Backer at ferry: Backer waiting in Sierra Leone for the ferry from Lungi Airport to Freetown, which comes too late to conduct another remote session with his class (March 15, 2008)
Sonny Onyegbula lecturing class: Human rights lawyer Sonny Onyegbula lectures to Backer's Politics in Africa class via Skype webconferencing from Abuja, Nigeria,focusing on the military's intervention into politics since the mid-1960s (March 10, 2008)
Workshop Participants: Participants in the civil society workshop in Freetown, Sierra Leone that was facilitated by Backer on behalf of the African Transitional Justice Research Network (March 18, 2008)
Fieldworkers in Nigeria: Team of fieldworkers prior to the launch of Backer's survey of human rights victims in Nigeria (March 10, 2008)
David Backer in West Africa
When a research project required that he be in West Africa for a few weeks during the semester, Backer resolved to continue teaching both sections of his “Politics in Africa” course – from Africa. To make this venture possible, he worked with W&M’s IT department and the Technology Integration Program (TIP) to arrange an interactive audio-video feed that would transmit right back to the classroom on campus.
“I wanted to include outside speakers to make it a little more tangible, so it wasn’t always just my voice,” says Backer.
Armed with just a laptop and webcam, Backer enlivened his remote lessons with the voices of regional experts, ranging from a UN human rights lawyer to the Chief of Press/Public Affairs of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. “It was really an interesting and engaging way of bringing a new dimension to what we were reading,” remarked student Grace Heusner ’10. “During these satellite classes, I was very aware of how real the issues in class are.”
Backer is not the first William & Mary professor to use technology to enhance the learning environment. IT and TIP have been supporting Interactive Video Conferencing on campus for almost a decade. Together with creative faculty, they have facilitated Anthropology classes with universities in Japan and Hong Kong, enabled language students to speak to Germans about their experiences living in a communist bloc, and even connected Government and International Relations classrooms to USAID and U.S. State Department personnel in Afghanistan.
“Politics in Africa” is just the latest example of the innovative teaching possibilities taking shape in William & Mary classrooms. “Things are really changing in terms of what you can pull off,” remarks Backer. “You can do a lot more than you ever have been able to do in the past.”
