The programs consist of multi-media projects (or webzines) that our teams produce in each town over a 4-week stay. Computers, digital cameras and videocams are provided, and the first week is spent learning how to use them in our portable MAC lab. The last three weeks are spent in the field documenting life in the community, returning to the lab to download photos, edit video and produce the web page.

Students are assigned to a four-person production team, which must find and produce four stories for the web. Each team member in turn is writer, photographer, videographer and web designer.

The course is a hybrid that combines classroom instruction and lab work with aspects of internship and practicum courses, including field work in a setting unfamiliar to student participants. The program is to be thought of less as a class and more as a professional enterprise, where students are employees working to produce a dynamic web documentary and faculty members serve as supervisors, charged with first training employees to master certain trades and then working with them to apply those skills.

Participating students are assigned up to nine hours a day to do work on the project. This includes time spent in class, in the field researching and producing stories, and in the lab completing assignments and coordinating the elements of each story. Students should be prepared to perform a variety of assignments and chores to support the effective functioning of the project.

There are usually seven specific course modules: Storytelling, Photography, Videography, Web design, Intercultural Communication, Podcasting and language/culture. Students will work to master these elements and work as a team to produce distinct web presentations. Students will also be evaluated for professionalism and initiative, two vital aspects of expert journalism.

The final aspect of the students’ evaluation is in citizenship. Students are expected to be respectful of the people and town. Students who receive the highest mark in citizenship are ones who take extraordinary action to become familiar with the town and its people.

Because of its setting, students will have a unique opportunity to learn how to access a foreign culture and to acquire practical language skills, rapidly -- using an immersion technique. The ability to assimilate quickly and to hone in on another culture’s values are indispensable tools for anyone preparing for a career in a field where globalization and multi-culturalism are becoming increasingly important. At the micro level, students will learn how “to read” another culture on its own terms -- thereby eliminating cultural bias. At the macro level, students will be ready to become facilitators in the inter-cultural dialogue that the modern world requires.