September 8, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 1999 Vol. 8 No. 1
Exploring the Real World Online
By Jim Woodell and James Gray
Real-life expeditions to several regions of the world, offered online by GlobaLearn, Inc., provide social and cultural connections along with curricular materials that help teachers engage students in active inquiry. Through the eyes of real explorers making actual expeditions, students in their classrooms can discover and become familiar with people and places around the globe. Their teachers can help them connect online experiences to curricular themes and everyday experiences.
Advances in computer and network technologies regularly promise educators new ways to enhance teaching and learning. Technological tools provide far-reaching information access and flexible use of data, while online media expand educationally oriented communication.
But even the most powerful digital tools and media have no pedagogical impact unless they can be used effectively by teachers and students to meet learning goals. Online expeditions at www.globalearn.com can help educators avoid potential pitfalls and build on the possibilities of online interactions to foster cultural understanding.
Connecting
GlobaLearn, Inc. is a not-for-profit organization that is now presenting
its seventh real-life global expedition online. (For insight into how the
idea originated, see “A Matter of Experience.”)
In these expeditions, real explorers—teachers, photographers, journalists, and other professionals—have visited Europe, Asia, South America, the Black Sea nations, the United States, and now the Eastern Mediterranean, documenting the cultural, economic, and physical landscapes they witnessed along the way and researching local environments and ways of life. In the online programs these explorers have presented stories and other research reports in a number of formats as they were conducting their explorations, using text, illustrations, video and audio, virtual reality images, and computer-mediated communications.
These online expeditions are designed to help teachers foster students' cultural understanding. The globalearn.com Web site, featuring a team of five adult explorers on each expedition, provides a variety of information formats and opportunities for communication about the content. Teachers and their students watch and listen as the explorers immerse themselves in other cultures. Through the explorers, they meet faraway children and communities and are inspired to tell stories about their own hometowns.
Fran Castiello, a fifth-grade teacher at the Irving School in Derby, Connecticut, describes how Arnur, a boy from Kazakhstan, stimulated her students to discuss their social knowledge: “My students commented on the similarities and differences among themselves and also between themselves and Arnur. Students often discovered that their ‘similarities’ list was longer than their ‘differences’ list.”
Opportunities
As Castiello and many other teachers have discovered, opportunities for social
connections are important for engaging students in interactions that help
them develop cultural understanding. Classrooms participating in an expedition
have many opportunities to interact with and get to know each explorer.
A
globalearn.com explorer and local student discover Machu Picchu, the site
of an ancient Incan city in Peru.
Participants first connect to the expedition by reading the explorers' journals. In each journal the unique perspective of an explorer emerges through his or her personal narrative. Based on these stories, students—and their teachers—often become engaged in the expedition as it unfolds and in related academic projects through the eyes of one particular explorer with whom they make a personal connection.
Rob was a student in Castiello's class who benefited from his connection with a globalearn.com explorer. (All student names used in this article are pseudonyms.) According to Fran, Rob had been having academic difficulties, but his problems lessened and he became more engaged in learning after he began to see the online expedition from the explorer's perspective. Now, several years later, Rob still writes regularly to the staff at globalearn.com to tell them about his academic successes.
Visiting
Expeditions at globalearn.com also foster connections with students and others
in the host countries by having the explorers spend real time with young people
in each of the cities, towns, or villages along their expedition routes. The
explorers then write extensive profiles of each host student from the student's
perspective.
By including information on the students' daily schedules, their family lives, and their communities, these student biographies give participating classrooms firsthand views of life in other cultures.
The globalearn.com site further enhances connections among participating classrooms using two-way communication media. After discussions begin in a classroom, teachers and students can post their ideas in the Explorer's Club, a moderated message board, and in the Gallery, an area where students can display their project-related work. Students decide collaboratively which questions explorers should ask in their research, then submit questions to them through a feature called “You Investigate!”
Questioning
Other opportunities for communication, while not tied specifically to the
curriculum, allow for further social connections. Students post general email
questions to the expedition team through a feature called “Ask the Explorers.”
