Our discussions have been dominated by organizational (programs, requirements, disciplines) and technological considerations, and haven't lingered much on curricular questions --on what could or should happen in on-campus courses to broaden the availability of international and transcultural material, and provide W&L students with a better basis for their own continuing education in global issues.
It seems to me that there are some gaping holes in what we teach about international subjects, though just how to fill the gaps is problematic. Most of our students don't know much about the world outside the United States, and the existing structure of disciplines and majors and general education requirements seems to conspire to keep it that way. There doesn't seem to be room for courses and resource development to support teaching in the global realm of how do we think about the world?, in which a primary objective is to support the development of lifelong curiosity that is inherently "dilettante" in the positive Liberal Arts sense of
(one who) cultivates an art or branch of knowledge as a pastime, without pursuing it professionally (Webster's Third)
Vital issues and processes such as demography, urbanization, human rights, health, modernization, infrastructural development, industrialization, food production, communication, technology, education, and ecological change sprawl across disciplinary boundaries, especially when considered as global (rather than national) questions. Various W&L faculty have knowledge and interests in these areas, but the smörgåsbord approach of structuring a course of bits and pieces contributed by several instructors has many problems ('credit', release time, and coordination are only the most obvious), and the institutional home of such courses is unclear ('Interdisciplinary' comes with the built-in gen ed identity problem).
The landscape of global information has changed dramatically in the last decade. In Internet sites and databases we now have tools that permit us to monitor and ask and answer questions of the current state and trajectories of such broad subjects as those listed above, but the tools are rarely employed toward the goal of developing citizens (in the Jeffersonian sense of persons with knowledge and concern) who bring their general knowledge to bear upon whatever professional identities they have.
In my former life as a professor of anthropology I developed and taught for about 12 years a course in Human Geography that was meant to address many of these problems, and to treat the specific problem that my students (most of them Canadian Maritimers) had little knowledge of the outside world. It was based in the use of maps and quantitative data and graphical imagery, and aimed to pique interest in and raise consciousness about, not provide answers to, the complex questions raised by the topics considered. In those days before the Internet (I last taught the course in 1989-90) most of the course materials were paper --no textbook (nothing available that encompassed the subjects I assayed), LOTS of personally-created handouts, and constrained by on-campus resources.If I were to teach such a course again I'd have a whole new palette of resources to draw upon, including map-making software (ArcView), global TV, and of course the Web as an information-gathering and presentation tool. Students could be much more directly involved with real-time information, in ways that would actually train them for lifelong interest and involvement.
At the last meeting we talked at some length about the possibility of a teleconferencing link with a university in another country. This sounds to me like a fixed pipeline that would be empty most of the time, and as a use of telecommunications technology inherently limited to a small number of people at each end. There must be more effective ways to hook ourselves into global communication networks, in and out of the classroom context, and links that would be more general in interest and applicability. Among the existing resources we might make better use of is the realm of satellite TV, now mostly (so far as I know) used by language departments and Journalism, and distributed via campus cable. As a lifelong non-participant in TV I'm the last person to know about the potentials and practicalities of this medium, but others more sympathetic might construct sensible schemes.
It might be worthwhile to consider the various possibilities for links between W&L and students and faculty who are elsewhere. Internet connections are potentially available pretty much anywhere, with more or less expense and hassle according to local conditions, so various forms of electronic communication are certainly practical, though they may not turn out to be desirable. I flirted with the idea of student-abroad-as-roving-reporter, making use of high-end technology to operate as a W&L outpost, but the problems and difficulties of such an approach are all too obvious (theft of hardware, accusations of spying, equipment maintenance, cost...), and in fact one objective of international experience is often to have an immersion that doesn't have a lifeline to the Mother Ship.
Sometimes it's useful to look at what others are doing. Here are some links to sites which deal with some of the same issues we're charged with discussing: