A Dialogical Approach to International Education

Ed Bice
The POP

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     Last modified: March 25, 2005

Abstract
Meadan is the Arabic word for a town square or gathering place. The POP's MeadAn project is an effort to create collaborative structures between the US and the Middle East in educational and journalistic settings. We will leverage emerging internet communication and collaboration technologies, engaged pedagogies, and, eventually, Machine Translation enabled platforms to drive substantive dialogue.

Our Jordan American Learning Project (JALP), which will connect students from select secondary schools in the US and Jordan in a project based, video enabled, and collaborative 'virtual classroom.' Our pedagogy is meant to cast students in an active role as both teachers and learners. JALP is a semester long course of study built around curriculum driven web-presentations followed by organized dialogical interaction. We will capture and archive this into a virtual textbook. Our partners include Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Education, and World Links Arab Region.

Our open access Machine Translation enabled journalistic intervention will allow users to engage in two-person closed, secure, and anonymous chat settings across language boundaries. Users will be able to import and translate excerpted pieces of media as a means of offering a comparative viewing emerging of events. Submitted dialogues will be archived into a searchable and self-sorting (by use and rating) database. This will, we feel, enable a 'dialogical journalism' of emerging events which we might 'drill up' into mainstream media. We feel this might serve as a tool to democratize global dialogue.