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CIAO DATE: 6/99
Long Live the Beta Version - Active Learning and Technology in the Information Age
Memoirs of a Cyberprof and a Proposal for the International Studies Association
*
California State Polytechnic University
Pomona, California
International Studies Association
40th Annual Convention
Washington, D.C.
February 16–20, 1999
There was a time, not so long ago, that in an undergraduate Introduction to World Politics course the answer to the question “what major event took place in the summer of 1969?” was simple. There you were, in the middle of an engaging series of exchanges with your students, highlighting the linkages between science and technology and the arms race, and the answer, of course was, Woodstock. Well, actually the answer you were looking for was the first landing on the moon during that famed August summer. Woodstock was, at best, part of another discussion on domestic influences on foreign policy issues and the war in Vietnam.
Times have changed. In a recent exchange, again, exhibiting the best active learning strategies I could muster, I posed the question “what major event took place in the summer of 1989?” Again, the context was a discussion on science and technology and the arms race. We all know that Tienamen Square, the collapse of the Soviet centralized state, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe and the beginning of the end of the cold war were events that are now seared in our minds from that summer, not so long ago. I should not have been surprised at the deafening silence that followed. Of course, 1989, was a very long time ago. Most of my students had no consciousness of those events in their pre-teen years. After what seemed an eternity, but keeping my best case method hat on, I managed to finally get an answer out of the guy in the corner fidgeting with his CD walkman headphones and wiping the top of his head in a good rendition of Henry Winkler’s Happy Days. The big event, he announced, was the commercial birth of the Internet.
Immediately, the class broke out in a collective sense of affirmation. “Why of course”, announced another student spontaneously and with considerable confidence. “We think of the Internet as something that was developed in the 90s but it was actually an 80s invention!” Light bulbs are going off everywhere in the class and I’m thinking myself how do you turn this discussion to Glasnost, the anti-nuke movement in Europe, and the breakdown of the bi-polar world. These were, after all, the key concepts and constructs of the discipline. The Internet was, at best, part of another discussion on the growing influence of technology on domestic policy issues and human rights issues in China.
And then it struck me. Both Woodstock and the Internet were the right answers to the respective questions about significance in 1969 and 1989. These were developments that expressed zeitgeist. The first step on the moon was, relatively speaking, little more than one small step for ‘mankind’. The U.S.landing the first men on the moon was a motif that helped to describe and even reinforce the idea that the “real” world of the 1960s, could be best understood by the World Politics community, in terms of states, Presidents, power struggles, a war of ideology linked to, and indeed often times informing the pursuits of science and technology. For most faculty, concerned with pedagogy and active learning strategies, events, whether those events are the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Landing on the Moon, the event-centric approach is used to help students develop both context and analytical tools for understanding the world around them. Dismissing Woodstock effectively reflected a value proposition on the faculty member’s part about what context, what framing issues, and what core concepts were important to making sense of the world. In the end, and certainly, with considerable hindsight, by the time we began to teaching about the Summer of 1969 in the 70s and 80s, we had reconstructed the meaning and importance of those events to suit the analytical frameworks we were trying to advance. In Popperian terms, while data was following theory, theory was actually constraining our read of the data.
Is it possible to imagine that the half-baked (and only partially correct) student intervention regarding the summer of 1989 was closer to some truth than I was originally willing to concede as I fretted on how to bring the case discussion around to the “real” events of 1989? At the time, I didn’t have enough good sense to let him, or any of the other student lemmings (as I often times thought this cohort represented) actually try and explain themselves.
Only recently, after having a chance to give a number of talks and facilitated discussions on “technology and its discontents” is the answer becoming clearer. Technology and its discontents, of course, is a play on Sigmund Freud’s last major and most sweeping contribution in his lectures collected in “Civilization and its Discontents”. From Freud’s perspective, technology had a built-in dualism and dynamic. On the one hand, technology was one of the great “civilizing” tendencies in a world largely dominated by self-centered, selfishness, egotistical behaviors of individual men. On the other hand, for Freud, the technological and scientific revolution had rendered humans “prosthetic gods” as we mastered science and as the technology become ubiquitous and omnipotent. The dialectics of Freud’s analysis, a term, I know, that has lost all fashion, is of considerable value to understanding the value of the Internet. At the same time, the growing sense of surplus powerlessness that we now experience on a daily basis, a term coined by Michael Lerner, necessarily tells us something about the general malaise and paralysis of our discipline and why, ultimately, the answer to the summer of 1989 might be the Internet and not the end of the framework of super power politics.
The Internet As A Paradigm Shift In Pedagogy
I have been using computer-mediated communication as a mainstay of my active learning toolbox since 1986. The use of the apple HyperCard stack for term paper work was an assignment offered in the very first summative assessment technique I offered in the fall of 1986. In the winter of 1987, with the burgeoning growth of bitnet accounts in teaching environments, international simulation games were enhanced through the elaborate use of electronic mail to exchange and distribute strategic missives among all the participants. Multi-session U.N. Summits were enhanced by the intensive use of email that enabled and supported student attendance to the subject matter of the course well beyond the limited boundaries of the classroom experience. World Press reporters could seek comments from spokepersons and in turn simulation participants could read about the issues of the day through early push technology originating from the World Press and other disinformation services made possible through the technology. Simple text-based interventions were enhanced with other technology mediating learning tools including the use of radio documentaries, analog video editing experiences, shortwave radio diaries, and the integration of film and breaking television news stories in the in-Class learning environment. Time on task, a key element of good teaching principles has always been made easier through the engaging nature of the medium.
In 1989, along with 4 or 5 other faculty colleagues in institutions around the country, equally committed to active learning strategies for our students, we began to extend the geographical boundaries of the world politics experience to include interaction between our students at multiple institutions for a limited series of interactions. And although our ability to make use of the technology to support student-to-student collaboration and interaction has become more sophisticated over the years, as early as 1989, the asynchronous power of the medium, in terms of anytime, anywhere learning was apparent and seen as invaluable to extending the opportunity for student to student interaction across time and space. Gopher had not yet been born at the University of Minnesota and so the tools at our disposal were limited and yet for most of us, student and faculty colleagues alike, the power of the medium and its prospects for enabling collaboration was as seductive as it was powerful. Student-to-student collaboration, an all too often dismissed part of the active learning strategy had advantages clearly mapped to higher-level and critical learning skills. From the students’ perspective anytime-anywhere had its clear existential advantages. I have a distinct recollection of the first three-person mini-term assignment involving students outside of Boston, in Waterloo, Canada and out in Phoenix Arizona. The team intuitively moved the midnight deadline from the East Coast to the Midwest and final out to Arizona.
Asynchronous communication also facilitated greater flexibility and collaborative opportunity for faculty participants. The International Political Economy (IPE) Network, one of the very first professional listservs on the Internet, was originally begun in 1990 being administered from a PC clone running a 20 Meg hard drive and an 8088 CPU. The reality of the academy, most everywhere in the world, creates isolated intellectual existences for most faculty in the IPE world. If there was an international affair faculty cohort on our campuses there were but a handful of colleagues interested in the relationship between international politics and global economic dynamics. Opportunities for sustainable professional relationships were hard to come by and anomie was the de facto nature of one’s existence. The creation of the IPE Network, and subsequently, some half a dozen years later, similar professional e-mail lists associated with the International Studies Association, facilitated a new form of communication between scholars and teachers. The annual professional meeting was now bridged through the information highway in exchanging topics of professional concerns, including course preparation, text adoption recommendations, the integration of technology into the curriculum, active teaching strategies and plenty of substantive exchange on IPE topics. As our understanding of the world changed in the late 1980s, the IPENet became the space for scholars, educators, and practitioners in our field to explore the impacts of those changes. While scholarly journal contributions remained typically wedded to analytical frameworks that moved as quickly as the review process for journal publications, and professional meetings required commitments of more than six and nine month of advance reflection, the IPENet was, and remains, a just-in-time space for reflection and exchange.
