Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of the following story about two students who were active bloggers - one from Barbara Ganley’s creative writing class and another from Barbara Sawhill’s conversational Spanish class (see cover story) - is that both were initially very apprehensive about using social software, and they also considered themselves not technologically savvy.

Despite such misgivings, Geballe and Levine became model web-savvy citizens quite capable of using blogs to their educational advantage. These two traditional-aged seniors were excellent additions to Sawhill’s and Ganley’s EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Annual Meeting presentation, "The World Is Flat: Using Blogs and Skype to Create Communities of Learners and Cultural Literacy." Geballe and Levine presented very informative and interesting insights about their experiences using blogs and other new media in their classes at Middlebury and Oberlin, respectively.

Blogging the World Project

Geballe’s introduction to blogs in Ganley’s creative writing class ultimately gave Geballe the impetus to participate in the pilot of the "Blogging the World Project" for students studying abroad, which began during the 2005-06 academic year and is still going today. Students from Middlebury College, Haverford College and Dickinson College participate in Blogging the World. As noted on the Blogging the World website, these students, while attending to their work-study experiences overseas, maintain individual blogs "about their lives abroad, including written reflections, narratives, observations and analysis; photos; podcasts and audio files; and/or multimedia inventions. Reader comments and discussion are encouraged, as are links to other social software tools, like Flickr."

An Outlet for Expression from Siberia

Geballe spent her year abroad in Irkutsk, a city with a sub arctic climate located in Siberia, Russia. Her blog was appropriately named "Cyberia." She explained how providing personal reflections on her blog gave her an outlet for expression and room for responses from other students studying abroad. "That combination of experience and reflection seems to be the point of studying abroad," she added. "Everything became a blog entry. I wanted my blog to be as sincere as a diary but as informative as a publication."

A fellow Middlebury student who spent a year teaching on a Native American reservation communicated frequently with Geballe. "The blog was the one and only medium by which we felt comfortable communicating," Geballe noted, adding that their posts facilitated meaningful conversations that would not have happened by phone, email or in person.

Being located in such a remote place required her traveling to an Internet café, which was a 40-minute bus ride from where she was staying, in order to post to her blog. Her entries were first written on paper a week or two in advance and then transferred to the electronic environment. "The process was beneficial in that my thoughts could marinate," Geballe explained. "However, by the time I would type my posts, many of my opinions and reactions had changed dramatically. Typically, I would have to add a few introductory sentences, justifying my anger in the paragraphs that followed. In this way, the blog allowed for a combination of spontaneous and reflective writing."

When she returned to Middelbury, Geballe was surprised to find out that University of Texas students planning to go abroad to Russia were pointed to her blog for their pre-travel reading assignment. She added that she does not claim to be a technology expert as a result of her blogging experiences. "However, I did return from Russia with a sense that technology can be used as a reflection tool that writing cannot."

Blogging Brings Unexpected and Rich Learning Experiences

Levine’s blogging experience became a tool that generated a world of interaction and learning that she never expected or experienced before. Previous to enrolling in Sawhill’s conversational Spanish course, Levine spent a semester studying in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, located near the border of El Paso, Texas. Levin worked for Casa Amiga, a civil, non-governmental, non-profit association that helps victims of violence, especially women and children. When she returned to Oberlin, she explained that she wanted to expand on the amazing cultural experience she had in Ciudad Juárez and keep speaking the language. Sawhill’s conversational Spanish class fit that billing perfectly.

Levine noted that she ran into "numerous challenges" when figuring our how to blog, podcast and use Skype, spending two or three extra hours in the language lab, for instance, learning how to upload files. "It was awful sometimes, but I can honestly say that the benefits of learning this new technology really outweighed the setbacks." She added that Sawhill would always adapt the speed and the content of the course to the class learning curve. "I think that was invaluable. We learned from each other."

Levine also talked about how students read and discussed poetry, listened to Spanish music on their iPods, wrote about songs from Central America and learned about current events, such as the reign of Venezuela’s left-wing President Hugo Chavez. "By utilizing these new technologies, we were really able to take the exploration of these subjects to new levels," she said.

She called the Skype-generated conversations the class had with students in Spain and Argentina "amazing, because we did not have a set rubric. I did not open up a textbook and learn about flamenco in Spain. I talked to a student in Spain who had both similar and completely different interests." Additionally, an invaluable conversation was held via Skype with a Venezuelan citizen who discussed what it was like to live under the politics of the Chavez regime. "I can’t imagine that we would have had this kind of conversation via phone or a traceable e-mail," Levine said. "Skype really provided a new method of communicating that I don’t think we would have had otherwise."

Enhancing Cultural Literacy

Perhaps more important than all of the aforementioned positive learning experiences, Levine was able to tailor her final class project to a personal interest that, she said, ultimately furthered developed her cultural literacy of Northern Mexico. From her Ciudad Juárez/Casa Amiga experiences she learned about an atrocity against women in Northern Mexico known as the "fimincidios," for femicide, in which 400 innocent women have been murdered over a period of 10 years. Casa Amiga is dedicated to solving these murders as well as bringing these atrocities to the forefront of the Mexican government.

Levine started doing research on the femicide and posting information about it to her blog. She posted an interview about the femicide that she conducted with her superior from Casa Amica, and she posted pictures on her blog, which she took when she was living there, of some of the burial and remembrance sites. "I wanted to foster a dialogue about this and really bring it to light between the members of the class, just to have an understanding of what’s going on." To her surprise, "by blogging about it, I helped to create an international dialogue," she said. "Not only were my classmates commenting, and my professor commenting, but people from outside of our class started to comment on what I was writing." One of the outsiders was a mother of a 17-year-old victim. The mother drafted a letter that she wanted to be forwarded to the Mexican government that Levine gave to her former boss at Casa Amiga. "I did that just recently and hopefully some kind of connection will be established," Levine said.

Additionally, Levine was recently contacted by the editor of a human rights group publication out of the American University Law School, seeking permission to use some of her photos in a story about the femicide.

"To this day my blog remains open, and I engage with people from around the world in an area of study that is not only dear to me, but something that would have been lost had I not been in this course," Levine claimed. "I am able to keep my Spanish up to date, and I continue to enrich my pool of cultural literacy. I don’t think I would have learned what I did without these tools. I can’t imagine continuing to develop my language skills without using these tools."