BUTTERFIELD STEPS DOWN FROM COL BOARD

The longest serving member of COL's Board of Governors stepped down at the end of June. Ms. Shona Butterfield, former Chief Executive, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, was first appointed to the Board in 1998 and named an Honorary Fellow of COL in 2004.

Few people have made as significant a contribution to the development and use of open and distance learning, particularly in the area of technical and vocational education, as has Shona.

With an outstanding background in nursing and nurse education, she was appointed Chief Executive of The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand in 1989. At that time The Open Polytechnic was a correspondence trade school run as part of the Department of Education. Under her leadership, The Open Polytechnic became one of the country's largest tertiary institutions with more than 62,000 annual course enrolments by over 30,000 students - all studying through distance education. Today, it is a distinct institution guiding its own destiny, which is a model not just for New Zealand but for the world.

Shona has been an extraordinarily active contributor to the community. She was a member of the Prime Minister's Enterprise Council, the Prime Ministerial Taskforce on Employment and a member of the Advisory Committee on External Aid and Development. She is a past President of the Distance Education Association of New Zealand, has chaired the New Zealand Polytechnic Chief Executive Officers' Forum and has been involved with a range of professional groups. Upon leaving the Open Polytechnic, she became a Commissioner on New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission and chaired New Zealand's eLearning Advisory Group in 2002. She was awarded the Queen's Service Order in 1994 and named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2005.

Ms. Butterfield served the COL Board of Governors with thoughtful enthusiasm, first as the representative of New Zealand when the country gained major donor status, then as the representative of the Secretary-General and, most recently, as New Zealand's representative again. COL was greatly privileged to have her services as a governor for nearly a decade because she brought to her work great wisdom and experience gained from leading a major ODL institution. As well as taking a particular interest in COL's activities in the Pacific she has devoted her considerable energies to improving the governance of the organisation, in particular through the preparation of a Governance Manual. We shall miss her wise counsels.

BOARD NEWS

COL Board of Governor member, Ms. Jenny Glennie, recently received the Chancellor's Medal at the University of Pretoria. The award salutes Ms. Glennie's contribution to the development of open and distance learning in South Africa and internationally, calling her "the most recognisable international face of distance and open learning in South Africa today". Ms. Glennie is the Founding Director of the South African Institute for Distance Education and was named an Honorary Fellow of COL in 2002.

STAFF NEWS

COL Education Specialist, Dr. Wayne Mackintosh, has joined the WikiMedia Foundation Advisory Board. The Advisory Board is an international network of experts who give the Foundation meaningful help on a regular basis. The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable organisation dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 10 most visited websites in the world.

UNESCO NEWS

Mr. Nicholas Burnett was appointed UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Education last month. Previously the Director of UNESCO's EFA Global Monitoring Report, Mr. Burnett has spent his career working with developing and transition countries, much of it on Africa. In addition to working for the World Bank, he also worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office as an Economic Adviser on Africa and Latin America and managed his own international consulting firm. Mr Burnett brings to the position a very broad knowledge of education, especially in developing countries, and of Education for All.