Course in the air and flying

We are now just about four weeks into the course, and though we have had some difficulties, such as this week's snow that stopped the heartbeat in London, and some intital pressure on getting the hardware up and running, I think we can comfortably say that we are having a good deal of fun engaging in these trans-national seminar sessions.

Initially, well I guess still, I feel like an old man shouting on a mobile phone in a public space when speaking in the videoconference seminar - which is, of course, not necessary, since both the video and audio goes through very well. I guess it just takes some time getting used to. One of the UCL students noticed one thing that makes a videoconference seminar different from a regular seminar, apart from the obvious fact of us only virtually being in the same room, that we seem to formulate ourselves more carefully when speaking "through the wall" - we noticed that the individual contributions are very thougtful and more consciously responsive when doing a seminar this way. I had not thought about this, but I think it actually hightens the level of reflection and active contributions to the seminar sessions.

The best thing about the course is, I think, that we have an excellent group of students with just about 6 UCL students and 3 Danish students. Most of the UCL students are volunteers and are only auditing the course which doesn't leave them enough time to engage as actively in our students led group work sessions during the week as they would have liked, but here, fortunately, the Danish students are extremely active and make good use of the Moodle site we have created for the course. Read more about our Moodle site elsewhere on the blog. You can also see a photo taken by David of our videoconference setup seen from London. I wonder how it looks from the Danish side?

As you can see in Davids photo, we have set up our tables in a regular seminar fashion with a wideangle camera in front of us and a multi-directional microphone on the table. On the screen to the left we have an image of the Danish seminar room, and to the right we have an interactive whiteboard where we share a screen (using a NetMeeting application that allows us to shift control of the board). In the photo we can see ourselves on the whiteboard, but in the seminars we have our Moodle site there, a powerpoint, pictures, pdf files of texts or websites that we are discussing in the seminar. We still need the assistance of our technician in Aarhus, Michael, to set up the communication, but it looks really intuitive and I think we, Svend Erik and I, could manage all of the tech ourselves. I'll try to get more photos of our setup and some more precise technical stuff up on the blog soon.

We hear you loud and clear

Hi Everyone,

Here's the image I took with my computer during our second (my first) session. I thought the Aarhus assembly might like to see what it looked like from the UCL side.

David

UCL checks into our virtual classroom

A few days ago we had our first local meeting here at UCL, and we are all looking forward to meeting the Danish participants the coming week. Three out of the seven students met in the Access Grid studio (Diana, Natasha and Elena), and I think we all agreed that this is going to be quite an unusual and fascinating learning experience for all of us - we have been hit by some sort of malignant virus here in London, and we hope to have a full team ready to meet, virtually, the three Danish students (Lene, Christian and Jacob) and Svend Erik on Monday in our first video conference. You will soon be able to "meet" all the participants on the Moodle site.

As a way of introducing the course, I talked a bit about the rationality behind it; and we discussed what it might ad to the course that we conduct it across national borders, why are we using Moodle, hypertext and other WEB2.0 technologies as central tools in the course? One of the more complex and experimental issues is, of course, how the format and technologies of the course will feed-back onto the theme, Memory and Literature in a Globalised Culture. Will we, for instance, at the end of the course, be able to determine whether or not the transnational and hypertextual format of the course and its products will influence the way we think about memory?

We wont have time, I am afraid, to continue the discussion we had on some of the "memory images" we have collected in the Moodle database: the Lukasa, Luba Memory board, and Saxgren's photograph of a native-american Dane, wearing traditional costume in the midst of his Danish domestic setting, but we already took some steps towards exploring the mediated, encoded, nature of cultural memories, and the fact that heritage and cultural memory translate, in interesting ways, into other cultural settings - I am sure this discussion will continue with other materials in the weeks to come.

I am looking forward to meeting the rest om my UCL students and, not least, our Danish collaborators - I am certain we will have many transnational memories to share as the course unfolds.