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Appendix 4 - IM3 – 2002In the summer of 2002, I was invited by the then Dean of Education to examine the biddocumentation for a project which the Faculty was keen to win. The task was to review thetender, write a summary report, and to make a recommendation to the Faculty’s managementteam as to whether or not there was any point progressing towards the submission of a bid. Theproject, which I later referred to as ‘E-China’, was designed to deliver high quality Englishteacher education to the Chinese context. The successful bidder would need to provide anetwork architecture and infrastructure capable of sustaining potentially millions of concurrentusers of an online service, as well as pedagogic consultancy, English language tuition andBritish quality assurance and accreditation standards.I made my recommendation and was then presented with the task of writing the bid, in a week.In that week I had to get my head round the technological challenges of scaling up to a millionconcurrent users of a VLE, the principles and practices of distance education, the challenges andprotocols of working in another culture and in another language and the 21 st Century imperativeto form ‘partnerships’. That I pulled the bid together with partners from the British Councilthrough to a range of technology companies is a footnote in history; that the bid was lost toNottingham University is also a fact of history. Why this is relevant to these doctoral studies isfor the unintended outcomes of that burst of activity.Critical to the success of the project was my need to get my head round the principles andpractices of International Education and I was put in touch with some experts in this area at theUniversity of Bristol, School of Education. Through this network, I became aware of the AsiaPacific Society for Computers in Education and its annual conference which, in 2002, was to beheld in Auckland, New Zealand. My interest in New Zealand had been wakened in Primary350Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)