Executive Director’s Welcome

Welcome to International ALCoB Conference for APEC Learning Community! It is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to our meaningful event here in Korea.
We are about to begin the year 2004 with full spirit of friendship and cooperation. Though we all had an hard time last year due to the unexpected visit of SARS, we have never lost our motivation and confidence in developing our own projects and have been sharing our friendship and cooperating with one another ever more.

Korea initiated the APEC Learning Community for Shared Prosperity in 2003. It aims at narrowing knowledge and digital divide among APEC economies and finding educational solutions for ever-lasting development of APEC. This Project integrates and elaborates the two previous projects of Korea, APEC Cyber Education Network (ACEN) and International Internet Volunteer (IIV) of 2001.

Autonomy and ownership are the principles of this integrated and elaborated project. That is, this project encourages educational stakeholders, teachers, learners and education-related institutions to take the core responsibility in building, managing and developing it. We call these people APEC Learning Community Builders (ALCoB). ALCoB can start from taking part in on-line and off-line human network and share case studies and educational materials in teaching and learning. Currently, 164 ALCoB in 10 APEC member economies actively participate in various activities through on-line and off-line communities.

This conference will be a place to evaluate the 2003 activities and to plan for 2004 activities. Also, it will be a place to renew our existing friendship and make new friends for further collaborations. I believe APEC Learning Community for Shared Prosperity will contribute to fulfilling the ultimate goal of APEC, the “Shared Prosperity” .


YoungHwan Kim, Ph.D.
Chair and Executive Director
Institute of APEC Cyber Education