Reflections on the 10-14 video conference with John Paval
Yesterday, my Cultural Interfaces class had its exciting first video conference with students at Orebro University -- the first of three video exchanges we'll have this quarter.
(To see more pictures from our video conference, visit our photo stream on flickr)
To make it even more special, we were led in our workshop by John Paval, a consultant in oral expression and a Stanford Alum, now living in Stockholm. He led us through a very innovative workshop that moved students from a virtual auditorium to activities in their small groups and focused on the practice and performance of oratory. In rhetorical terms, we focused on the canons of memory and delivery, and how shifting audience influences the rhetorical situation of an argument.
For our part, I was really excited by the activities, which -- despite a hectic pace -- seemed to foster a lot of laughter and deep learning on the part of the students. I've participated in many video conferences over the years, but I found this model of bringing in an outside expert to lead an international workshop to be a really really rewarding one and a promising new direction for some of our CCR workshops to take.
Looking forward to our continued exchanges with Orebro this term, I was pleased to see the students involved in productive exchanges with one another. It was a good first step in our international collaboration.