Using GV as an educational resource
Global Voices is frequently used by teachers and university professors as a resource and platform for students to learn more about international affairs. Here is a collection of some use cases of teachers incorporating Global Voices into their curricula.
Constructing a Textbook
Clarence Fisher is a Manitoba-based Canadian junior high school teacher who is often lauded for his use of technology in the classroom. On his blog Remote Access he describes how his students use iGoogle to construct their social studies textbook. Among the sources of information they subscribe to are one topic and one country feed from Global Voices.
Scholars DC Summer Program 2009
Eduardo Ávila, Global Voices' regional editor for Latin America, teaches a new media literacy course for high school students each summer at the Washington National Cathedral. For the 2009 program Ávila and his 9th grade students visited the Artful Animals exhibit at the National Museum of African Art. Each student was told to choose his or her favorite animal and then remember which country that animal came from. Once they were back in the computer lab they then wrote a blog post describing some basic facts about the country and incorporated one relevant post from Global Voices. You can see the results on their class blog.
Social Media and the Digital Disruption
Social Media and the Digital Disruption is the title of a class taught by Garrett M. Graff at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies. "The fourteen weeks of this class are designed to equip journalists and PR professionals to work in the ever-evolving digital world at the dawn of the 21st Century." Each semester Graff asks his students to "go to Global Voices Online, which rounds out the bloggers around the world, and pick a country that begins with the same letter as your name (to get the country listing click on countries in the upper right-hand corner). Explore that country’s blogosphere and write your blog post of the week about your findings." An example of one student's review of Global Voices' coverage of Kenya is available here.
Social Media and the Global Conversation and Citizen
Robert Berkman is an Associate Professor of Media Studies & Film at The New School in New York. For his Spring 2008 Introduction to Social Media graduate level class he gave his students the following assignment:
"Go to the Global Voices Online site. Go to the "Topics" pull down menu on the upper right. Choose a topic you are interested in, browse a few bloggers' postings. Then tell us here what topic you chose, and what you noticed or learned from those bloggers that you think would be difficult to find, or different than what you might find from a US mainstream source, or even from a US-based blogger. You can discuss either the actual content, or perspective, style and approach. Feel free also to comment on how the experience of reading these blogs was different from reading about the topic from someone in this country (or your home country if you are not from the U.S.)"
GV's Managing Director Georgia Popplewell spoke to his class and answered their questions via video chat.
Communications Policy, Advocacy and Media Structure
For a class on Communications Policy, Advocacy and Media Structure, Lokman Tsui gave the following assignment:
Dividing the class in four groups, each group was asked to pick one of the following websites and to spend some time there to learn about the Beijing Olympics: Global Voices, the BBC, All Voices and IndyMedia. Each group reported back to the class what impression they had.
The exercise allows the students to see how each website gave a very different perspective & picture to one singular event. It is helpful in thinking about and discussing what factors shape and influence coverage by allowing them to compare the different websites, e.g. the importance of funding for high production content, or the role of advertising in attracting a particular kind of coverage.
What they found: The Global Voices team remarked how they learned about the Olympics through how other countries experienced it. The BBC team was struck how comprehensive their coverage was, and how high quality the production was (video documentaries), as well as already looking forward to the next Olympics in London. The IndyMedia team found the website not really useful in learning about the Olympics except for when protests and boycotts would take place. The All Voices team noted the often sensational nature of their coverage.
Lycée Ozenne collaboration with Global Voices
Since 2008, Global Voices has been used in the English classroom to advanced students of the Lycée Ozenne, a public high school in Toulouse, the capital town of south-west France. Audrey Lambert, a teacher in Toulouse and a Global Voices volunteer, assigns Global Voices posts as homework for her English students and publishes them during school breaks. These posts are then published on Global Voices in French, in the following profiles: