We are back!

We’ve been silent for a while. There are many reasons to it which are irrelevant now. What is important is the way forward, and we have decided to be more often with you through this blog. Rather than painfully crafting our modest bulletin every once in a while to include the news about the activities of our member universities, we will be now posting the news as the happen, in real time. So please, let us know about your activities as they take place and send us to this email a few paragraphs and illustrations that you would like to share with other members of the network. We welcome your contributions and will be updating the blog once or twice a week, giving priority to those news items that show collaboration between network members.

One of the additional advantages of using this blog site to share information is that we will be able to include other colleagues from universities that may not yet be part of the University Network but have a common interest in studies on communication for development and social change. Our distribution list will thus be able to expand without limits.

We have much to include here, many activities have been going on during the past few months. There is a wealth of information in our files which we will be releasing during the next weeks until we do catch-up with all the pending releases.

But for now, since this is the first posting and will be reaching new colleagues all over the world, we will briefly remind everyone that the University Network News is the humble bulletin that has been issued since April 2006 to keep network-members informed. Nine issues of the Network News Bulletin were issued since, that can be found at the Communication for Social Change website.

The University Network itself was created during our meeting of universities in Los Baños, The Philippines, in September 2005. Faculty and graduate students from 12 universities in Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, Latin America and The Caribbean, all with specialised degree programmes in communication for social change and development met at the invitation of the Communication for Social Change Consortium to discuss their programmes of study. On the last day of the gathering facilitated by the College of Development Communication, the oldest in the world, there was a collective decision to create the University Network, facilitated by the Consortium.

The “Los Baños Statement”, a document that all universities signed, including the objectives, the activities sought and the vision of the network can be also accessed in our website.

The universities that initially joined the network are: the College of Development Communication (The Philippines), Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru (Peru), Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar (Bolivia), Ohio University (USA), University of Guelph (Canada), Universidad del Norte (Colombia), Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), University of the West Indies (Jamaica), Malmö University (Sweden), Roskilde University (Denmark), University of Zambia (Zambia), G B Pant University of Agriculture and Technology (India). Others have joined in recent years, which we will be portraying in this blog every month.