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Return to
"Beyond Computer Literacy:
Implications of Technology for the Content and Outcomes of a
College Education"
The third of five outcomes of
a liberal education as described by the Association of
American Colleges and Universities:
3) Intercultural knowledge
and collaborative problem-solving skills—achieved and
demonstrated in a variety of collaborative contexts
(classroom, community-based, international, and online)
that prepare students both for democratic citizenship
and for work;
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Interacting with
students in other countries: Technology is making
more direct learning about other cultures possible,
too.
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“Raison
d’Etre” is a project conducted jointly by the
University of South Carolina, Lycee Paul Heroult,
and Dickinson College. Students learning French in
the United States interact regularly with students
in France who are majoring in English. They
correspond weekly, engage in regular chat sessions,
and use web cams as they talk about one another’s
cultures. The project won a 2003 National Award
from the
American Council of Education's AT&T Program on
Technology as a Tool for Internationalization.
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Another ACE/AT&T
national award-winner was Ball State University's
Global Media
Network. Thirteen institutions on five
continents are members. The technology they share
makes it possible to have highly interactive class
meetings (not just talking heads) with faculty and
students from pairs of institutions. A major goal of
the program is to provide initial international
exposure to lower division students in the
University's core curriculum.
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Language learning has been a
focal use of technology in the academy going back at
least to language laboratories. Many important
educational uses of technology had their start in this
field, and then radiated to other disciplines. Perhaps
its pioneering role is due in part to the fact that all
of higher education involves learning some kind of
'second language.' In this area of the web site, I'd
like to mention some unusual uses of technology that may
help expand our imaginations.
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Use of massive, multiplayer role
playing games as a context for learning a language.
The University of Maryland's
ICONS Project
has occasionally offered such simulations for
students in many institutions and sometimes from
many countries (e.g., diplomatic negotiations about
environmental policy, complete with language
translators) for many years. Recently,
NITLE's Brian
Alexander noted this
use of "World of Warcraft" for learning Spanish.
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Technology is playing a role in
expanding study in (and about) other cultures.
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The web provides more options to see
other cultures, from the inside, by examining their
own web sites.
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The web also provides rich academic
resources for studying cultures of the present and
the past. One of the older and best developed
of these resources is the
Perseus Digital
Library, a massive, well-indexed web of texts,
images, tools, and other resources for the study of
classical Greece and related cultures.
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Simulated worlds give new options
for exploring the artifacts of other cultures.
This
recreation of the Sistine Chapel by Vassar in
Second Life gave me a far better sense of the layout
of the chapel than I'd ever gotten from a book.
(A free account in
Second Life
is required to tour the chapel, the rest of Vassar
in Second Life, and the growing world of facilities
there.
This page for an April 2007 TLT Group event
provides a gateway to a variety of resources about
educational uses of Second Life, including
evaluation materials being developed by our
Flashlight Program)
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This topic is described in Outcome 4 ("Pro-Active
Sense of Responsibility for Individual, Social and
Civic Choices")
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Authoring on the Web as a
way to develop and communicate
associative forms of argument as a way of
analyzing other cultures
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Imagine an undergraduate from suburbia reading a
translation of Beowulf or studying a novel of
Appalachia. How can the student develop a
deeper understanding of another culture where
familiar words may not have familiar meanings? How
can the student express that understanding in a form
that allows feedback? Prof. Patricia O’Connor of
Georgetown University has asked her students to
create web sites that annotate text from their
readings in two different courses: one on
Appalachian literature and the other on
monsters in literature. Students link each
selected word and phrase to illustrated commentary
about their meaning in context; terms used in the
commentary are themselves linked to other such
commentaries, creating a web of description of that
culture. Andrew Owen, one of O’Connor’s students,
analyzed a brief passage from River of Earth,
a novel by James Still set in Appalachia. Dozens of
phrases and terms “patriarchy,” “God’s green earth,”
and “homeplace” were analyzed and illustrated with
archival images. Owen’s analysis, like the culture
it depicts, has no beginning or end – each narrative
annotation stands partly on its own but it is
interlinked with, and given further meaning by,
several other such annotations. For more on
this topic, see our materials on
digital writing across the
curriculum.
In what ways do the
uses of information technology in the wider world have
implications for what all students in higher education
should learn? If you know of
examples that can be used to expand this web page, please
let me know!
- Stephen C. Ehrmann,
ehrmann@tltgroup.org
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"Beyond Computer Literacy:
Implications of Technology for the Content and Outcomes of a
College Education"
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