Combining Studio Videoconferencing
& the Internet to Promote Intercultural Understanding
Facilitated by Globe-Gate: UTMartin's
Intercultural Learning Project
Videoconference
Visioconférence
Videoconference
Visioconférence
Professor Crapo has illustrated the overall
project history, while Professors Jones and Sorenson have
elaborated some technical and pedagogcal considerations. My
job has been largely to invent and implement internet media
strategies to support videoconferences. Some of this is outlined in
a pedagogical film segment: "The Mercury Project." In La
Visiocommunication à l'Université
d'Orléans. [Orléans,1999].
Advantages of the Media
1. - Internet access and technology are common, and available on a
daily or as-needed basis to most students (certainly most university
students).
2.- For foreign languages, the media brings learners closer to the
reality in which they must eventually immerse themselves.
3.- The more students practice the functionality of this technology,
the better prepared for general work tasks, and the more
functionally attractive they become.
4.- The technology has image, telephony and even videoconferencing
possibilities.
5.- It also has a certain flexibility to it. For example, any text online
can be mined for data and vocabulary, using copy & paste; it can also
lend prefacing structure to student questions.
6.- It can be be presentational interactive and collaborative.
7.- It allows people spread over a large area to share information
along with their analysis, reactions and suggested applications, at a
nominal cost.
8.- With the advent of web-based mail, laptop & palm computers,
optical and satellite connectivities, all is becoming more
portable.
9.- While the limited number of appropriate journals available to
students in small to medium sized institutional libraries can
occasionally yield unexpected insights into a topic chosen for a
videoconference, the search for them can be unnecessarily
challenging, and will not yield anything close to a comprehensive and
up-to-date coverage. On the other hand, the intelligent use of
search engines of the kind I have provided in
can yield a score of highly informational articles from official
organizations and respected journalists in a very short
time.
Now I would like to review videoconferences which I supported in the
context of the role I played.
The first of our videoconferences ocurred on November 21,
1996. Participants were from the University of Tennessee-Martin,
Austin Peay State University, the Université
d'Orléans. The topic was the 1996 U.S. presidential election,
the technical facilitator, BellSouth Videoconferencing, through a
studio on the APSU campus. The event took place at 8:30 am,
because of the 7 hour time difference between France and US Central
Time. The eye-opening reality of a two and a half hour early morning
drive, must have been a motivating factor in the readying of our
campus distance studio for a bidge connection in the the next
videoconference, on April 10, 1997. Here the topic was the 1995
French presidential election.
The web site created to support both videoconferences was mostly a
webliography and a public display of student position papers. Our
French interlocuteors were rather primitively equipped as far as
individual connections were concerned, and it was hard to bring about
any kind of dialog. The show value, however was worth the site; we
had an American student participant who was a National Democratic
Convention delegate and some firey socialist discourse from the
French.
was cited in political journals like THE CONNECTION, ON POLITICS
(Washington Post), featured in a number of French Civilization
courses and has become a known resource for political opinion
research.
The third of our videoconferences took place on November
13, 1997 The topic was racism in the US, with some emphasis on equal
opportunity in employment. The fourth was on April 9th, 1998,
focusing on the kind of racism in France delivered by the Front
National and immigration policy.
We felt reassured that topically relevant events in both of our
countries would provide grist for our mills. The European Commission
had named 1997 " L'Année européenne contre le
racisme" 1997 marked the year when the American practice of
Affirmative Action received a legal set-back from California's
proposition 209 .
Here is where we began to get some enthusiastic student
participation. It is also where we ran into some unanticipated
problems. More French students had internet connections and e-mail
addresses than during our first two videoconferences. We had a
particularly anti-racist student from Pulaski, Tennessee (origin of
the Ku Klux Klan). When we started receiving e-mail from the French,
we decided to try out a bubba-board for both English and French
comments. At the outset this seemed to be a good move. Students
who were normally fairly quiet, were suddenly writing, and one or
two seemed to be caught up in the interactivity. All of a sudden we
were discovered by some verbose neo-Nazzis who dowsed the fire
of our enthusiasm with fairly brutal racist discourse.
conducted in English, and took place on Thursday, 18 November
1999.
