CCR Instructor Blog

This post comes out of my very real gratitude for our amazing staff of student tech workers here at Stanford CCR: shown here hard at work prepping for a video conference, Jonathan, Anya and Eethar are all now in their second year working with our project, supporting the video conferences, and every day I am grateful for their help.

We didn't always have student tech support -- while our Stanford Tech Guru, Bob Smith, has always been on hand to help us out with our connections, for several years, Alyssa and I have balanced the logistics of curricular planning with the hands-on reality of hooking up wires, checking for hot ethernet ports, troubleshooting bad network connections, solving echo problems, realigning webcams -- all the very necessary work that goes into trying to create a "transparent" tech interface for our students to use in talking with their globally distributed partners. And, in fact, ironically, despite our strong student staff, some of our connections this quarter are completely UN-supported for the very first time (because of scheduling conflicts), leaving the instructor to field the tech issues him/herself during the session. Of course, this is the situation that many of our partners face every time they connect with us: we know that many schools that we work with DON'T have any infrastructure to support video conferencing and that it is in fact the teachers who are managing the tech aspect of things on their own.

It occurs to me that we need to think hard about the tech requirements of participating in a video conference exchange. As much as we try to streamline participation in the project, what level of tech expertise is still necessary on the part of the instructor? And what is the base level of buy-in needed from the university's tech support structure to make these connections work? How can we best facilitate these exchanges from a logistical point of view, both for those with tech workers, and those without?

I'd be interested in your ideas about this issue!

Posted by Christine Alfano at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today we are piloting our first cross-cultural rhetoric video-conference WITHIN the US.

Students from Aurora, Colorado are connecting with students at Stanford.

Thanks to Susan Achziger, English Composition Faculty, Community College of Aurora

The task today?

Rhetorical analysis of image of the American Flag - from diverse perspectives! Not only are there diverse nationalities at each institution, but Colorado and California have very different cultures. In addition, Aurora is a small community college and Stanford is a research one graduate university - so what can we learn from each other? How might we better understand America and its diversity?

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

On Thursday, October 1, Professor Bill Foley from the University of Sydney gave a talk to students and faculty about his scholarly perspective on cross-cultural rhetoric. As Chair of the Department of Linguistics, Professor Foley brought a unique, interdisciplinary perspective to CCR. He also penned a most captivating title for his talk: ARISTOTLE AMONG THE HEAD-HUNTERS, OR PUTTING THE CULTURAL INTO CROSS-CULTURAL RHETORIC"

In his talk, Professor Bill Foley presented a new way of approaching the concept of "identity" based upon his years of field research in traditional New Guinea cultures. He shared with the audience instance of ideological beliefs about language practices and their meanings and then made the bold claim for rethinking rhetorical practices in traditional oratory. The talk was inspirational to those interested in contrastive rhetoric, comparing the rhetorical traditions of the West drawn from Aristotle and classical rhetoric against those from New Guinea social groupings. His talk made us all think about the central role that anthropology and linguistics can play in cross-cultural rhetoric studies.

His talk was well attended in the Hume Writing Center, and students remained afterwards to ask Professor Foley questions.

Next week, his own students at the University of Sydney will connect with Stanford students in 5 (five!) CCR video-conference connections, spanning three days. It's a great opportunity for global learning - meeting both universities' initiatives to foster globally educated citizens. Plus, we expect it will be great fun for the students to meet their peers across the ocean!

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From January to March 2009, students in "The Rhetoric of Tourism" class at Stanford worked together with students in a rhetoric and writing class at the American University of Cairo on blog posts around the subject of tourism. On Stanford’s campus, we see tourists every day as they pour off tour buses at the Oval, walk around campus with a backwards-walking tour guide, and wander through the Rodin sculptures, cameras clicking. And so that's where the Stanford students started: by posting blog entries on the different forms of tourism we see on campus all the time.

Continue reading "Stanford and AUC Blog on Tourism" »

Posted by Julia Bleakney, Stanford University at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Even though classes at Stanford University don't begin for another month, the CCR team is always looking to the future. In addition to lining up CCR video-conference and blog connections for the 2009-2010 academic year, CCR has just launched a new research collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin.

This is thanks to Sean McCarthy, Assistant Instructor and Assistant Director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab within the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Sean attended our CCR panel at 4C’s in March on "Cross-cultural Perspectives on Technology-enabled Learning in the Global Writing Classroom." He then wrote to us interested in introducing CCR as a core project for one of his research groups at UT Austin this year. We were thrilled to meet Sean at 4C’s, and now, we are even more excited at the prospect of a year rich in research collaboration.