These questions, answered weekly by the team, range from favorite foods to
logistics and the challenges of being out on an expedition.
Explorers and host students also communicate in real time with participating students and teachers through scheduled, moderated chats in the online Auditorium. In addition, teachers may schedule time in the Auditorium to present experts from their own communities.
Every expedition at globalearn.com uses varied forms of communication to connect students to explorers and to each other so that they can construct meaning through interactions with real people in distant places. The expedition format used by globalearn.com reflects the belief that cultural understanding begins with genuine social interaction mediated by the explorers on the expedition and teachers in their classrooms. Academic learning through curricular activities builds on these fundamental social relationships.
A Better Way
As the examples in the accompanying article “Possibilities
and Pitfalls” illustrate, each online medium allows particular kinds
of interactions that can facilitate or impede academic learning. But well-designed
online expeditions can foster student interactions that enhance learning and
avoid some of the pitfalls.
Students
make connections on a resource map to sites on a globalearn.com expedition.
Expeditions at globalearn.com offer information, communication, and curricular materials designed to support the development of cultural understanding and maximize the potential of online environments. Perhaps most important, curricular activities and materials provided by globalearn.com help students make connections between online information, books and other classroom resources, investigations in their local communities, and their online interactions with explorers, hosts, and fellow students following the expedition.
By providing a wide range of options, globalearn.com allows educators to customize an expedition to their students' needs and interests. Teachers can choose only the activities and materials they feel are best matched to their students' individual learning styles, classroom social groupings, and local social and cultural issues. In this way teachers and designers at globalearn.com work in partnership to provide engaging online social interactions and information that can help students to make sense of faraway places and people.
Expanding
As globalearn.com continues expanding its range of online services, it builds
on six years of experience supporting teachers in their efforts to foster
student understanding of others.
Currently (February 11-May 12) students are following five explorers on GlobaLearn's seventh expedition. The preliminary itinerary included several places in the Eastern Mediterranean: Carthage, Naples, Rome, Athens, Ephesus, Aleppo, Tripoli, Damascus, Jerusalem, Petra, Cairo. The themes students are probing include ancient civilizations and empires, government and law, conflict and peace, economics, religion, population, ecosystems and habitats, architecture and technology, and mythology, arts, and literature.
Online expeditions may even inspire academic efforts that enhance the social development of young students. As Rob's story illustrates, online social connections with a role model can motivate students to study harder. While students having academic trouble often act out their frustrations or simply give up, Rob found the inspiration to apply himself to his studies. As he explained it, he wanted to succeed so that he too might someday become an explorer.
Understanding
Concern for children and adolescents who increasingly inhabit educational
and other types of online worlds leads us to hope that ultimately they will
construct genuine forms of interpersonal and intercultural understandings
from these experiences. Educators and parents want youngsters to develop the
skills and attitudes that will serve them well in the face of increasing globalization
of commerce, culture, and educational experiences.
Murat
Armbruster, founder and president of globalearn.com, helps students discover
a distant culture.
Online services such as globalearn. com offer the opportunity for students to learn about themselves and their local communities as they expand their understanding of distant individuals and cultures. Indeed, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz observes in “The Uses of Diversity” (in Robert Borofsky, ed., Assessing Cultural Anthropology, McGraw-Hill, 1994), understanding others can help us to know ourselves—to understand better who we are and are not, and perhaps who we could become.
Jim
Woodell is director of online productions at globalearn.com (www.globalearn.com).
He is also an instructor in technology and curriculum reform at the Graduate
Center of Marlboro College (gradcenter.marlboro.edu). Jim can be reached
at jwoodell@globalearn.com.
James
Gray (www.eternal.net/jgray) is a graduate of the doctoral program in Human
Development and Psychology at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
He has recently begun his tenure as a postdoctoral scholar researching Tools
for Learning Communities at the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies
(www.cilt.org) and may be reached at jgray@post.harvard.edu.
Click here to access the Possibilities and Pitfalls Sidebar that accompanied this article.
Click here to access A Matter of Experience Sidebar that accompanied this article.