Crossing the Borders:
Summary of the Teleseminar Experience

by Mary Lynn Rice-Lively
University of Texas at Austin
May 2, 1995

Any and all copyright retained. This material may be referenced but not copied without permission.

	What happens when you open a classroom to 50 students diversified by cultural
heritage and political perspectives and separated by hundreds of miles?  Season
the mix with the usual disparate pedagogical and learning expectations ranging
from exploration of and experimentation with new technologies to broadening
individual understanding of simmering issues such as NAFTA and the Texas/Mexico
borderlands. What results from this concoction?  The product, in this case, was
the highly innovative teleseminar, entitled, Communication Issues Related to
NAFTA and the U.S./Mexico Border.  The Spring  1995 seminar grew from cooperative
planning between two faculty members from the University of Texas at El Paso
(UTEP) and the University of Texas at Austin (UT-A) and implementation through
teleconferencing. To best describe the teleseminar experience I turned to the
stories shared by participants in the teleseminar, as students and faculty
constructed and reconstructed their understanding of their class experience
through:
	
 
	o replies to surveys (five administered by various members of the class) 
	o participation in focus groups (two in Austin and one in El Paso) 
	o email musings 
	o reflections offered during a number of individual interviews and conversations. 
	
	These excerpts from student suggestions and observations honestly convey the
strengths and weaknesses of the teleseminar experience.  For me, however, it took
my first trip to El Paso a few days before the end of the semester to fully
understand the complexity of this new "classroom" that spans distance, ages,
political and cultural perspectives.  The realization that the usual class member
relationships had formed despite the challenges of the teleconferencing and
computer mediated communication.  The moment I saw the UTEP campus vistas of the
border and I stepped into the UTEP classroom and I knew it was possible to span
technological borders and to form relationships.  That first handshake across a
"real" table, squeezing of "real" warm hands and receiving smiling nods of
recognition of from my UTEP classmates confirmed the benefits of cross-class and
cross-cultural teleconferencing. The struggle to understand complex issues such
as the border, U.S./Mexico relations and, even, NAFTA began to make sense during
that face-to-face encounter.  The issues of the border and of U.S./Mexico
relations - technology, communication, politics, and economics - really were just
about people and their stories.
	

	Early in the semester students and faculty on both ends of the T1 line
connecting University of Texas (UT) whispered questions such as this, conspiring
to match mail addresses with faces transmitted through the TV images.  Blurred
transmission, sometimes faint, delayed or nonexistent audio transmission
complicated the usual class "getting to know you" rituals.

	This remark, offered not by a newcomer to telecomputing, but an experienced
networker, draws attention to a perception that the important issues of group
building and collaboration were dwarfed, in one view, by a distorted enthusiasm
for and importance of technology to understand borderland issues and to seek
solutions to borderland problems. Teleseminar students, nonetheless, had a
variety of opportunities to explore and to experiment with the following media
available for class communication:

	A variety of reasons motivated students in both sections to register for the
teleseminar. A border of another type arose among the class with interests
divided between learning new technology and networking skills and applications,
and a focus on the topic of the seminar (NAFTA and UT/Mexico culture along the
borderlands).
	

	Lessons learned from the implementation of this innovative seminar were
numerous and diverse.  Without question these lessons will shape future
collaborative teleseminars between the UTEP and UT-A campus. Selections  from the
diverse and thoughtful suggestions offered by the students follow:
		

This page is the work of Mary Lynn Rice-Lively in partial fulfillment of requirements for the seminar, Communication Issues Related to NAFTA and the U.S./Mexico Border.