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Students as Designers and Content Creators: An Online Multimedia Exchange between the U.S. and Spain
9/29/2003
Figure 1: MIT student Sarah Mendelowitz introduces preparations for a mechanical engineering contest.
The focus on college life continues within other areas of the Web page, with chat functionality, a presentation section called Teach Me (photos and text), and a calendar for posting upcoming activities. Users can go to the What’s New page to see recent contributions in various categories, configurable by time period. The Spotlight section allows users to contribute topics and photos; at times Spotlight themes remain within the confines of the general focus on college life, but often current events take precedence, as occurred with events of September 11, 2001, the Iraq War, or the ecological catastrophe off the Galician coast of Spain caused by the oil tanker "Prestige."
Fuzzy Identity
Currently anyone can download materials, but in order to participate in bulletin board discussions or chat, add links, or upload multimedia files, a user must register and be logged in. User profiles, available through the People section, can be as short as school identification and email address, or much more complete, with biographical information, link to a homepage, and a photo. Biographical profiles reveal linguistic as well as personal information, and demonstrate the complexity of identity categorization. Except for groups of foreign students enrolled in specialized programs, undergraduate participants from the Spanish side exhibit a uniformity of ethnic and religious background that contrasts sharply with that of their MIT counterparts, who at times are often second- or third- generation Americans with roots in Europe, Asia or Africa. Graduate student participants at the UPV in Spain are sometimes from Latin America.
The resultant mix of "otherness" creates what might be termed "fuzzy identity," where images, that reveal ethnic origin, co-exist with language, that belies various degrees of acculturation. MIT students become privy to a Mexican, Chilean or Ecuadorian take on Spanish society, and UPV students confront the multi-layered, "hyphenated" identities of many MIT students. The multimedia aspect of the project creates norms of online behavior distinct from other online text- or graphic avatar-based communities, where characteristics such as gender, age, ethnicity and appearance can be ignored, changed or masked by anonymity or invented personas.
Students provide most of the content. The pedagogical emphasis of the project lies in the need for representation and interpretation. Both English and Spanish are used throughout the website; students’ use of their native language is for the benefit of their counterparts in the other country. Students represent their own identities in various dimensions: national, ethnic, religious, educational/career. They also represent their college and its particular culture, and interpret the representations of others as well.
"Multimedia and the Internet enable learners to find a voice for themselves at the intersection of multiple time scales, to represent their own version of reality through multimodal texts, and to confront a broad public audience with that reality. It remains to be seen how foreign language pedagogy will adapt to such a paradigm shift." (Kramsch)
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