Globalization and the Information Society Seminar

USA - South Africa

Winter 1999 - present

The Alliance for Community Technology helped launch yet another bold experiment in distance-independent education. Using a cluster of commercially available, Web-based technologies, a course is being delivered, simultaneously, to over 30 from 3 (sometimes as many as 5) participating universities: University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI), American University (Washington, DC), University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa), University of Pretoria (Pretoria, S. Africa), University of Fort Hare (Alice, S. Africa). Each Winter semester (January-April) students connect every week to a virtual auditorium to listen to a real-time lecture, interact with the professor and other students, ask questions, and make presentations to the class. During the rest of the week students engage in a variety of asynchronous activities in their multinational teams: holding online discussions, collaboratively creating reports and documents, exchanging project-related files. Not surprisingly, the course's theme is "Globalization and the Information Society" and the rationale behind delivering it in this way is twofold:

1. to make it possible for students in remote locations to enroll in a course not offered at their alma mater
2. to give students in the course the opportunity to experience first-hand the practical implications of information exchange in a global environment

(For more information about the course please visit its Web site.)