A Collaborative Teaching and Resource Sharing Initiative
Enabling faculty, students and activists worldwide to collaboratively share resources important to understanding of urban development and urban struggle in global perspective.
Neema Kudva, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, nk78@cornell.edu
Faranak Miraftab, Department of Urban Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Neema Kudva and Faranak Miraftab have been working on the idea of developing a collaborative web-based teaching resource that can be of significant interest to the Gpeig. The idea is to develop a website where faculty, students and activists from different locations nationally and globally can upload and download resources important to global understanding of the urban development and urban struggle. While to start with a smaller group can be involved in design and development of the site and its resources, the ultimate goal is that this resource can be available to all with an Internet access. Below is a brief synopsis of the idea and the concept.
Project Idea
In our teaching experiences, students at Cornell and the UIUC often represent unfamiliar spaces of the global south, be it in the third world or in marginalized communities of the US, as either places of exotica, or dismal homogenous spaces of poverty and backwardness where terrorists, danger and strange others lurk. To address this challenge we, as faculty on campuses with existing course offerings on urban development in the south, seek to supplement our traditional teaching materials with web-based technologies such as wikis, e-music files, and interactive maps. We believe that use of informatics will strengthen instruction through interactive media familiar to this generation of students. In doing so, it will encourage ongoing dialogues about both interdisciplinary course content and multiple, discipline-appropriate assessment alternatives that promote collaborative teaching such as teacher to teacher mentoring and peer evaluation. This virtual archive on urban processes in the global south will engage activists, students and faculty from multiple locations within the US and across the global south. In doing so the proposed project promotes a greater cross cultural understanding of urban development issues and encourages students in the US institutions to seek experiences for internship, academic exchange or studying abroad across the globe. The goal of this project is to set up a resource that can be shared by planning schools and organizations as well as citizens and civil groups across the globe.
Project Objectives and Significance
Our interactive web-based archive will allow participating faculty and students not only to consume but also collaboratively produce and map video and text images from the everyday worlds of urban communities with whom they communicate. It will allow participants to engage in a dialogue about the many and contested meanings of images representing urban experiences and encounters in the global south. We envisage the production of this archive in two phases. During the initial one-year phase we will use a seed fund to initiate a dialogue between participants about the archive content and work with specialists to identify the necessary technology and budget for development of grant applications to external funding sources. During the second three-year phase the content and technology will be developed and tested. Following this a core group will be elected to manage and periodically review the material uploaded by the broader network. The ultimate archive will therefore be self-sustaining and will need minimal additional financial resources.
This interactive web-based archive creates opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching and learning experiences on campus, using campus-based information technologies to extend classroom experiences to include dialogues with off-campus communities and promote intercultural scholarship and learning. The project also increases and enhances undergraduate research and creative opportunities by relying upon user-generated content to engender intercultural knowledge. Web-based communication tools, which are increasingly accessible to young people across the globe and can transcend traditional barriers to intercultural dialogue, will increase the capacity for effective communication across cultural and linguistic boundaries as well as position the academy to meet 21st century opportunities.
This project builds on and seeks to expand two prior projects: the first, a multi-media website, Virtual Cities, initiated at Cornell University by Neema Kudva and William Goldsmith, built a conceptual structure that will inform our project, while the second, the Global Planning Grid technology developed by Keith Pezzolli of UC San Diego, will structure the ways in which we collectively produce and disseminate locally produced video, visual and text images of cities in the global south. The challenge is to use this global grid to spatially code information about specific localities in ways that enable a dialogue between local and extra-local users and producers across this global grid.
Our hope has been to develop this project as a valuable resource for global planning educators. Last year HUD International Affair’s Office and Gpeig leadership in consultation with its members expressed an interest in the project leveraging a suggested $3,000 HUD funding support for development of the concept. So far, however, the project has not received funding. Considering that the Gpeig will reconvene this July through ACSP AESOP joint meeting in Chicago, we are open to withdraw from this pending support should Gpeig and HUD opt for supporting a different project idea.