In 1992, the first Virtual International Political Economy Research (VIPER) seminar was conceived in gopher space providing for a collaborative on-line learning environment to support learning across territory and temporal dimensions. From the outset, VIPER was an experiment in research and education, mediated through computer networks, electronic mail, and electronic archiving of materials. It has sought to create an international dialogue among students and scholars in various countries on several continents, creating for students a global forum in which they may and are expected to participate on an equal basis. In the process, discussions and an exchange of ideas on the course theme and topics among scholars and students from other cultures and societies has vastly enriched the learning experience. While topics are developed by faculty collaborators, course themes have ranged from broad surveys of the discipline to special topics virtual seminars on global cities, popular movements and the global political economy, IMF structural adjustment, NAFTA and culture, women and development, and technology and global society.
As a component of the weekly scheduled group sessions, students explore the virtual topography of computer networks (or ‘cyberspace’); examining the nature and content of the vast pools of information posited there; developing competence and skills in computer-mediated research and communications; and learning the praxis of building and using a particular information medium (computer networking). From an active learning perspective, VIPER and the many iterations of on-line instruction that I have developed since that first experiment have revealed at least three additional variables that distinguish the on-line learning environment from the typical in-class experience.
Gopher’s most important innovation was the notion of hypertextuality. Over the millennia, recorded human history has fallen victim to the limits of technology to record, by and large, linear representations of complex and multi-dimensional realities. The medium of course is the written word recorded on parchments (whether animal skins or paper). Philosophers of science typically associate the dominance of linear reasoning in western thought and practice with Cartesian logic. Over the centuries, whether in ancient rabbinical interpretations of the torah scrolls creating commentaries that physically surrounded the primary source material on a single sheet of paper, or in similar Christian and Islamist variations, our ability to afford the reader an active opportunity to explore commentary and secondary analysis has been highly restricted. Conventions like footnotes and endnotes are simple representations of the awkward and usually relatively ineffective methods for representing opportunities for discovery. Embedded in this deep cultural practice is a conception of space and time that anthropologists sometime call monochronic time, a course of reasoning that is governed by the linear and direct movement from point A to point B. Monochronic concepts of time and space are typically distinguished from non-western deep cultural traditions known as polychronic. Not only have our concepts of hierarchy, power and authority been deeply impacted by monochronic thinking, so too are western concepts of economic transactions, the logic of the market, and very basic cultural practices. Textbooks in international affairs, for example, are typically bounded by monochronic reasoning matched only by detective books in terms of the tyranny of the author and linear reasoning. All the complexities of the world and human societies are distilled into analytical frameworks, key categories, concepts, and are restricted lenses through which we are taught to see the world. The very basic issue of English language composition classes is informed by a logic, which implies that in order to communicate effectively one needs to learn a bounded form of communication largely determined and delimited by the medium. Hyperlinks on the Net has had the messy effect of challenging all of those realities. Learning in a hypermedia world is now, more than ever before, the challenge and the responsibility of the learner. Affording the student the opportunity to discover and to experience the meaning of serendipity and the “a-ha” factor that we use to tell students about when referring to the wonderful experience of scanning the old dusty shelves in the library stacks is more readily available than ever before. Hyperlinks allow the author to create a gateway through which the reader is invited to join new avenues of discovery and insight. Hyperlinks, so much a part of the experience on the Net, has created a technological bridge joining the monochronic world of the west to the polychronic world of the rest of the world. Students exploring background material made available concerning a case on negotiations on high definition TV standards may find themselves able to explore a range of regional and international institutions, decision makers, technologies, economic actors, and products by doing little more than clicking a mouse button from a well developed faculty page providing selective background materials on the case itself. The positive value of boundless discovery process is limited for most traditional learners and teachers alike. Learners have been socialized to ask “what do I need for the exam” and many teachers feel constrained by the “need to get through the material for the term”. But hyperlinks are a core reality of the Net and challenges everything from how to prepare students for English composition classes (learning to write a college essay, or perhaps learning to write hypertext marked up essays on the world wide web?) to the growing reality that access to hyperlinks avails most students equal or even advantaged access to the most important scientific, economic, and political information upon which the professor asserts his authority as “expert”. Back in 1992 when VIPER was first launched as a gopher project, students embedded links in their term work to other on-line content areas. Drafts of student term work were made available on gopher to facilitate collaboration among the students and of course we continued to build on our earlier efforts associated with listserv discussion groups and the use of email.
