Jane Yau (Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Germany)
In Hong Kong, China, the little girl in the picture loved to learn at school and was very curious. In the village where she grew up, she loved to explore the natural surroundings, play in the rice fields, run up and down the mountains and swim in the rivers with her fellow villagers. She loved going to the village library and was fascinated by the children’s stories, which she can still remember reading vividly – especially those of her beloved Welsh author Roald Dahl, who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (translated into Chinese). After having only attended school for 1 or 2 years, she was amazed that she could read and understand the library books completely by herself . She finished primary school and did really well, until she moved to…
England, where she had to learn everything from scratch, including the language! Luckily, English was easier to learn than she had imagined. In the process, she even temporarily forgot how to speak Chinese (Cantonese). Though she eventually mastered English, she still struggled in some school subjects. However, she still loved reading. Despite not having top grades, she earned a Bachelor’s degree, then took a gap year to think about the next step and to gather some financial resources for potentially pursuing a Master’s degree. In the end, she completed her Master’s degree (by research), which she really enjoyed. After careful deliberation, she realized she was brave enough to apply, and received a scholarship to fund her doctoral studies in a passionate topic of hers – using mobile technologies for education. The writing of the monograph thesis was the most challenging part, and she couldn’t believe that one day she had actually completed it, and was awarded a Postdoc position in…
Sweden. This was a fantastic experience professionally and also personally to learn about the country and the culture. During this time, she discovered the Mobile Learning Week, which is UNESCO’s flagship ICT in education conference that explores how mobile technology can help fill the education gap. Since then, she has aligned her research interests to help advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 – Quality Education for All. This led her to…
Germany, where she has taught a state-of-the-art course in mobile learning featuring a number of UNESCO’s initiatives. She has examined the contribution of learning analytics research in reducing student dropout rates in higher education institutions, and developed some policy recommendations that German universities could adopt in order to implement learning analytics successfully. She is currently a research coordinator in the German project “Highly-informative competence driven feedback for digital learning” (2021-24), and an EU project where games are used to engage citizens with the aim of influencing policy-makers’ decisions relating to the climate emergency (2023-26). Nowadays, she frequently spends time mastering the German language and has two children.
My message to all girls and women is this: Find your passions, pursue your dreams despite your fears or obstacles, acquire the necessary skills, persevere, learn from your mistakes or failures, you will succeed!!!