CCR Instructor Blog

One year ago, winter 2009, students at Örebro University, Stanford University and Khabarovsk State Academy of Economics and Law collaborated on this blog, using the Khabarovsk-Örebro-Stanford Blogging category. This year 2010 we are going to continue the conversation on-line.

The students at Örebro University study a class on intercultural communication as part of a programme in rhetoric, having Dr Anders Eriksson as their professor. The students at Stanford are taking a class in the Program of Writing and Rhetoric focusing on political leadership, with Dr Alyssa O'Brien. The students in Khabarovsk are taking a class on Intercultural Business Communication with Dr Olga Kovbasuyk. The three professors met at the fifth International Intercultural Communication Conference in Wichita Kansas May 2008.

The collaboration is going to have several phases. The students from Örebro are going to present themselves and their cultural background on February 4, post reflections on stereotypes and why they are not true by March 11, and post an abstract in english of their research papers by March 18.

To have intercultural competence is to be able to communicate effectively between cultures. One of the first steps is to be aware of our own cultural bias. January 28 the students in Örebro tried the online simulation called Cage Painting, see Rimmington & Alagic Third Place Learning. The purpose was to become aware of the "cages" around us that block effective communication. This week, February 4, we are going to share some of the cultural bias we have discovered. In rhetorical theory this is called our doxa, our hidden assumptions, the things we take for granted. As we present ourselves we will also say something about our culture that will be important for a conversation partner from an other culture to know. The students at Stanford and Khabarovsk, when they collaborate with the students in Örebro, will learn some of new things about us and our culture.

Dr.Anders Eriksson, Örebro University

Posted by Anders Eriksson at 05:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As classes end, as we wrap up our grading, and as we turn our thoughts to the holidays, I would just like to thank all our CCR partners, instructors, students, supporters, researchers, and tech workers for making the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric work possible so that many students can benefit from opportunities for hands-on global learning: writing, speaking, collaborating, and learning across the globe.

Looking back now from the vantage point of December, it is clear that we had a very busy fall, with blogging, Marratech video-conferences, and exciting guest lecturers either in person or via video-conference (courtesy of a SiCa grant).

The following visual montage shows some of the highlights from this past quarter -
• New intra-cultural connections within the USA with Aurora Community College in Colorado and City College of New York
• Sustained video-conference and blogging connections with our strong partners in Sweden: Anders Eriksson of Örebro University and Patrik Mehrens of Uppsala University
• A first-time Marratech video-conference with the American University of Cairo (AUC) thanks to Ghada El Shimi, following culture blog posts,
• Continued blogging with Mark Michael of the American University in Cairo
• An exciting five-part Marratech session with Bill Foley’s course at the University of Sydney
• Guest speakers John Paval, W Kamu Bell, Bill Foley himself, and Christina Tangora Schlachter

Looking ahead, we are thrilled about the video-conferences and blogging to kick off again in January: Uppsala, Orebro, CCNY, Khabarovsk Russia, AUC Egypt, and more? We plan to have more guest speakers made possible through our two SiCa grants.

We also have exciting new research initiatives, such as our collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin, and a grand plan to help Uppsala University launch its new Wallenberg-style Learning Lab on March 11 with a video-conference kick off!

Moreover, we are going to pilot using CCR technology to connect with international pro-fros (that’s Stanford speak for “prospective freshmen”) in April, and we’re now supporting a CCR-style student group called SURF (Stanford University Russia Forum).

Finally, we hope to hold another International Symposium in the Spring – a chance to come together and reflect on the good work done and the new directions possible with technological innovation in higher education – or how to open the world for students, one screen at a time.

Happy Holidays!
Alyssa

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Continue reading "Completing three Stanford connections with Orebro University" »

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 11:15 AM | Permalink

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 (4)

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 (14)

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 (3)

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 (2)

The last four weeks I have been involved in seven Marratech connections with Stanford. The connections between Stanford and Örebro are now becoming a well-working routine. The technological difficulties that have sometimes haunted us in the past are past. We have met in four small globally distributed teams, the students have had a chance to build trust over time in successive meetings. As for the technology in Örebro we have used Macintosh laptops with built in cameras and echo-cancelling microphones connected with cables to the internet. This has eliminated the problem with the sound and overloading of the wireless network that previously has troubled us.

