About

About Salih Mansur, the Extended Version

From Early Curiosity to Lifelong Learning: The Journey Within!

My educational journey began much earlier than most. At nearly five years old, I missed playing with the neighbor's kid when he started school, leaving me bored in our new home without a TV or other basics such as electricity. Ignoring my mom's concerns about my age, I filled a school bag with books and waited outside the school daily, hoping to join. My determination caught the school principal's attention. Despite being younger than the new students and the school year already underway for about a month, I impressed him by showing I could read. He agreed to let me enroll. This experience, inspired by a story I read about a wise man finding his path in the olden days when literacy wasn't common by reading and reflecting, fueled my lifelong passion for learning despite any obstacles.

I've traveled a unique path in education, coming from an unconventional background by not being able to attend traditional high school, but opting for an Open Ed (GED) later due to my training and instructing Ottoman educational curricula such as Old Turkish, Arabic, Persian, grammar, jurisprudence, logic, philosophy, translations of Greek and Latin texts, i.e. Isagoge, by Syriac scholars for the House of Wisdom, Metaphor, Rhetoric, Canon Law, Faith and Theology with an approach to modernize these teachings connecting past to present. Later, I worked as an official translator and guide for the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, where I also transcribed imperial archives while guiding international visitors and scholars across Turkey's rich history. 

Right around then, I was cluelessly in a quest to further my education but didn't have foundations and prospects to carry on and I encountered an ad in a magazine that stated that the new form of illiteracy was not just about reading and writing, but also about not being able to use computers. So, I got the idea that technology could be my ticket to higher education which led me to America to pursue my studies in multimedia design and communications only to discover how art and technology reflect human nature. This led to exploring self-discovery and later to studying psychology, deepening my understanding of how we learn and behave. 

My experience as a Multimedia Assistant at City College of New York's School of Education, facilitating ePortfolio and tech across various majors, continuous research assistance at LaGuardia Community College, along with earning a Harvard certificate in higher education while getting a Master of Science in Instructional Technology (ITP) as well as the Graduate Assistantship, and the most importantly teaching the Ottoman curricula in my youth have been preparing me to bring a simple perspective to remodel education in the most simplistic way all along.

My experiences have deepened my understanding of human behavior and strengthened my belief that education, enriched with multimedia and psychology, can transform lives. I am also focused on using educational psychology to enhance, not replace, traditional learning methods because technology can often be distractive. My current project involves integrating these techniques into education, making it more accessible and meaningful. I aspire to create an open-source, creative-commons, non-profit, pro-bono, and most importantly free platform combining the best features of informational and educational resources such as Wikipedia (The Free Encyclopedia), and Internet Archives, and other online learning platforms such as edX, Coursera, and Udemy, etc., for simplicity, effectiveness, and sophistication. 

This journey is about ongoing lifelong (LLL), lifewide (LWL) learning and inspiring change and transformation in our lives by making the all-in-one (Ai1) open-source, simple, foundational, fundamental, infrastructural education available for everyone everywhere through communication, cooperation, collaboration, coordination, and corroboration because sharing is caring. From nowhere to now here, I also aspire to pursue a Ph.D. in education to stretch my prospects under the supervision of connoisseurs of the field.