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Students as Designers and Content Creators: An Online Multimedia Exchange between the U.S. and Spain
9/29/2003
Photo of the UPV (right) courtesy of Adolfo Plasencia
Foreign language students spend much of their time communicating with each other, and with the teacher, who strives to use language tailored to the perceived level of lexical, syntactic and cultural awareness of the class. Study abroad, a potentially transformative immersion experience, is an ideal opportunity for practice in less artificial situations; nevertheless, relatively few students are able to participate in a study abroad program.
One solution is to use the Web as a simulated immersive experience, so students can access authentic languages and images. Many educators concentrate on providing paths for students, or equipping them with enabling strategies to find useful paths themselves, through the vast quantity of webpages available (Perez). This solution favors reception, since the learner essentially collects, rearranges and analyzes extant material.
An alternative is to create a mechanism where the learner produces content as well as decodes it, and one means to this end is a Web-based virtual community.
The MITUPV Exchange (http://mitupv.mit.edu) is a bilingual virtual community where, since Fall 2000, students learning Spanish at MIT and their counterparts studying English and other subjects at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV) in Spain, communicate each semester by means of bulletin boards, photos and online video. There has been additional participation by smaller groups of students from Cambridge University (UK), the University of Texas, Austin, and other universities in Spain and Latin America. More than 1100 community members have registered, including several students from other European countries and Asia who learned of the project through a Wired News article from November 2002 (http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,56082,00.html).
Focus on College Life
Most college students are extremely interested in analyzing, critiquing and communicating their own university experiences and comparing them to those of their counterparts in other places. The MITUPV Exchange offers a structure for students to compare various facets of their experiences and while doing so, acquire additional linguistic and cultural knowledge. The principal webpage category is "University," which offers the sub-categories of Academics, Extracurricular activities, Athletics, Majors, Residences, Social Life, and Traditions. Within each category the user can choose a bulletin board, a series of links to other Web pages, or a multimedia section. The multimedia section contains photos and videos, accompanied by a title and explanation written by the person who uploaded the object, on subjects appropriate to each sub-category. The content of the photo or video ranges from a visit to a lab where students conduct experiments or build machinery, a glimpse of a party, campus concert or p'etry reading, to tours of an apartment or residence hall. Other community members post text comments to these media objects. Separate from "University," a category with the same structure is "Cities," which includes discussion boards, links and multimedia about the cities where the participating universities are located as well as photo and video visits to the students’ home towns or places they have visited within their country or abroad.
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