When we encounter an unfamiliar culture, we tend to rely on what others have told us, on our imagination, and on our perceptions to develop a picture of the culture. Communication through global networking, however, can help by putting us more in control of discovering first-hand information about people from other cultures and by allowing students to become more active creators of their own learning experiences. Through a global education, we learn to recognize, accept, and integrate in some way that which is culturally different.
In 1992, Professor Bruce Roberts, Professor Howard Thorsheim, and I struggled to find partner classroom for our e-mail projects. While we were pleased with the success of our initial e-mail partnership efforts with the two Japanese schools, we were eager to expand our partnerships to include classrooms in other countries. Realizing that our difficulty finding partner classes abroad for e-mail exchanges must not be unique, in October, 1993, we created IECC as free service to help teachers link with partners in other countries and cultures for e-mail classroom pen-pal and project exchanges.
Although our primary intent was to assist college and university faculty in building classroom e-mail partnerships, we were pleasantly surprised to also see a great deal of interest at the K-12 level.
Initially, we named the mailing list "International E-Mail Classroom Connections" but soon realized that the word "international" did not accurately represent the intercultural nature of the links people were making within the United States: rural schools linking up with city schools and Chicago suburban schools connecting with schools in the southwestern U.S., for example. In March, 1994, in response to tremendous growth and a recognition of the multiple purposes for which the mailing list was being used, we renamed the IECC mailing list "Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections" and split it into three components: IECC, IECC-PROJECTS, and IECC-DISCSUSSION. In January, 1995 we also added a branch of the IECC focused on higher-ed (IECC-HE) and in April, 1995 one devoted to student-generated surveys (IECC-SURVEYS). Finally, in February, 1999 we added IECC-INTERGEN, an intergenerational linking component, to the IECC project.
Because of the popularity of IECC, the time required to maintain the system and respond to inquiries from subscribers was becoming unmanagable. In 2001 we agreed to transfer IECC to Teaching.com, who now runs IECC service at www.teaching.com/iecc.
From its creation in 1992, IECC distributed over 28,000 requests for e-mail partnerships. At the time of its transition, IECC counted 7200 teachers in 79 countries as subscribers.
While Bruce, Howard, and I continue to be interested in appropriate applications of technology in education, our efforts have turned in other directions, some of which you may be reading about later on this blog!
I'll sign off from this entry with a quote computing colleague Dan Boehlke made several years ago that, even with the massive changing in computing and communications, is still entirely relevant:
- It is a given that networks may connect computers to each other. The connection of computers is insignificant, when compared to the ability of a network to connect people to each other, building a global community. Networks are for people.
