CCR Instructor Blog

Today at Stanford, my 9 am first-year class on Visual Rhetoric across the Globe connected one last time with Anders Eriksson's Rhetoric B class at the University of Orebro, Sweden. It was quite fruitful to have three consecutive connections, with the students working in the same groups each time. With this pedagogical plan, students were able to get to know each other well, develop concrete strategies for communicating across cultural differences and timezones, and know what to expect.

We structured the three connections as a progression - For the first conference, students brought in cultural artifacts and discussed images of culture found on the academic website of each institution (see the lesson plan and workshop page). Next the students composed blog posts with their own photos and discussed doxa, or the cultural values embedded in the nexus of the social fabric as captured through visual texts (as explained in the lesson plan here). Finally, the students created their own visual arguments, making montages or translations of their written argument to communicate in a visual language across cultures and discursive conventions (go to lesson plan).

The American University of Cairo, in Egypt, joined us for video-conference 2, and we had a powerful three-way sharing of perspectives on lifestyles, clothing practices, food preferences, and academic environments.

Each time, the video-conference culminated with project-based leanring: the students had to create a text TOGETHER, as a globally distributed team. First: a collaborative team name and image; second, a ad brochure for their team (imagining they were hired to launch a student travel company), and third, today, a visual representation of what they learn in CCR iself - how can they create an image that might inform other students and persuade others why this kind of global learning through technology matters?

The students said they enjoyed today's final connection very much (see their blog comments), and you can see the final images they created in teams below - powerful learning and a very strong experience for all. As Gordon Brown recently stated at the TED conference, WE NEED new ways of global communication if this world is to get along -- to survive and thrive - and to help others. I am so thankful to Anders as well as to all the students at Orebro and here at Stanford for making this vision a reality in their hard work during these three videoconferences.