By 1994, the first notions of a different kind of hypertext mark up language began where gopher and software and lynx left off. Although gopher and lynx could support access to non-text-based attachment and other digital objects, they were, at their core tools for text-rich documents. By the third offering of the gopher course, it became apparent that there were important pragmatic limitations to the value of these text-based products. Gopher and lynx, like much of traditional higher education engaged in highly restrictive methods of working with the human sensory system. Bounded again by the medium, there are innumerable challenges associated with the standard lecture/seminar format followed by paper/oral presentation combination that underlines so much of our pedagogy. With the introduction of the NCSA’s first web browser it became possible to begin to address the multi-sensory nature of human learning. The Net and other technology mediated instruction is a major corrective and affords considerably higher degrees of access to learning opportunities. Multimedia not only makes learning come alive for students challenged by limited proficiencies in written and oral traditions, multimedia (pictures, sounds, video, music, virtual reality, and even smells) are actually more directly linked to our most acute senses associated with long term knowledge acquisition. This is not only helpful on the receptive side of acquiring experience, the ability to express understanding, insights, and analytical complexities through the multimedia medium has also afforded many students with opportunities to development critical and creative skills that would simply not have been possible if they were limited to written essays and term papers. For large number of students in my class it was easier and a richer experience to work through a story-board for a video production on the rise of hypernationalism in the post-cold war world than to try and develop a written thesis and gather in a written fashion the evidence that they could marshal using technology. Multimedia technology allowed my students to compile a 6 part group project with sound tracks, photographs, and even historical footage on Politics, History and Culture of Zimbabwe. The experience was so engaging that students in the course organized a 10 week summer seminar trip to Zimbabwe to explore their in-class experience. On-line, NCSA’s web browser brought color pictures, graphs, charts, and even audio files of speeches and music to the web. Early student authoring on the web supported collaboration, hyperlinks, ease and frequency of feedback, access to learning, and an insatiable commitment on the part of the student to become involved in their subject matter. Learning was now playing and in turn playing become the key success factor to introducing students to the commitment to life long learning and an excitement around ideas, people, and the making of history.
Finally, as web technology began to mature in the second half of the 90s, the transformative qualities of the Net began to render themselves more meaningful in a broad manner. The explosion of information and access to information has challenged the most basic nature of communication and interaction at the university. The organizing principle for routing traffic in the learning environment has been transformed. Learning from the beginning of time has been of the form known as route directing (I talk to you, she broadcasts to us, “turn taking”). The Net, due to its origins in the script writing of a post-nuclear world, was in its very design based on no organization. The message keeps its own gate, is route oblivious, carries its own homing device. The new anatomy of communications architecture contributes to the loss of central control and hierarchical decision making and authority. This was the central design feature of the Net, a message without a messenger, power without an originating intent to be powerful, influence without an explicit effort to be the influencer. Decision-makers in the most senior positions in the institution are now accessible in a manner that redefines their ability to make autonomous decisions. In the on-line classroom, as the faculty member it is very easy to experience “death of the author”. Your voice, attached to your message to the class carries no authority beyond the quality of the message. There is little ability to communicate body language and limited opportunity to actively pursue working on the guilt associated with pulling out answer from students. Indeed, the decentralized nature of the Net is at once high democratic and while the faculty member does not start the class by walking into room, quickly establishing new norms, rules and principles for interaction and etiquette.
Nearly 15 years ago we discovered the power of the Net was grounded in our ability to exploit asynchronous learning opportunities. The anytime anywhere features of the Net have turned into a corporate slogan however at the core the Net is the most non-hierarchical and widely accessible space for education — ever. Over nearly 15 years or so, technology mediated education has matured and has taken advantage of new technological capabilities. The key differentiation features of the Net include its enhanced capacity to support multi-sensory learning, hypertextuality, interaction and democratization of the learning environment. Finally, patterns of communication have been radically altered leading to both challenges and opportunities. The experience of those faculty who have been involved in any of dozens hybrid on-line instruction experiments have also generated tough questions.
Re-Visiting Some Harder Questions
From an active learning perspective, VIPER and the many iterations of on-line instruction that I have developed from that first experiment have been informed by Chickering and Gamson’s 1987 publication on the 7 Principles of Good Undergraduate Teaching Practices. Overtime, VIPER matured into the Global Political Economy virtual seminar and ultimately helped to inform the development of Cal Poly Pomona’s Digital Summer School.
