Excerpt from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/27/02
http://chronicle.com/free/2002/02/2002022701u.htm
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Tufts Students Study Sociology and Politics Online With Students in
Africa
By SCOTT CARLSON <mailto:
scott.carlson@chronicle.com>
This spring, a group of students at Tufts University have a rare
opportunity to study with African students -- without ever leaving
Boston.
Pearl T. Robinson, a professor of political science at the university,
has worked to set up online forums shared by sociology and
political-science classes at Tufts, the University of Dar es Salaam in
Tanzania, and Makerere University in Uganda. Together, the students on
two continents will study issues surrounding African labor migration and
refugees, and will discuss the issues online.
The shared forums are the second such project organized by Ms. Robinson.
A year ago, she worked with the two African universities on a course on
regionalism in African relations. In these "metacourses," as Ms.
Robinson calls them, each of the university classes follows its own
syllabus and reading materials, but the instructors work out a common
nexus, and hold online discussions and post materials around that
connection.
In last year's course, the connections between cultures yielded
revelations for students on both sides of the ocean. The American
students have far more access to online materials and database research,
and are able to share what they learn with the African students. Ms.
Robinson is able to track the number of times that the students log on
to the course site; she found that the students in Africa were online
more often than the students in America. "It was because for them it was
new, it was this resource, and it opens up their minds, their lives,
their worlds."
The African students, meanwhile, have a direct contact with the culture
being studied and have access to materials and points of view that they
can share with the Americans. In one discussion, Ms. Robinson asked the
students to imagine that they were going back in time to talk to
Africans, but with the knowledge of all the problems that Africa has
today -- warfare, genocide, AIDS, and so on.
"The American students were reluctant to be critical," whereas the
African students weren't, she says. "You end up being able to have a
conversation to have a greater understanding about why someone has a
different perspective. ... That's the kind of dialogue that can change
the way we think about international studies."
The idea for the metacourses came out of a sabbatical year that Ms.
Robinson spent in Uganda. "It was an attempt to try to make it possible
to maintain professional relations with the people in Africa and have
our students engaged in dialogues that take you beyond what you would
study with people in your classroom," she says. Although others had
explored ideas of bringing Internet technology to work in Africa, most
had concentrated on the technical setup, Ms. Robinson says.
"Almost nobody had focused on curriculum development. So my project got
funding because it was seen as a way of linking the notion of bringing
more computers to these universities and doing more than just basic
computer skills." The Ford Foundation gave her a $265,000 grant for the
project; the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have also given smaller
grants.
This year, some of the grant money paid for new computers at the African
universities and subsidized the cost of Internet service there. During
last year's course in Uganda, 25 students had to share six computers
among them. "They put this thing together with bubble gum and
shoestring," Ms. Robinson says.
Ms. Robinson will return to Africa this spring while the courses are
running. She says she will try to encourage the African professors to
post more material on the courses' sites, and will look for African
policy makers and other experts to participate in chats with the
students.