Crossing the Borders:
Summary the Teleseminar Experience

Summary Highlights

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.

The following are highlights from the full report of "The Teleseminar Experience."

		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. Seminar students (27
male and 24 female) ranged in age from 24 to 48. The mix of undergraduate and
graduate students brought to the seminar educational and professional expertise
in communications, computer, political and information science, Latin American
Studies and sociology.  Sixteen students reported fluency in Spanish, although
infrequently used teleconferencing or in group email messages.   Other students
reported language skills as diverse as Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Portuguese,
and an assortment of computer programming languages.
 
	"UT-A people thought the UTEP people were graduate students and might 
	have avoided coming across as arrogant and overbearing, if they had 
	known they were talking to ungraduates."

Distance and technologies spawned misconceptions among UTEP students, as well.

    "Some of the UT-A students came across as condescending, like they were 
    our saviors to lead us to new levels of technological and methodological 
    expertise."

One student, however, observed that the absence of face-to-face exchanges
thwarted the normal adjustment of initial impressions and misconceptions of class
mates. Survey responses revealed, indeed, a range of telecomputing expertise.  
Initially many UTEP students lacked both the skills to use and ready access to
email.

	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:
	
	o  Email 
	o  Teleconferencing Equipment 
	o  Usenet Newsgroup (accessible only to UT-A) 
	o  Conferencing, using TN3270 software and UTEP's MUSIC System and
   	   named CONF NAFTA 
	o  MOOing 
	o  Various Internet interfaces and tools including World Wide Web browser, 
   	   gopher, search engines, and telnet, a remote login protocol.

	On one hand, the technologies enabled class members to spurn the challenges
of distance and time, to reach out to each other, and to create a unified
learning experience.  On the other hand, the technologies also exaggerated the
differences between the two campuses.  A mid-term questionnaire predictably
underlined the significant differences in how UT-A and UTEP students perceived
the utility of the following communication media, including classtime with the
absence of teleconferencing.  (Using a Likert Scale of 1-7.)
	
			UT-A Average Value	UTEP Average Value

	Email			6.67				5.67
	Teleconfer		5.42				4.33
	Newsgroup		3.42				0.92
	CONF NAFTA		1.17				3.58
	WWW				3.17				3.58
	MOOspace		2.33				0.00
	Phone			4.96				4.33
	Fax				4.04				3.67
	Class W/O		4.71				5.08 
      teleconf

Specific examples of uses and reactions to each of the above communication
options further expand understanding of communication technologies' role in the
teleseminar experience.

Email: Not Restricted by Time or Space

	Many students described email as best used to communicate and to collaborate
on joint research projects.  For some, email offered a convenient and
non-intrusive way to exchange ideas, to broadcast events and schedules, and
sometimes even (although asynchronously) to chat.  Many UTEP students, however,
did not have convenient access to email, as few UTEP students had computers and
modems at home.  Additionally, the loan of Mac Powerbooks and IBM Thinkpads were
not available to UTEP students until several weeks before the end of the
semester, forcing the students to be dependent on visits to one of three busy
campus computer labs.  The UTEP campus computer labs offered an uneven range of
equipment from a small high-end multimedia lab, to the library's low end
collection of PC's and Macs networked to dot-matrix printers and the campus IBM
mainframe system. 
	Survey respondents noted to the pitfalls of email use.  For example, one 
respondent mused "it only works to the extent that everyone is on it and checks it 
regularly."  Survey and interview responses included frequent complaints of the 
receipt of "lots of email that doesn't apply to me," indicating as one student 
observed that "a lot of email may have been better suited for a newsgroup.  Why 
aren't we at least using a listserv?"  One UTEP students made the effort to travel 
to campus to access the system, expressed disappointment "when I go to the library 
[the site of one of three campus computer labs] and the system is down."  
Other class members, however, observed:
	 
	"I love using email.  However, I think people are overestimating my 
	ability to internalize information I receive through email.  I get those 
	incredibly long messages..." 

Whether by choice or by default email became the communication medium of
preference building a group email archive of over a megabyte of messages.

Peruse an archive of The Best Letters from the Net.

Teleconferencing: The Big Eye of the Camera

	For students on both campuses the teleseminar offered a first time
teleconferencing experience.  Some class members reflected on how the
teleconferencing technology was both intimidating or restricting.
	
	"Even though I have participated before [in teleconferencing], I 
	still feel intimidated."
	
	"I feel restrained by the equipment.  It is hard to hear the audio, 
	the video is jerky.  This new equipment should be better."
	