Continuing to leverage technology to realize and even extend best teaching practice has been at the core of my academic and administrative efforts for more than a decade. The list of key elements, including
challenges not only pedagogical methodology but ultimately impacts the ontology of the international affairs subject matter.
The traditional Introduction to International Affairs course is among the larger course offerings in most political science departments. Strategies for combating large class size disenfranchisement, alienation and passive learning environments have been among the major challenges of the active learning community. While there is something romantic and nostalgic about the fabled priestly learning environment of one-on-one learning, we continue to strive to reduction of classroom size as the sine qua non of learning. When surveyed students remember their “best” college experience as typically being associated with the discovery of a faculty mentor. Our on-line experiences have involved some large classes and we have used virtual tutors with 5-8 students to work towards the approximation of the low ratio of students to experienced instructor. We also obviously support threaded discussions, chat rooms, email, and other forms of student-faculty contact. However, if we take the first principle seriously, it becomes important to realize that faculty-student contact is a necessary but not sufficient condition for enabling good learning. Indeed, both faculty and student alike typically remark that faculty access on-line far surpasses the experience in the lecture hall and typical contact (office) time. The reality is more muddled. None of the structurings associated with supporting student-faculty contact on-line or based on in-class experience guarantees a positive outcome. The central issue is to challenge the deeply structured view that learning occurs when faculty deposit knowledge into the students open mind. For most of us, we learned our subject matter when we were challenged to teach it in front of others. The reality is, however, that we can not expect to teach anyone anything more than what we ourselves experienced as students. This is a disconcerting admission and challenges some of the core values of the academy and our professional lives. Hierarchy, power, and authority are the reinforcing concepts that inform both the subject matter of traditional international affairs as well as the very structuring of the traditional environment (the classroom) within which we learn about the questions that matters. The implications of the technology are not insignificant for either student or instructor. The decline of the presidency, of centralized power in general, the tensions between fragmentation and growing vulnerability to anarchy and the logic of global capital are mirrored in the daily lives of faculty and students. The same technology and its associated impulses has challenged our own authority in the classroom and we find ourselves caught between professional practice without rules (the equivalent of fragmentation and growing anarchy) and the assertion of universal truths. Not unlike the introspective soul searching for meaning in the traditional disciplines of international affairs, it is nothing less than our own identities as faculty that are being challenged by factors informed by technology.
Student collaboration is a key dimension in the Internet age. For many of us in front of the class, student “group” projects is something we dismissed from our own experience as a technique that tends to produce free rider effects. After all, we are the one’s who survived a fairly rigorous and at times painful, alienating and anti-social process of individual assertion through our efforts to get into graduate school, comprehensive and dissertation defenses, and ultimately tenure and promotion. As many have envisioned, the Internet can be the ultimate clearing house for individuals to demonstrate mastery of a given subject matters through some form of outcomes based assessment. Individuals can interface with their computers until they are prepared to take a competency test, ignoring for the most part the social context within which habits of the mind and the heart take place. Indeed, mastery of subject matter is largely an outdated concept in the age of databases and digital libraries. So too the notion of isolated learning as a measure of individual accomplishment is an outdated notion in the Internet age. Most faculty are the exception and not the rule to individual character typologies. Most students will be confronted with social context, team environments, group interaction, and family and community opportunities for collaboration most of their adult working lives. Joining theory to practice becomes a social good and is more times than not a “team” environment whether in the kitchen, factory floor, board room, or community center. The asynchronous nature of the Net enables individuals to balance personal preferences with the development and production of group outcomes. Chat rooms and listservs support spaces that support active “listening” and relative anonymity which in turn supports the bonding of students across traditional cleavages like class, gender and ethnicity. The Net is color blind, indifferent to gender preferences, and incapable of pre-identifying your socio economic status. Opportunities exist to leverage this fascinating element of social identity on the Net in order to advocate for tolerance and joint stewardship of important issues that might otherwise be pre-destined to failure in a real-time environment. Musicians, disabled adults, young Arabs and Israelis, Cypriots from both the Greek and Turkish sides, Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, and rivalry gang members in downtown Los Angeles have all, to varying degrees and with varying degrees of success leveraged the technology to foster better communication, opportunities to build better understanding and many of the necessary (if not sufficient) pre-conditions for peace and harmony.
