educator, Prof. Kamini Mendis, helped me develop some working hypotheses for my research and also spew out some ideas for action.  Prof. Kamini Mendis is in town for a short holiday. She is currently the Senior Advisor to the Roll Back Malaria Program at the World Health Organization (WHO). She moved to WHO after an illustrious career as a professor of Parasitology at the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Colombo where she published a record number of papers and ...

What should the Ed forum do next? We have so many options. Our recent seminar on Year-1 Admissions alone pointed us in several directions. Then the President decreed that henceforth all tertiary education institutions shall be reviewed by the government. That's good, but quality assurance of education is too important to be left to government. In quality assurance in education, typically, government agencies and civil society organizations play complementary roles (more on that later). Therefore, at this point, the Education forum will focus its energies on collecting information and ranking education choices for school leavers, and disseminating the information ...

A University for Uva Wellassa, the 14th university in Sri Lanka's public university system, was opened on August 7. To the average citizen who pays for these ventures through every purchase he/she makes (except milk powder and LPG, as of yesterday) this is a not so joyous birth of a 14th child to a public university family with 13 other mouths to feed. (One interesting development is the appointment of a non-academic to the Vice-Chancellor position, more on that later). Our universities are short on everything. Short on resources and short on talent, both academic and managerial. We should be devoting ...

A Sri Lankan Geologist, Prof. CB Dissanayake has just been recognized as a leader in research by no less a body than the editorial board of 'Science', one of the most prestigious journals in the world. During 2005, Science celebrates the 125th anniversary of the publication of its first issue with a special essay series, inviting researchers from around the world to provide a regional view of the scientific enterprise. The journal has invited  Prof. Chandra Dissanyake of the Geology Department in the University of Perdeniya to write the essay for the month of August under the theme Global ...