September 2007 — News
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Cultural Exchange: LMS Bonds Texas Students with Denmark
In an example of bridging vast cultural divides through technology, students from a conservative Catholic high school in Texas are learning from college students in Denmark, and vice versa, through a Blackboard-based exchange launched last year.
The program was implemented to strengthen cultural, communication, technology, and language skills among students at Denmark's Roskilde Handelsskole, a student from Texas' Brownwood Senior High, and students at The Oratory Academy in tiny Pharr, Texas. Students collaborated and learned from each other through relatively low-tech asynchronous, moderated discussion board exchanges.
The results were so impressive that both sides are expanding the project this year.
According to Linda Gillis, educational specialist, educational technology for Region 4 Educational Service Center in Houston, which serves a million students, the program was conceived during a chance meeting two years ago. Gillis was attending an educational conference and met two educators from Denmark who proposed a collaborative project. As discussions ensued, she and the Danish educators began to map out a technology link that would allow students in both countries to learn about another culture and the world at large, to communicate via a distance learning tool, and to learn to use technology to present information.
As they talked, Gillis discovered that the sort of project they were discussing would address precisely the sorts of skills today's students need, and in fact matched up perfectly with a list of desirable twenty-first century skills from the National Alliance of Business. Those skills include interactive communication, inventive thinking, and quality results. "We were just amazed [at the skills match-up] as we started getting into the project," Gillis said.
The project was coordinated and administered through the Texas Virtual School, a Web-based learning initiative designed to meet the needs of Texas public school students and educators.
The first step was to set up an account with Blackboard, already the learning management system for both the Danish college and Region 4 ESC. "We started discussing ... what we wanted this project to look like." Gillis said. As the relationship developed, she discovered that the students couldn't be farther apart culturally. Ages ranged from 15 on the Texas side to 24 or 25 on the Danish side. Equally striking were the cultural differences: The Oratory School is a private college-prep Catholic school, largely Hispanic, with many students who cross the border from Mexico or who have parents who have immigrated from Spanish-speaking countries in Central or South America.
On the Danish side, Roskilde is a two-year business college, "very liberal and non-religious," Gillis said. "We had these two groups ... and yet it was such a successful project, and so amazing."
