Students as Designers and Content Creators: An Online Multimedia Exchange between the U.S. and Spain

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Students as Designers and Content Creators: An Online Multimedia Exchange between the U.S. and Spain

9/29/2003

By Douglas MorgensternBy , Adolfo PlasenciaBy , Rafael Seiz

In the case of the MITUPV Exchange, the nature of the audience lies somewhere between the limited audience inherent within the confines of a classroom discussion or simulation, and the broader group referred to in the quote above. Through use of the project students become aware that they need to take into account differing culturally-based perspectives of the "other," and cannot assume that university systems, living arrangements, and expectations regarding friendship and family are easily translatable. For example, engineering students in Spain ask why MIT students take humanities courses. The mixture of engineering and humanistic content on a single webpage is an innovation for Spanish universities, where courses and careers are generally compartmentalized.

Spanish participants are also baffled by the smoking and alcohol restrictions prevalent in US universities, and are intrigued by the "hand-on" approach typical of MIT engineering courses, where design contests and competitions are heralded events. Initially it d'es not occur to MIT students that their counterparts in Spain would not automatically grasp the concept of a "prom," "fraternity" or "sorority." Some of the students in Spain offer photos of themselves with text captions whose affectionate or joking tone is interpreted as flirtatious by their counterparts in MIT. The Valencia students’ strong opinions on international politics, including how the United States is viewed abroad, also surprise many of the US students.

Students learn about these similarities and differences through the experience not only of exchanging messages but by examining the representation of the "other" in photos and videos. They also know that others in their own university community will learn from, comment on, and sometimes challenge, their representation of a particular aspect of the same university. In fact the nature of the audience has been a critical point from the outset. In post-use evaluations some students favor expanding the base to include more universities, while others prefer the more personalized feel of a smaller virtual community, with 100-150 students participating during any given semester. One student said she needed to see the photos of the students abroad to experience them as real individuals. Another student who visited Valencia after the semester ended said he was not "meeting" students there because he felt a prior familiarity from earlier contact.

Designed by Students

MIT has been involved in technology-based projects for language learning since the 1980s, many of which were undertaken in conjunction with other research institutions (http://consortium.dartmouth.edu/). and are related to other academic units (http://web.mit.edu/cms/ ) The original idea for the project arose from an MIT classroom simulation where students of intermediate Spanish design a "utopian university," coupled with the desire for a distance learning experiment between MIT and the UPV. We were also encouraged by the success of a different kind of inter-university online project for French (http://web.mit.edu/french/culturaNEH/).