Yancee Hardy (F’09), a student at the School of Foreign Service in Qatar, likens meeting his counterparts at the Hilltop to the time he saw Jay Leno.
"You definitely knew who they were, but they looked totally different in person," said the former U.S. Marine, who decided to study in Qatar after his final tour of duty.
A class of six students in Washington, D.C., had been meeting two mornings a week for seven weeks in their Causes of War course with students in Doha through distance-learning technology. But this spring break, those students traveled to Doha to get acquainted with their six counterparts in the Middle East.
“I hadn’t ever been anywhere near the region before this trip,” said
Zachary Bluestone (F’09). “The experience was incredible."
For a week, all 12 students were able to talk in person and have class face-to-face in the same physical class location.
The
global classroom utilizes high-definition technology that provides symmetrical classrooms in D.C. and Doha, so that students can talk to each other in real time.
“I was pleasantly impressed how the students interacted with one another once they all met,” said
David Edelstein, the assistant professor of government who teaches the class.
Though he had already traveled to Doha the previous semester in anticipation of teaching this spring, Edelstein said it was very helpful to be able to match the personalities with the students he teaches via the global classroom.
“The technology is great in that it allows students the opportunity to learn from each other a continent away,” he said. “But there’s nothing like being in the same classroom."
Once settled into their Doha surroundings, the six D.C. students met with their six Doha classmates and broke off into four groups of three to continue work on presentations they had begun weeks earlier via the “telepresence” technology. Their projects focused on four Middle Eastern wars – the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria; the war between Iraq and Iran; the Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s involving the United States and Iraq; and the current war in Iraq.
Bluestone, who gave a presentation on the first war in Iraq, began working on his project with his Doha counterparts about three weeks prior to his Middle Eastern voyage.
“We’d set meetings in the global classroom after regular class to prepare, but most of the work came the week prior to the trip and while we were over there,” he said.
When they weren’t working on their class presentations, the Georgetown visitors toured SFS-Qatar and the rest of Education City, a 2,500-acre campus of its own that houses several other university branches as well as Georgetown’s.
“I’m not quite sure what I really expected before I got there, but I was surprised,” Bluestone said. “There were definitely cultural differences, but it was very similar to America and Europe with some of the development you’d see in Mexico.”
The D.C. students took in local cultural sites and tourist attractions, including Doha’s Islamic Cultural Center, the studios of the Al Jazeera news agency and the Souq Waqif marketplace. They even took time out to ride camels in the desert.
Though Bluestone missed out on that opportunity, he did get a chance to view the desert dunes of Qatar.
“I had never been to the desert before,” he said. “We went to the Saudi Arabian border, and you could just see this beautiful blue-green water. I don’t think I would’ve imagined seeing that in that part of the country.”
For Bluestone, the experience ranks high in his time at Georgetown. “This trip,” he said, “has provided memories that I will likely draw on for the rest of my life.”
Hardy said he looks forward to continuing distance-learning classes with his counterparts throughout the semester.
"Eating baby camel and shopping at some of the local souqs [with them] was pretty fun, but actually meeting with my group in the library and knuckling down on our project was the most memorable," he said. "I just enjoyed getting to know them personally."
Edelstein said the spring break trip to the Doha campus already has had an impact on class interaction that he hopes will continue to be a benefit.
"You can already see the difference in the way that we communicate with one another,” he said. “There's some joking. There's a sense that they know each other.
View How Other Georgetown Students Spend Their Spring Breaks:
GUHERE Student Reflects About Rebuilding Along Gulf Coast
Fellows Hope to Implement Lessons Learned on Isle
Building Communities and Relationships
