Abstract
Low-cost internet-based technologies are now widely available around the world even in areas previously de-facto cut off from the core of Western educational centers. These technologies enable us to build bridges across the North-South divide in our classrooms, allowing educators to add individual and truly global voices to the multiple sources of information their students are exposed to directly in their classrooms. This provides a low-cost and unique experience for students that adds often marginalized voices, views, and experiences to the agenda set by the global news media. This type of learning-experience is especially important to a new generation of students (often characterized as “millennials”) that tends to be more open to learning based on personal discovery rather than a passive reception of textbook-based arguments. This paper discusses the technological and theoretical implications of virtual encounters in a class-room setting and for scholarly collaborations, provides concrete examples, and demonstrates the use of these encounters for a discovery-based learning experience of concepts such as levels of analysis, agenda setting, bounded rationality, cultural and contextual-based theories, complex interdependence, to name just a few.
Joachim K. Rennstich
Professor International Social Work and Research Methods
My research interests include the long-term development of digital capitalism, digital literacy and innovative teaching-methodologies.