congratulations!
Hi Grian, I'm really impressed with what you've put together and am interested in the topic as I am part of a small team at the University of Wollongong (one hour south of Sydney, in Australia) putting together a Graduate Certificate in Global Citizenship, and one of our subjects has some interesting overlaps with your global issues and globalisation theories topics. I have forwarded a link to your Planning page to the subject co-ordinator and will see what she says. FYI we are currently running our first fully online accredited (by the university) semester long course called "Model United Nations" and there is some material there about the History of the UN that speaks to international relations history and theory - similar terrain. Over the next month we are running the actual Model United Nations eSimulation, giving students a chance to act as diplomats representing a country in a debate on a topic that is current in the UN. http://wikieducator.org/course/MUN/ Thanks Sarah Lambert
Thank you a lot, Sarah. :D Yes, it seems we have many common points. It would be wonderful if I can collaborate with you in one way or another. I hope to have enough time, because I'm in these moments working hard with my PhD research. I want to finish it before the end of this year. About the MUN, when do you intend to run this course? It seems interesting, and a very creative and original idea. Thanks for you comment and your kind words. Grian
Hi again Grian, yes the MUN course is running now, and we are in week 7 of a 13 week course. You can see it here http://wikieducator.org/course/MUN/ and if you go to the page "Link to students tweets and blogs' you can also peruse some of the work the students have posted. Most of the students are doing this as enrolled students face to face. However we have a handful of students studying for free/open online - but they are happy 'free range learning' their way through the content, and are not really doing the blogging and tweeting activities. Which i am finding interesting, as it was for them that we designed them in. But in fact, the face to face students are raving about this digitally rich subject! All good i suppose!
Hi Sarah, I've seen some of the students tweets and blogs in MUN page. It seems an exciting course, and you are talking and debating about all those issues which our governments are not dealing properly... or not dealing at all. I was involved as an activist, in 2011 and 2012, in the Spanish Indignados Movement (the forerunner of Occupy Wall Street). That was a powerful experience about making politics from the other side, from the grassroot-participatory democracy (you can see a video I edited about this for English speaking people, in https://youtu.be/PjqdD_Fzolo, with English subtitles). It would be nice to introduce this debate (the participatory democracy from grassroot people) in an environment like the United Nations. As you probably know, the push and perspectives of our Indignados Movement have taken shape in a new party, Podemos, which is threatening the supremacy of the two main parties in Spain. In fact, surveys say they are the first party in vote intention for the next general election (November 2015). Perhaps next year I can participate as a student in your MUN course. It seems amazing.
