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2008B19Gerben

Computing across Cultures: Learning Intercultural Competencies through International Exchanges
Reviewed by Chris Gerben
cgerben@umich.edu

Upon looking back at this panel in a few years’ time, attendants at CCCC 2008 may not believe what they missed. Although the panel consisted of Christine Alfano and Alyssa O’Brien discussing their ground-breaking and innovative cultural rhetoric class within Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric, their discussion was as much about the technology as the theory and practice. Their main delivery mechanism, software owned by Marratech, is a combination instant-messenger, video conference, audio link, and PowerPoint presentation all in one easily navigable window. And, oh yeah, it was just bought by Google. The power of the system to be able to facilitate simultaneous instruction in such a collaborative and beautiful format is as exciting as what the instructors at Stanford (and Sweden) are using it for, namely to teach cultural rhetoric to college students across the globe at the same time. The dozen or so attendants who were present were pleased and privileged to be a part of this presentation.

The panel began with chair Marvin Diogenes explaining Stanford’s cross-cultural rhetoric project within PWR2, which is a required, sophomore-level course at Stanford that works on developing students’ oral and presentation skills, as well as crafting written and visual arguments that consider audience. Diogenes was filling in for Anders Eriksson, who in addition to Eva Magnussen, teaches at Orebro University in Sweden, but was unable to attend the conference. Due to an odd lack of wireless Internet access present in nearly every panel, the team from Stanford was unable to contact their Swedish counterparts in real-time by using the Marratech software. Instead, short videos were shown of the Swedish instructors displaying their workspace and how they see the project benefiting their own students. The panel also treated us to a brief Swedish news clip (shown entirely in Swedish without subtitles) in which foreign journalists travel to Stanford to document the project and interview Stanford students and PWR Director Andrea Lunsford.

The remaining portion of the panel was largely O’Brien and Alfano outlining their theoretical background and practical guidelines for using the software in their well-designed course. The goal of the course is to, according to O’Brien, “develop intercultural competencies” through collaborative information by basing their practice in theories by Goswami and Lovitt, and Hawisher and Selfe. With the frame in place, Alfano then stepped viewers through a typical course using the software. Each class begins with an instructor—in our example, John Peterson, a Stanford PWR instructor—giving a brief lesson based in rhetorical theory. The speaker is seen and heard in a highlighted box. However, it is also fun to watch the boxes beneath that show the temporarily silenced students reacting to the speaker and taking notes. Once the primary lesson is delivered, students then enter smaller virtual collaboration rooms where they interact with their international counterparts to discuss the lesson and work on a task to demonstrate their understanding. After a short time, all of the members of the class then reconvene to the virtual auditorium where they take turns displaying their findings and collaboratively-authored reactions to the class. Within a short amount of time, then, students separated by thousands of miles are able to digest the same information, consider diverse audiences, and demonstrate rhetorical choices to show their understanding of the concepts. Sample student responses were all incredibly positive, and later Alfano told many anecdotes of students who had befriended each other outside of the classroom after class, which only extends the intercultural understanding aspects of the project.

Curiously, in the brief Q&A that followed, many of the attendants seem to only want to discuss more popular collaborative and social media, such as Facebook. Alfano and O’Brien handled these persistent questions with tact, as they explained the connections to writing, rhetorically constructing user profiles, and (perhaps most importantly) allowing students to continue dialogue along cultural lines that extend beyond the classroom. Perhaps without even meaning to, their responses echoed Cheryl Glenn’s earlier keynote address that asked instructors to work across differences. In an obvious connection, students at Stanford and Sweden are already doing this. And with any luck, if Google uses Marratech wisely, instructors of all institutions will be able to do the same thing in the future.