The only way to make the Net an active learning space is to create great content. After the initial excitement, the web has devolved into a large number of courses and other offerings being pasted on to the web and being offered as education opportunities. A poor quality syllabus on the web is no better a course offering than the poor syllabus offered on a photocopy. By and large, the web has not begun to be populated with content that differentiates it from hard copy. The only way to produce exciting content is to find ways to engage the best faculty on the campus to begin to take full advantage of the capabilities of the web. The university as an institution appears to be pre-disposed to acquiring technology but regularly fails to invest in the people who will make a difference to the lives of the students who attend the institution. There are but a handful of faculty support environments where faculty can expect to transform their instruction by interacting with support professionals. It has become common place for university strategic plans to embrace and even make commitments to becoming the technology university in a given city or region. It is hard to imagine a more exciting subject area for creating great content than for international affairs. While texts remain the mainstay for international affairs courses, too few publishers and on-line education firms have invested in non-traditional active learning content in our disciplines. Count the number of outstanding DVDs available on the history of the 20th century. When was the last time you had an opportunity to bring in the United Nations into your classroom? When did your course on trade and development use compressed video conferencing to tie your class into an international symposium on the same topic? Where is the new standard video offering on Paths to the 21st Century? How many case studies have multimedia versions? Where are the virtual reality experiences of the impact of currency crises in Russia and Indonesia from the perspective of peasants and central bank authorities? The Net and technology support active learning. However, the available portfolio of active learning materials leveraging the technology is still waiting to be developed.
Computers can certainly provide prompt feedback and measure time on task. Students can generate an infinite number of randomly generated practice quizzes and the computer can grade multiple choice questions and email students not only the right answers but also reference the student to the readings that deal with a given subject matter where the student may be experiencing some difficulty given his or her response on the computer-aided practice examinations. A student in my digital summer school course emailed me and told me that she had spent 8 hours researching my international Internet treasure hunt quiz. I’m just no good at using this new fangled technology. I checked her time on task and emailed her back that the computer had registered when she began the assignment and then again when she logged out and that she had barely spent 20 minutes on the assignment. So the technology has some monitoring and feedback features that can support some discipline and checking on broad comprehension issues. As we move toward portfolio evaluation strategies, computers can provide rich storage and easy access to student products and performances. As we have done in the Global Political Economy on-line seminar the server can keep track of early efforts, so instructors and students can see the extent to which later efforts demonstrate gains in knowledge, competence, or other valued outcomes. However, there are still very few international affairs programs or even courses that are adopting a digital portfolio approach. Once again the international affairs subject area would appear to be a prime candidate for experimental use of digital portfolios. Innovation and change have become endemic to the field since 1989. While traditional areas like political philosophy and social science research methods may be less inclined to creativity, international affairs would appear to be a logical candidate for such an initiative.
Publishing on the web has always been one of the most attractive ways of communicating high expectations to students. Students who are vested in the course subject matter take pride and ownership in their work being publicly available and showcased as exemplary. The same logic extends to faculty pages, department web spaces and even professional associations. There are some outstanding examples of web pages of individual faculty members providing a dynamic invitation to their students and professional colleagues to engage in their digital active learning space. There are fewer departments or associations associated with international affairs who can be pointed to as best practice examples. The two best examples of virtual access points on international affairs include the International Affairs Network at the World Wide Web Virtual Library ( http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/ianweb/ ) and Communications for a Sustainable Future (http://csf.colorado.edu).
The transformative possibilities of technology, the contribution that technology can make to active learning strategies, and the challenges that the technology puts before the international affairs community both individually and collectively are becoming more evident every day. The last section of this paper proposes an outline of a strategy to harness the potential of the technology to support further collaborative opportunities, instructional innovation, and active learning.
