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“Where is it?”

“The server is at the University of Texas.”

“No, not the server, the game. Where are the other players?”

Staring at me with a puzzled look on her face, Cynthia pointed to the screen in front of her and replied, “They’re in there, of course.” That was the Aha! moment in which I knew the world had changed and that my students and I were living in different zones. For Cynthia and the other students, everyone was present together in the space-time of the network.

The discussions in our global classroom were unexpectedly lively, and all the students actively participated. Indeed, students were more willing to contribute than in most of my traditional courses. The range of perspectives students brought to the class greatly enriched our discussions. I especially remember the class in which we discussed the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s book America. The Finnish and American students interpreted the book in completely different ways. When the Finnish students readily accepted Baudrillard’s rather predictably French criticism of the United States as a country uninterested in history and preoccupied with popular culture, the Williams students pushed back. At one point, Brian Malone, an unusually bright student who now is a professor of neuroscience, declared, “Look, what you Finns don’t understand is that for us, Europe is Grandma’s attic.” This exchange provided an unusual teachable moment.

Obviously, teleconferencing cannot replicate the advantages of the personal when everyone is present in the same room, but my Finnish colleague and I were both surprised by how effectively it simulated what goes on in real classrooms. In moments of intense debate, I sometimes forgot I was on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean from Esa and his students. Without this technology, it would not have been possible for students from Finland and the United States to take a class together. By the end of the semester, several of the students had developed close personal relationships through their online discussion. On the last day of class, the Finnish students shocked us when they announced that they and Esa were all coming to Williamstown at their own expense for a week in January.

With the end of the semester drawing near, Esa and I explained the term paper assignment, and the students rebelled. “After what we’ve been reading and discussing, it makes no sense to write a traditional term paper with footnotes and all that stuff. Let us make a film or video; better yet, how about multimedia projects?” We knew they had a point, but we did not have the resources or ability to support such new forms of creative expression. We admitted they were right, explained our handicap and promised somehow to accommodate what they were proposing the next time around.

The only way I could fulfill my promise to those students, to enter their world, was to develop a collaborative relationship with them. I would teach them the books and ideas I thought were important, and they would teach me about the technologies that were such a significant part of their lives. Students were required to explore the implications of the writings of philosophers and theorists like Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ernst Gombrich and Marshall McLuhan for the new technologies we were using in class. Our goal was to bring together theory and practice in a way that would enable students to think critically about the media they were using and to consider carefully the social, political, economic and ethical questions new technologies raise. This pedagogical principle continues to inform all of my work with new media. My experience in that first course forced me to admit that if I could not find ways to communicate with students in the media to which they were becoming accustomed, I could never teach them the lessons I thought they should learn. Over the intervening years, I have worked with students to create laboratories in which they learn how