	Teleconferencing offered a communication and visual immediacy, that email or
newsgroup exchanges did not.  "It's the closest we can get to face-to-face
communication at a distance." Many students, however, expressed frustration over
the difficulty to interact personally, to communicate ideas effectively in a
spontaneous manner.
		
	"What is most interesting to me is the lack of visible cues available 
	to see what they are really thinking."
	
	"Just the fact that everyone has their own projects and they are 
	all coming at it from different angles and different background, 
	different departments, so there are so many things going on at once.  I 
	can't say whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.  I would say it is 
	just like anything.  It has good aspects and it is really creative to 
	have everyone with different interests, but then it is really hard to focus."

Interview participants observed the tendency of seminar participants to just skim
the surface of deep, important issues.  There were, however, a couple of notable
exceptions.  One example was the evening a UT-A student, a Mexican national,
offered a moving and articulate, almost confessional, testimony in Spanish of how
the readings and teleconference with colleagues on the border had reshaped his
opinions and stereotypes of borderlanders.  As one survey respondent described,
"For the most part we tend to skirt any confrontational issues."  The comment
referred to a discussion of racism based on shades of skin color from those of
Spanish descent and those of Indio descent.

	
	"This [racial attitudes] was brought up last night when they asked for
	reaction to being down on the border.  That was how it got started, but it 
	didn't get very deep. ...When we get to a subject and we get maybe to the 
	top layer and we don't get really in deep.  Maybe that is where we want to 
	use email or conference or on of those other technologies to get going."
	
A survey respondent observed:
	
	"Some may feel afraid of talking because the 'big eye' of the camera 
	will be focusing on them.  Therefore, they better say something 
	intelligent or not open cans of worms since the pace of the class seems 
	pretty hasty."

Many students offered that a teleconferencing highlight was the video tour of
the border produced and shared by a group of UTEP students.  Although survey and
interview responses revealed threads of student frustration with what they
perceived to be a lack of focus, fragmentation, and even loss of joint class
participation.  
	There was general agreement among mid-term survey respondents that the
teleconferencing time required better organization.  The feeling of
"disorganized" or "lack of planning" permeated comments about the
teleconferencing sessions.  "Students need more time to prepare for discussions
by both sides."  The uneven quality of the conferencing transmission also
contributed to the awkwardness of the technology.	

Newsgroups and Conferences: Administrative and Institutional Barriers

	There are similarities in the use of Usenet newsgroup and conferencing in
that each medium broadcasts messages from one to many without filling email
boxes.  For most users the communication and technical protocols of both media
were awkward and unfamiliar.  Only 21 students reported ever having used the
class newsgroup (accessible only to UT-A students) and 15 the conference, CONF
NAFTA, a creative topical online discussion forum to electronic conferencing
structured by a UTEP student specifically for students in the teleseminar. Either
forum could have provided a place for announcements, follow-up discussions, or
for "long documents that have no time constraint nor are of general interest." 
In this case the boundaries between institutions, however, obstructed universal
access to the class newsgroup.

Web Pages and MOOspace: Alternative Communication Media

	Of all the communication media available to seminar participants communication
through the hypertext and hypermedia environment of World Wide Web (WWW) and the
ambiguious and non-intuitive world of MOO (textual virtual reality) were the most
experimental.  Both media offered relatively new communication experiences to
most network users; students, initially, seemed uncertain how to use them to
their communication advantage.  On the basis of mid-term survey responses using a
Likert scale of 1-7, students rated the value of these two media as follows:
	
		Web Pages      MOOspace
UT-A		   3.17           2.33
UTEP		   3.58           0.00
	
The MOOspace drew the widest range of reactions, as illustrated below:
	
	"So far, [MOOing is] good for socializing on a less serious level, 
	but it could be used for some serious discussion between 2-4 people at a time."
	
	"MOO is an excellent interactive virtual reality environment perfectly 
	suited for this course.  Easy to access and to master."
	
	"It is fun because the group is less influential."
	
	Not everyone, however, in the class agreed with the "easy to access and
master" comment.  The following email exchange communicates one MOO newcomer's
first attempt at MOOing.
	
	
	Newcomer:  "I _want_ to like this MOO thing, but I am having a difficult 
	   time getting a grip on what the heck I am supposed to do once I am 
	   online. I can navigate around, but keep getting frustrated by not know the 
	   appropriate command strings, etc."
	
	Expert:  "Yes, the interface is rather irritating. It's environmental.  
        Everything operates by a spacial relationship (you invoke a verb on
        something or on yourself). And using Help just doesn't tell you much..."
	
