International education, the internet, and the Three Kings experiment

The current project linked students in three universities in a guided discussion of the movie, Three Kings. The goals were to assess the viability of having students from three different courses, in three different universities, in three different countries find common ground to have intellectual discussions via the Internet and to assess how responsive students would be to answering structured questions as a stimulus for intellectual discussions. We also wanted to understand how the Three Kings was perceived by students in the United States, England, and the Netherlands. Overall, there were 19 students who contributed a total of 217 conversational threads (distinct entries). Conversations were lively and interactive. Content analysis revealed that race relations within the United States, U.S. policy in Iraq, and the depiction of American values were the "big" global messages of the film.