I created a supporting site for this videoconference, with the
intention of donating links to our Women's Studies colleagues, but
alas, I found no interest. At the same time, with a full teaching load, a
career crisis, and numerous other pressures, I could not muster the
time for the kind of active and enthusiastic participation needed to
direct a successful internet support campaign. The essays, however,
do show a strong student interest. No videoconference took place
the next semester due to the serious illness of the French course
director.
Among its many problems, our latest videoconference, on
homelessness, presented a situation which can only be labeled as
pure "irony". Our Globe-Gate server had undergone a series of
crashes involving swapspace and problems with a new version of the
Apache web server. I was hesitant to put something new up, until I
was fairly confident we were entering a long period of uninterrupted
service. I chose instead the University's very stable main Sun box
running a licensed version of the latest Unix, with good serverside
includes. About 800 hits into the life of the site, a Polish hacker
broke deep into the University system. The computer center quickly
brought back web pages, but it closed down many services, including
directory access, in order to rebuild using strict security guidelines.
Since I was in the midst of editing, formating and posting a corpus of
student position papers, now nearly 7000 words, the situation was
unacceptable. By this time I had a list of e-mail addresses for most
videoconference participants on both sides of the Atlantic. I decided
to pack up our chattels and move the site to a server belonging to
our local telecom, which had shown rock-solid stability, even though
it offered no serverside includes. I mailed news of the change to all
on our list. The site had not been up for two days, when I began
encountering directory access and permission problems, which the
help desk personnel were unable to resolve. Homeless again, the
site had to be relocated quickly, and I chose a server in the
computer center with some serverside includes, and which had not
been effected by the hackers. This machine, however, had the
ditinct disadvantage of teaming a Novell file server with a ZB web
server...not exactly crashproof. I mailed news of the change and
made my awkward apology to all on our e-mail list. Came the
weekend, and...you guessed it. The server crashed and we were
evicted from our third home. Alas, there was but one choice left.
Reeady and steady or not, we had to move, lock, stock and barrel to
Globe-Gate, an old PowerMac 7600/120 running MkLinux R1 with
Apache web server, version 1.3.19. We have been up ever since, but
my 20/20 hindsite informs me that our homelessness and
vabadondage resulted from making an initially wrong choice of
servers. I have tried not to let the fact that our campus student e-
mail was shut down for repairs the day before the videoconference
bother me.
To conclude, I would like to leave you with some thoughts on
how to let internet technology improve not only the
videoconferencing , but the learning process for which it was
conceived as well as the intercollegiate and interpersonal relations
which can develop from it.
1) Just as we are changing the status of course software from
ancillary to an integral and mission-critical means of attaining our
goals and objectives, so should we be making a similar
transformation of internet support for international
videoconferencing.
2) Internet facilitators should take part in the initial planning stages
of these videoconferences. They should become immediately
familiar with the pedagogical goals of group or course directors,
designing features to help their students acquire the targeted
knowledge and proficiencies.
3) Teachers should encourage students to participate fully, making a
reading of the web site, writing a position paper, participation in the
bulletin board the videoconference and e-mail list a graded and
tested segment of the course.
4) Students should track their own participation, counting linked
articles read and messages sent, noting those which got responses
or started debates.
5. Student participants can and should work on collaborative
projects: gathering and interpreting vocabulary and acronyms from
second language articles, peer editing position papers, coauthoring
series of questions for the videoconference, writing and conducting
opinion surveys of both French and American students on facets of
the vidioconference topic.
6. All planners and participants should accept the idea that
electronic communication means dealing in electrons. E-mail
addresses, position papers, etc. should be harvested electronically
to save time and allow a focus on the fruits of outcome rather than
the labor of procedure.
7. Planners should make sure that student participants can produce
and read in their e-mail extended ascii caracters.
8. Finally, Teachers and course directors can look for signs of student
Cultural Competance growth in accordance with the "Indicators of
Competence" developed by the