	Other students less enthusiastic or as open to MOOing commented:
	
	"[MOOing] is too geeky.  Also I spend so much time in front of a computer
        during the day, I would not want to MOO in my spare time."
	
	"It was entertaining, but the academic element was clearly missing 
	being that entertainment is a luxury, that as a student I cannot 
	participate in."

Several students made the observation that early in the semester, the students
(or the professors) should have decided which communication media would be used
for what purpose.  "As in MOO's and CONF NAFTA, all such communications should be
delineated;  it should be clearly stated what sort of communication will move
through those channels."  Who does set the ground rules for such a diversity of
communication options?  The issue of specific places for certain information or
communication catagories was never really clear in this learning community.

	"The ones who have really gotten in and done it feel like the know one
	another a bit.  The ones who haven't, haven't gotten a thing out of it... 
	Some students say, well, teleconferencing does nothing for me because they 
	are never talking about anything I am interested in. ... You just need to 
	set it up so that it is a win-win game for them."

	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).  The following survey comments illustrate the dichotomy of
interests and motivation levels in both sections:

	"I want to learn about creation of virtual archives/virtual communities."

	"The class allows me to keep up with the newest technology and this is a 
	good cheap way.  Besides I need three hours."

	How can the professors in two cities and at two institutions facilitate a
learning environment that can address to some satisfaction such a diversity of
expectations and learning goals?  As in most classes supplemented by the high
levels of interactivity offered by networking, teacher and learner roles blur. 
In the words of one of the professors:
	
	"This is a constructionist classroom, where you create the scaffolding 
	and the environment for learning to take place.  You facilitate the learner.  
	But basically we are all learners."
	
	"This is the first time [for me] to literally take up and try to invent a
	course... I wanted to make it highly interactive...This is not to be a 
	talking	heads class.  If anyone said that Fred was really in charge of this 
	or Henry was really in charge of this, then we aren't doing it right."
	
	Despite the challenges of multiple learning agendas, survey respondents
remarked on numerous knowledge gains from the seminar.

	"I've gained knowledge about the obstacles to technology - administrative,
	policy, access, learning to use it, limitations of the technology.  
	Technology adoption is a very complicated process.  CONF NAFTA has been 
	the most striking example."
	
	"I suppose one of the things that has been among the most interesting for 
	me is the great symbiosis between the Internet and the conferencing. That has 
	made the Internet stuff a lot more interesting."
	
	As in any learning situation, for students who invested the most of
themselves and of their time there is a direct correlation between knowledge and
skill gains.
	
	"The ones who have really gotten in and done it feel like the know one
	another a bit.  The ones who haven't, haven't gotten a thing out of it... 
	Some students say, well, teleconferencing does nothing for me because they 
	are never talking about anything I am interested in. ... You just need to 
	set it up so that it is a win-win game for them."

	Lessons learned from the implementation of this innovative seminar were
numerous.  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:

Course Structure and Content:

	
	"Have a syllabus with assigned readings."
	
	"Have students in groups of 2-3 lead planned topical discussions - 
	not prepared statements."
	
	"Solicit research topics from both classes, then let the class vote 
	on the core group."
	
	"Read more texts, the reading requirements were too light."
	
	"Improve use of teleconferencing time."
	
	"Have more discussion on the research and what we have learned."
	
	"Improve the organization/coordination between UT-A and UTEP.  It 
	appears that it is very fractured between the two."

Class Interaction and Communication:

	
	"I think it is important to meet class members beforehand."
	
	"Require the bios from the very beginning."
	
	"Travel to El Paso.  Make it part of the fee to take the class, if
	necessary."
	
	"Participation should be a major, if not the main grading criterion.  
	Simply being involved in this undertaking, and witnessing the unique 
	problems and benefits inherent in the process, provide the practical 
	knowledge and experience that is tremendously valuable.
	
	"Include group photos of both classes on the web."

	
	"Consider offering pretraining classes on the technology."
	
	"Have a lab.  Spend the first two weeks training on technology
	[teleconferencing, Internet, etc.]  Use AOL or Delphi as the Internet 
	access to standardize networking and communication platforms."
	
	"I have emphasized the importance of the web several times in this survey.  
	I feel that at this point this is our most important [creation].  The 
	technology shouldn't be concentrated in the hands of a few."
	
	"I think someone should do a qualitative study of what happened with 
	CONF NAFTA."
	
	"Is technology an unconditional good?"
	
	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.