Thursday, July 19, 2007

Visitors from Valladolid Mexico

This summer, AB Tech was lucky to have visitors from one of Asheville's Sister Cities, Valladolid, Yucatan Mexico. There were 8 delegates from a technical school similar to AB Tech called the Instituto Technologico Superior de Valladolid. There were also 2 visitors from University De Valladolid. This trip followed a trip taken by Dr. Sharon Morrissey to Valladolid to begin a dialogue on how our schools can work together in the future with faculty and student exchanges.

Below - Raul Mendoza Alcocer the Director (like our President) of Instituto Technologico Superior de Valladolid with our own Vice President Dr. Sharon Morrissey pointing at a map of Asheville and Valladolid made by our Geospatial Technology Instructor Pete Kennedy.

Students and Faculty visited the Business Computer Technology Division one morning and learned about all our programs. Below is a slide show of their visit to our deparment. The group visited a Web Technologies class and of course visitied the GIS lab where we showed them maps of places they were visiting during their trip and gave them a short demonstration of some of the Geospatial Technologies we teach here in our certificate program.

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Dr. Morrissey and some others outlined the following as potential future partnership opportunities we will continue to explore with our friends from Valladolid.

(1) A return visit to Valladolid in February 2008 (AB Tech faculty and
students, Sister Cities members), staying with home hosts.
(2) ITSVA exchange students to spend 6 months or 1 year at AB Tech,
studying ESL and/or a curriculum program (hospitality, culinary, engineering,
management/business administration, networking, computer technologies,
HVAC).
(3) ITSVA faculty members to spend 2-4 weeks at AB Tech, shadowing our
faculty members in networking, culinary, hotel & restaurant management, mechanical
engineering, electrical engineering, HVAC.
(4) Mentor ITSVA in development of a Small Business Incubator/Student
Incubator program. (Raul plans to return to learn more about incubator
programs in the US.)
(5) Establish a CISCO Networking Academy at ITSVA.
(6) AB Tech humanities & foreign language students to study abroad in
Valladolid, staying with home hosts.
(7) AB Tech faculty to study the culture, cuisine, tourism industry,
history of Valladolid, staying with home hosts.

2 comments:

Héctor Aguilar said...

Dear Pete.
It was nice to read your article in this blog about our recent visit to Asheville.
It made me remember our staying in Asheville with you and I hope you can come to Valladolid next february.
I also want to thank your hospitality. Say Dr. Sharon Morrissey that she and Tim were so gentle and I appreciate all they did for me.
Alto I really thank all the attention you and the faculty members of AB-Tech gave us during our visit.

Héctor Aguilar Rivero

Pete Kennedy said...

Hector,

Thanks so much for commenting on our blog. Please send me an email and include Raul's email also. We enjoyed you all very much and hope to see you again soon.

pkennedy(at)abtech.edu