Ava Greenwell and Amy Wu
With SKYPE and other online video tools becoming “the next best thing to being there,” what happens when chat turns to college classroom discussions and lectures? This session will focus on two university professors’ use of the Internet to engage journalism students from different countries on the topic of diversity in reporting. Students learned the importance of background information in storytelling by experiencing what it was like not to understand because of missing context. This experiment raised important issues about when and how we should use technology in our teaching. Hear how two professors’ attempt at a cultural exchange turned out to be a lesson in pedagogy and how they plan to expand their experiment.