Continue reading "Class to class collaboration" »

Posted by Anders Eriksson at 04:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As John, Alyssa and myself debriefed after the workshop April 23, in which the students had discussed each others research topics, I had to share a reflection I had concerning the camera angles. The students in Örebro are seated in front of laptop Macs with a camera build into the screen. When they look into the camera their heads are above the camera, the thus look slightly down unto the camera. As the Stanford students see them on their screens their faces look quite large and from an above position. The camera angle thus gives them authority. Willingly or not they thus “look down” on the students at Stanford.

The Stanford students are seated three or four a bit away from the collaboration station. The camera is placed on top of the screen to make sure that all of them appear in the picture. But this also means that they are placed in a subordinate position. The camera is looking down on them, and the viewer on the other side in Sweden takes the perspective from the camera and “looks down” on them. The two camera angles thus reinforce one another so that the Swedish students are given a position of authority.

Continue reading "Camera and authority" »

Posted by Anders Eriksson at 01:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The image above is from a field trip our "Rhetoric of Consumer Culture" class took to the Stanford Shopping Center. Students broke into groups, did rhetorical analysis of storefronts, developed hypotheses about who would shop there and how they would shop, observed the stores to see who actually shopped there and how, and reported their results. They were able to apply what they were learning in the classroom directly to another learning experience that was quite different.

According to students, this desire to try new experiences and to put their learning to use in new ways is also at play in the CCR workshops. The cross cultural exhchange is a lively and active learning experience. As one student reported, "When I told my friend that we were doing workshops with a class in Sweden, she was jealous. She said, 'You mean you actually do something in your PWR class?'"

By "doing something" she probably means that, in addition to learning about rhetoric and research (which happens in all PWR classes), students are getting a chance to convert their learning almost immediately into an active process that is taking place beyond the classroom.

I am noticing how at ease Christine Alfano is at setting up the technology and working with dozens of variables in getting ready for our workshops. She and Alyssa O'Brien are working with hours and hours of experience now, and this expertise is creating an atmosphere in which students can experiment, be social with their CCR exchange partners, and learn the work of their classes in new ways. Anders Eriksson appears remarkably relaxed there on the other side of the world as he says hello and starts the sessions. This comfortable, human quality sets the tone for, as the student's friend says, "Doing something."

Continue reading "New Learning Experiences: "Doing Something"" »

Posted by John Peterson, Stanford at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April, a time for new growth and the end of winter bringing about fruits and bloom. Here in CCR, we are seeing the fruits of much hard work: The core team has been on the conference path, speaking and publishing about the work (more on that in another entry). Thanks to Chris Alfano's hard work and Bob Smith's creative solutions, here at Stanford were are finally building a technology-space infrastructure, while in Orebro Eva and Stefan have opened their new Rhetoric Room (the second one!)

We've also launched our video conferences for Spring. This quarter, we will be holding videoconferences nearly every Monday and Wednesday. It's incredibly busy but very rewarding. Our TA from the Master's Program in Technology, Design, and Learning, Evelyn Kung, will be offering weekly reports on these video conferences with the goal of helping us improve our ICT-pedagogy and curriculum implementation. Look for her reports in the comments to these entries and also in periodic synthesis reports.

Anders and Alyssa are developing a curriculum in cross-cultural rhetoric to be shared with other institutions and departments, so their classes are working on new, shared assignments, activities, and goals. Anders and John Peterson are holding three consecutive workshops to foster global learning. We also hope to hold video conferences with our colleagues in Egypt and Australia, with Chris's class, Helle's class, and Sangeeta's class. At this point, there is more demand than we can handle but that is a sign of growth, for sure.

Here's a photo of instructors John Peterson and Alyssa O'Brien debriefing with Anders Eriksson in Sweden after today's video conference on advertisements and cross-cultural rhetoric. As you can see from the whiteboard, the students were busy creating hybrid compositions -- and as they will all be posting on the CCR main blog, they will be participating in writing as an iterative process, with a dialogic feedback loop. It's very exciting!

We have much more to share in this instructor's blog so I will be back soon to revise it or add to it!

Alyssa

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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!

