CCR Instructor Blog

According to the student evaluations now rolling in, we had perhaps our most successful video conference to date last Monday, March 3, on the topic of controversial political speeches.

We were very excited to invite our new friends and partners from the American University of Cairo, Egypt, to participate in this CCR video conference, along with students and faculty from three universities in Sweden: Orebro University, Uppsala University, and Sodertern.

Professor Otto Fischer from Uppsala University led off the session, introducing everyone and welcoming his students -- many of whom had made a special trip to campus to collaborate with their Stanford colleagues and to meet new student friends from Egypt. Our Stanford Project PI, Professor Andrea Lunsford, then also welcomed everyone to the videoconference.

Next, Professor Anders Eriksson gave the workshop lesson on the "rhetorical situation" governing speeches. What made his presentation remarkable was that he delivered it live while connecting through Marratech from a conference on "Designs for Learning" in Stockholm Sweden. Amazingly enough, the core study team has just given a presentation at that conference, all through Marratech, only a few hours earlier (at 6:50 am Stanford time, 3:50 pm Sweden time).

To prepare the students for the Videoconference, Christine had captured Anders' remarks given over Marratech in Fall and made a Youtube video of them (available through the workshop page at http://www.stanford.edu/group/ccr/workshops/030308.html. We were worried that Anders would not be able to Marratech in from Stockholm, so we had this video as a back up, but everything went fine. He even cut his remarks down to 4 minutes, leaving more time for students to work together as they have asked to do in their debriefing remarks and exit surveys!

Then, we had the teams pick a speech from the choices online. A little bit of madness ensued, with each group wanting to focus on Lee Bollinger's Introductory Remarks at SIPA-World Leaders Forum with President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, September 2007. Soon, though, the groups had chosen and set about connecting in their globally-distributed teams through Marratech. We noticed that students were getting more comfortable with the technology, and it made a big difference to have the multimedia materials and resources all available on that workshop page (http://www.stanford.edu/group/ccr/workshops/030308.html)

We made many innovations in the lesson plan as well, such as asking students to analyze a visual representation of the speaker's persona and then listen to 5 minutes of the speech. We also asked the team to write a speech themselves, as a group, and to practice it once before delivery, so they could implement immediately what they had learned. Finally, once we reconnected, we had the groups give written feedback to each other using the chat feature of Marratech. This made the session seem more real, like a classroom activity with consequences and the words of real audiences responding to the work presented.

Above all, though, the students seemed to welcome the many diverse voices in this videoconference. As one student wrote today in an anonymous evaluation:

Overall, I thought it was great to have students from three different schools (and therefore three different countries). More schools/students meant more perspectives, and this enriched our discussion and overall experience tremendously. My group analyzed Nelson Mandela's speech, and it was amazing to see how the students in Sweden versus in Egypt versus in the US responded to the question "Would this speech work in other countries? Would it need to be changed?" Students from every country responded that the speech would have needed to be modified in their country of origin, but each country/school had different reasons. Generally, this experience broadened my understanding of how students from different countries look at the world, analyze rhetoric, and view their own culture in a larger globalized context.

See the blog entries students are writing about these video conference activities, and please add you own comment if you wish! See for example, this entry on Nelson Mandela's speech or this one on a speech and the female attire of Benazir Bhutto

For my part, I was sad to bring the official class-to-class collaboration with Uppsala to an end for this quarter. I feel that our lesson plans and methodology have become so much more rigorous and scholarly because of the suggestions and hard work done by Otto Fischer and Patrik Mehrens at Uppsala University. Thanks to you and to your students for all you have contributed over the past few months.

And yet, I am not sad, too, because we have Spring to look forward to, with more connections and chances for student learning. We are so thrilled to welcome Egypt to the project, and I hope we can continue to work as a Sweden-Egypt-Stanford team to provide our students unparalleled learning experiences that will stay with them for a lifetime!