Una’s Blog

I just finished looking at Sergio Chaparro-Univazo’s online powerpoint presentation Some Issues on LIS Education and Collaboration in Latin America (2005). In this presentation Chaparro-Univazo asks questions such as: why collaborate, why should we cooperation with Latin American Library Schools, and where should we start?

The link between the developing nations and the developed ones (like Australia), especially in the area of education, has always been of great interest to me. As Chaparro-Univazo asserts, online education offers a wide array of possibilities for enhancing the collaboration process. Collaborating with students in classrooms in areas of the world that are almost the opposite to their own is an ideal way begin students thinking about issues such as social justice, poverty, human rights and racism. In this way collaborative internet activities would complement and connect well with an HSIE unit and values.

Of course there are many many problems with this idea. Online education requires IT infrastructure that is not available, or is limited, in a lot of Latin American countries. However, Chaparro-Univazo suggests one place we could start with this endeavour would be with agencies and international organizations that promote cooperation (such as The Educational Portal of the Americas, and United World Colleges). He also outlines many reasons that this area must be approached in a careful way, which i completely agree with, however, I feel it is important enough, and would have enough benefits to make it worth the effort.

Image From: http://www.educoas.org

I just read the article Wherefore art thou, telecollaboration? by J Harris (2002). One of the main ideas in this article is that research shows students are using the internet in classrooms primarily for exchanging information in different ways, not for projects that focus on discussion and communication. The latter of which has proven to develop students higher-level social learning and problem solving skills.
I found this article interesting because it talks about using the internet in another way, taking the next step almost, in the classroom. It outlines the benefits of devising programs that require students to use the internet in a telecollaborative way, interacting and communicating across and between classes, schools, and countries. This type of thinking and discussion would encourage a very global mindset from both the students and the teacher.
This idea is very exciting for me. It is exactly what I would like my students to one day think about. The problems with actually incorporating these types of computer skills and activities into a program have been pretty substantial so far, however. So obviously it is going to take some work and more trials and experiments to get it well intergrated into a curriculum.
I think this type of project would work well with topics like media studies. One good idea i found in the article is the Global Novel Project.

Image from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Internet_map_ 1024.jpg/300px-Internet_map_1024.jpg