Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Final Post ♥ 10:19 PM
I think the culture exchange project was effective but not exactly fun. When the project first started out, I thought it may be interesting and maybe even fun to get to know people from around the world. However, it just caused stress for me by having to remember when to post by, racking my brain for ideas to write on, etc... It felt like the learning process was forced and not out of free will. The blogs were informative and it caused you to think, and you learned some on how other people live in different countries or areas around the nation. However, I believe we could've learned more if we had just sat down and had a conversation with one of them either by video chat, IM, or email. This would have enabled us to get a more intimate conversation and to learn about their culture on our own instead of forcing us to learn it in week by week intervals. For future improvement, I would definitely have everyone on the same blog site so everything is identical and easy to navigate. I would also have the people from California be more organized in setting up their blogs efficiently and the Korean students with replying and not typing in Korean, if at all possible. I also think another improvement would be to have more interesting topics to write about or even have the students sort of "journal" within their blog as to how their week was and what is going on in their life. I believe you can learn more about a country's culture by knowing how someone actually lives rather than just having them type about topics that could or couldn't have come from their own point of view on the matter.