Time To Connect
It's time to take online cultural exchanges to the next level with a powerful social networking system. Watch as Ariel Sorensen and I create a persistent community of practice using JomSocial
It seems I've been doing online cultural exchanges for ages. Back in 2004, I met an educator named Ariel Sorensen, and we set about to connect our students using whatever web tools we could lay our hands on. Luckily for me, Ariel was deep into Flash Media Server, so we started out doing some very exciting synchronous video chats between his students at Kitakyushu University in Japan and ours at Namseoul University in Korea. We did some interesting variations, like a paper-tower building contest wherein we connected our classes with a live video web feed. One of the most compelling components was the exchanging of culture capsules: boxes of trinkets and objects from our local culture that we sent to our partner school. The culture capsules were opened during a live web conference, and the students queried each other about the meaning and origin of the objects.
Later, in the spring of 2008, I moved to an exchange with Nicole Shamas at Dubia Women's College. We connected our students in Second Life and created some interesting programming that included the exchange of videos, real-world packages (culture capsules) as well as in-world interaction. In the fall of 2008, I worked with Steven Moinester to join students here at KAIST with students at Kwansei Gakuin University in Kobe Japan. Our program included the exchange of group videos, forum posts, as well as synchronous interactions in Second Life.