I think that most people who have been involved in international cooperative projects of any kind will agree that communication among teachers is most important as the beginning. In the case of our Me and Media project, the two supporting groups, esp in Europe and CEC in Japan, recognized this and encouraged face to face discussions at the start in order to establish goals and create close ties. However in the case of this yearfs teachers, this close contact was not maintained once the face to face meetings were over. Even though we created a teachersf mailing list, only one of the three teachers in Europe maintained steady contact during the year. Even so, her studentsf activity was limited to letter writing, with very little independent research done on the themes.
In Japan, there was even less consistency among the teachers regarding communication. One reason for this was that the group depended too much on email communication and many teachers were not used to this. More direct communication - even telephone - would have been better. As an example, communication between the classroom teacher at Doshisha and the Project Coordinator was easy because they were working together in the same school. Anytime information or a question needed to be exchanged, an answer could be given in real time. Also, and this is very important, in the case of Doshisha, the teacher could often be reminded - you havenft sent in your schedule!h or gPlease tell your students today to answer the emailh. This is very important because teachers are extremely busy people with a wide variety of jobs and responsibilities and they can easily put such things in the back of their minds.
In most cases, only one of the other Japanese schools responded to most mailing list postings. A project cannot succeed with this kind of communication.
From our past experience, we knew that it was important for the students in various schools to develop friendships and stay in touch with each other. However, our efforts this year to do this were basically unsuccessful. We tried a number of ways to encourage this, the most important being that we created mailing lists for each theme group. In some cases, if the numbers of members in a theme were quite large, as was in the case with fashion and music, more than one mailing list was made; that is, the students were divided into 2-3 groups. The mailing list members and individual addresses were posted on the Me and Media homepage, and this was announced to all the classes. We asked teachers to encourage students to write mail to their groupfs mailing list.
Even here we had some basic problems. The teacher in Germany gathered letters of introduction from each student in her class. Because most of her students donft have their own email addresses, she gathered all the letters into a single letter and passed the information to her schoolfs network manager. This was in early November, 1998. One month later, her students still hadnft received any responses to their letters, so she asked the network person if he knew anything that could be wrong. gOh,h he said. Those letters that you gave me to send? They came back because we had the wrong address.h Of course she was very annoyed that he didnft report this to her immediately - her students had been waiting for 2 months for answers, when their letters had never been received.
Later, when the Project Coordinator received the student letters, he divided them and sent them to each theme group, but naturally the students in Germany were already very discouraged having waited for more than a month with no reply. Unfortunately, it seems that even after these messages were sent out to the theme group mailing lists, very few students responded.
Generally speaking there was very little email communication among the students. There is no way of knowing how many students even knew about the mailing lists, though all teachers were informed about them many times. When letters were sent out to all the teachers at the beginning of the project, only 2-3 teachers out of 10 would reply or in any way acknowledge receiving the mail. So we canft really imagine how many students knew about these mailing lists.
In fact, in the middle of January the teacher from Holland wrote to the Project Coordinator and said that her students wanted to stop taking part in Me and Media activities because they were not getting enough responses to their letters. The teacher at Doshisha International said that he had been encouraging his students to post letters and answer any mail their group received, but the results even from his class seemed to be very irregular.
In mid- February, the Project Coordinator interviewed a number of students in the Doshisha International class to find out about their exchange with other students. During these discussions it was seen that the amount of mail activity was different in each theme group. In some groups there was no mail exchange, but in other groups there were letters received from Germany, Slovakia, and Holland. Also recently, in the music as media group, mail had been received from Shinonome High School students. Even though both teachers and students had been reminded regularly about sending letters to their group lists, most students had not taken part in any exchange of more than one letter. There were many reasons given for this:
a) I wrote a letter but there was no answer.
b) I got an answer to my letter, but I didnft answer that because it came just before winter holiday time here.
c) I think someone else in my group answered it.
d) I donft check my email very often, so I didnft know when I got a letter.
e) Ifm really involved in my own work here and donft have time to send mail.
In mid-February, students in the Doshisha International class were asked: gWhat about emailing listsf - do you use them?h A group of students said, gWhat? I never heard about mailing lists. What are they?h Some students said, gLetfs see, thatfs something we can see on the Me and Media homepage, isnft it?h Some other students said, gOh yes, Ifve used them to write a few letters.h No student said that he or she actively communicated with others.
In reviewing the poor communication during the year, the Project Coordinator feels the following are the main reasons:
1) Many schools had technology problems of various sorts, such as;
Every few networked computers,
Elack of individual email accounts, so that all
activity had to
be filtered through a
teacher,
Elack of time for students to write email,
E lack of good communication
with or support from the network
manager.
2) Many schools had curriculum or class scheduling problems of various sorts, such as.
Ethe number of class hours which could be given to Me
and Media activities varied from 1 class in two weeks to two classes in one
week;
Ethe time in which students could use computers or
other media equipment varied greatly
3) Many teachers themselves had difficulties, such as,
- not having regular access to computers.
- not having the habit of using email regularly and falling out of the communication loop.
- not feeling comfortable or competent with different aspects of technology.
- lacking the necessary local support to try new things.
The Future:
At the end of the project (mid-February) there was a flurry of activity. Some letters came in from Shinonome High School to the Music as Media group, and the students at Doshisha have been encouraged to answer them. Students have started to post letters on the bbs to discuss Forest Gump. Doshisha students have sent back a self-introduction video received from Tokyo Kokusai Gakuen students after six weeks. It seems that students and teachers recognize that they need to communicate much more. The problem is, how can we start these kinds of communication earlier and make them more central to the work that each group of students are doing.
In the last meeting held by Japanese teachers at the end of January, 1999, it was decided that one way to increase each schoolfs commitment and participation was to have a number of small projects that classes could join, rather than having one large Me and Media Project. I think this idea has great potential, and I look forward to try this new approach in the structure of the project next year.
(hillelw@intnl.doshisha.ac.jp)
February, 1999
Translation by Yumiko KASAI
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