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 06:24 PM | Permalink

We held our Video Conference number 6 today. John Peterson's PWR 1 class met with Anders Eriksson's class to analyze the representations of cultural identity embedded in paintings by Norman Rockwell and Carl Larsson. We set up 7 rooms all over Wallenberg Hall (see Chris's last post about space) and asked students to work in globally-distributed teams to analyze a painting and then present their rhetorical findings to the rest of the teams. It worked particularly well, with students offering a high level of rhetorical theory and understanding. Here's a screenshot of the Marratech interface with one of the student groups presenting out.

We were lucky to have Eva Magnusson here visiting in person! Bob Smith and Justin made it possible, and Chris was heroic again, as were her children, Max and Miranda, in charge of technology in the Basement Rooms of Wallenberg (they were our tech support team). Evelyn Kung provided her expert analysis as a graduate student from Learning, Design, and Technology, and soon she'll have reports to post on this blog to make us accountable to our research design.

What I think made this workshop particularly smooth was a combination of factors:

1. John and Anders met several weeks ago via Marratech to customize our template lesson plan to their chosen content. As a core team member and CCR project director, I helped facilitate this meeting to support both instructors -- we are moving to a model of increasing ease. Chris and I were joking today that we could create a "fast food menu"of workshops to minimize the work interested instructors would need to do, and yet allowinf for instructors to customize the lesson plan to their particular pedagogical needs.

2. Chris made a terrific custom webpage for ease of access during the workshop: students could go HERE (http://www.stanford.edu/group/ccr/workshops/021908.html) to open the slides, the lesson plan, the switching instructions. And with this, we are now GREEN! Less paper.

3. Ease of flow and dedicated rooms. In Orebro, Anders prepared the students in the hour preceding the videoconference. Here at Stanford, Andrea Lunsford, Evelyn, Miranda and myself met the students downstairs to greet them and give them an overview of the purpose of this activity (very important). John had established groups ahead of time. We led the students to the rooms, and the lesson plan flowed, with a strong introduction by Anders and John and then the students moving into their teams. It was essential to have students working in dedicated learning spaces with simulated proximity to their colleagues through video, audio, chat and whiteboard capabilities. The class ended with presentations and a debrief!

Today was a success - our sixth workshop since January 28, and perhaps our 30th since we began this project. I look forward to reflecting more on the progress and improving on what we have built here.

In two days, we travel to Santa Barbara to share this work with colleagues from around the world at the Writing Research Across Border conference.

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As part of our preparation for connecting internationally in a couple weeks, I've had my students revise their "About the Author" paragraphs that they wrote for their research paper for an international audience, and I've posted those student profiles on our CCR site at http://ccr.stanford.edu/stanfordstudentsf07.htm. It links off a new page that I created that is supposed to feature links to information about CCR participants.

The idea is to think of ways to facilitate asynchronous connections between participants. The profiles could be a way to help students become familiar with their globally distributed team members (I organized the students according to their videoconference groups) even before their first meeting.

It's clearly still skeletal, and I'm also interested to see how effective (or even desirable) it is to post profiles of this sort. Based on my own observations about my student's profiles, if I were to do it again, I would impose a stricter word limit (200 words? many of my students had a LOT to say, and I worry that it's overwhelming) and I also would have done a bit more with the profiles in class so they could benefit from peer review and revision.

But it's a good start. The assignment I used is included here; I would love it if Alyssa's PWR 1 class or the Orebro students might create similar profiles which I could then post up, even if that were to happen after the first videoconference. Of course, even if that's not possible this quarter, it gives us a starting point for talking about activities like these for the future.

Posted by Christine Alfano at 08:28 PM | Permalink

Late last week, I developed an assignment for my Cultural Interfaces class that I hope we can expand and develop into something useful for our project.

My class focuses specifically on Technological Mediation of Cultures and Subcultures, so I'm as interested in having students experiment with new, Web2.0 technologies, as engage in discussions and projects centered around cross-cultural issues.

For this reason, I decided to have them use Flickr and the blogs to accomplish some of the course objectives. You can read more about the assignment on the introductory entry to it on the Stanford Blog and also through the official assignment sheet. The student entries themselves are also accessible through the blog. In brief, though, here's a run down in how/why I wanted to work with the technology in this way:

Continue reading "Blog Assignment: Stanford Culture" »

Posted by Christine Alfano at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)