The International Studies Association, Virtual Universities, And The Connected Digital Community Of Scholars - A Proposal
The Western Governor’s University (http://www.wgu.edu/) and the California Virtual University (http://www.california.edu/) are two of the better known efforts across the United States and elsewhere around the world to provide access to on-line instruction. Most of the initiatives underway to support on-line instruction have been disappointing. The combination of vision, resources, and faculty and content development support for these digital universities has been, to date, singularly unimpressive. A recent review of course offerings in international affairs generated less than a dozen on-line, for credit courses in international affairs at any of the major virtual universities or on-line clearinghouse facilities in the United States. The opportunity to advance creative, innovative, collaborative, and active learning on-line is too important to the cross-section of disciplines associated with International Affairs to let the issue go undeveloped. The challenge of rendering the changing world intelligible to young people has become one of the great callings of the late 20th century.
The paucity of international affairs course offerings can be contrasted with other disciplines like engineering, business and Tele-medicine. These three disciplines account for more than 65 percent of all online, for credit, course offerings at the California Virtual University and the Western Governor’s University. In each case national associations have made commitments to support the efforts of individual institutions, programs and faculty persons. In the case of health care professionals seven national association of allied health care professional educators have collaborated to support the development of best practices in on-line instruction and other curricular support for the online Tele-medicine community.
In order to meet the challenges of faculty renewal and student comprehension of the changing world, the International Studies Association has an obligation to step up and take on the challenge of developing a presence of outstanding digital education opportunities in the area of international affairs. There is no other international association positioned to take on this task. The challenges in accomplishing this outcome are as difficult as they are important to the future.
As a first step, the international studies association should commission the development of an online clearinghouse of best practices in the use of technology to support learning and teaching. The site should consider follow the experience of both the Merlot initiative in the CSU and the Instructional Innovation Network at bestpractice.net. Both projects are committed to creating communities of on-line scholars and practitioners. The international studies association best practice project would represent the development of a baseline community of scholars and students committed to innovation and active learning strategies.
The second step would be to develop an international studies association bestpractice ranking and process of certification for excellence in online education. Courses eligible for ranking and certifications of excellence could be based at any accredited university or college affiliated with the ISA. In turn, the ISA itself, could sponsor a series of multi-institutional online seminars and course offerings.
The third step would be to take the now ISA rankable and certifiable offerings and develop an International Studies Education Network providing access to the best of the digital education offerings. The International Studies Education Network could feature both outstanding examples of active learning courses both online and in other settings as well as being supplemented with broadcasts of noteworthy ISA affiliated institutions hosting panels, keynote addresses or other activities. The International Studies Education network could also produce a weekly and eventually daily summary of the best of the international news stories for distribution across the network. Finally the International Studies Education network could include programming from the NGO and United Nations communities.
The hybrid digital education delivery system for the International Studies Education Network could include analog cable television, wireless digital cable, compressed video networks over ATM, streaming video, streaming realvideo, streaming audio, analog and digital radio broadcast and syndicated newspaper columns. Receive sites could either watch broadcast or multicast streams of a daily broadcast schedule or access any of the digital assets from the International Studies Education Network, either video on demand, or dial up realvideo on demand or audio on demand from the Network servers.
Finally, the International Studies Association would be in a position to offer an endorsed slate of course offerings through it Education Network and associated web spaces to the various Virtual Universities and other clearinghouses of online education.
Foundations like Sloan and Pew, Ford and Rockefeller, along with Federal and state funding could be sought in order to develop the International Studies Education Network project. Distribution channels, in addition to the Virtual Universities can also be approached to provide distribution networks and resources to the undertaking. Technology hardware vendors, telcos, and their respective foundations would also be a natural set of partners for the International Studies Education Network. Publishers, multimedia developers, NGOs, international publications, and the United Nations itself would all be important constituencies to approach.
The development of the International Studies Education Network project is a constructivist undertaking, broad in scope, non-partisan, multi-disciplinary initiative informed by a commitment to active learning and instructional innovation in the area of international affairs. If we want our students to become impassioned, caring, and thoughtful citizens of this globe — the process of learning about the world must be made as compelling as the problems facing the human race. The effective integration of information technology into the curriculum of the university, not as an end in and of itself, but as a tool for developing critical analytical skills and tolerance and respect for the diversity of views that exist has become the central challenge of the university in the late 20th century. Long live the beta version!
Endnotes
*: Prepared for presentation at the 40th annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, D.C., February 16–20, 1999. Back.
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