In our kick-off Marratech planning session yesterday, Sean introduced his colleagues and fellow assistant directors Molly Hardy and Justin Tremel, who sat in on the video-conference meeting.

Together, we discussed shared goals and made plans. This is an exciting opportunity to see how the CCR methodology can “transfer” to other universities and institutions. The whole point of our original WGLN grant-funded research was to develop a protocol and concrete practices that could be utilized by many in higher education. While we have enjoyed success in sharing the CCR knowledge and know-how with our active international partners, this is the first time that a peer institution in America seeks to study, learn, apply, and extend the research methodology, working practices, and knowledge developed by the CCR team in 4 years of research and sustained practice. At the same time, CCR will have a lot to learn from UT Austin as they have the technological resources and the researcher-teachers who can extend CCR methods to the next level, trying out new platforms for connectivity and investigating new research questions. Our ultimate goal will be a shared publication about this collaborative process, this cross-institutional shared research endeavor.

Tomorrow, Sean will pitch the CCR focus as one of the Core Research Projects to the graduate students and faculty – we are grateful for this endeavor, and we look forward to meeting his colleagues, working with them, learning from them and alongside them, this coming academic year!

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A dream has come true! Students in our classes can now enjoy guest lectures and workshops from artists and other creative leaders in the field who we beam in through our Marratech video-conference technology.

Thanks to a grant from SICA, or the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts for innovations in Curriculum and Pedagogy, we were able to set up an entire series of workshops for students in our PWR 1 and PWR 2 classes.

John Paval, a Stanford alum and professional communication coach, led several virtual classes through CCR video-conference technology, focusing, for instance on Oratory for Leadership. One of his video-conference workshops took place during the visit by our colleagues from Uppsala University, who had a chance to sit in and see first-hand how we can expand learning for our students with virtual lectures. Then, John Paval came to visit Stanford in person and led additional sessions with our students.

The SiCA grant also made possible a virtual workshop with Steve Bodow, senior comedy writer for The Daily Show. We had quite a packed house in the Writing Center for this special curricular opportunity - including Helle's students and many lecturers attending.

In addition, we had fabulous interactive class lectures by Dr. Bump Halbritter on sound and cinema, and a stand-up comedy workshop by sportswriter comidienne Julie Kicklighter.

The end of Spring brought the good news that SICA awarded CCR a new grant for 2009-2010 which will make possible more video-conferences, virtual guest lectures, and - in a new development - student showcases of work produced collaboratively through this exciting opportunity for global connection.

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Spring quarter (April-June) is always a very busy time for CCR, and this spring proved no exception. Right on the heels of our CCCC workshop and panel, we started our third quarter of classes, had many visitors and had even more global connections.

First, a class-to-class Video Conference summit with students in Olga Kovbasyuk's class at Khabarovsk State Academy in Russia. Students on both sides gathered to discuss views on Leadership - what makes for effective leadership? What do Obama and Medvedev bring to the world?

Then, we were fortunate to have three different video-conferences with Patrik Mehrens' classes at Uppsala University in Sweden:
* one on Speeches of Global Leadership
* one on Humor in which students analyzed the "Stockholm Syndrome" and wrote top ten lists
* one on Intercultural Communication Case studies in which student teams analyzed news media on Obama, Swine Flu, food politcs, and more then wrote their own "spoof stories" showing inappropriate or appropriate intercultural communication style. It was great fun!

Launching a new connection, we had a wonderful marathon set of video-conference connections with Bill Foley's and Ariel Spigelman's WRIT class at the University of Sydney. Five PWR classes connected for an exchange of presentations on political cartoons - it was an enlightening and rewarding set few days, and we plan to run the connections again in Fall.

Finally, we connected twice with Sanaa Makhlouf's writing class at the American University of Cairo, using Polycom rather than our preferred Marratech, but the students enjoyed exchanging ideas on media freedom, democracy, leadership and law, body image, and cultural perceptions of each other's communities. We look forward to more video-conferences and blogging exchanges with our colleagues at AUC next academic year!

Looking forward to a great year coming up in CCR! Thanks to all the PWR instructors who make these connections possible for students in their classes: Christine Alfano, Julia Bleakney, Jonathan Hunt, Donna Hunter, Melissa Levitt, Sangeeta Mediratta, Alyssa O’Brien, Carolyn Ross, and Helle Rytkonen.

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)