Olympic Fervor in China

I have posted discussion questions about a Washington Post article entitled, "Across a Nation, Olympic Fervor" here. The Post article explains that hundreds of millions of Chinese people are excited about the upcoming Olympics to be hosted in China this summer. According to the article many Chinese view the Olympics that the international community has accepted their nation's legitimacy.

As you know, I often write questions to prompt discussion around newspaper articles. Interestingly, these questions pose a certain amount of authority in the articles that I write about. After all, why discuss something if it is not accurate?

But, do we really want our students to take the content of newspaper articles at face value? Is this the type of information literacy that we want for our students at the beginning of the Twenty First Century? I'd suggest not.

Rather than accepting the authority of these articles, perhaps we should be challenging our students to validate, or disprove, the information presented in these articles. But, how do we do this?

Web 2.0 allows us to reach out and communicate with people across the world. Rather than trusting the authors of this newspaper article about Olympic fervor, we might try and contact individuals living in China and ask them what they perceive to be the typical thoughts about the upcoming games.

So, how would we reach out to the typical Chinese person, or even the foreigner living in China?

One way might be to search for contacts from China in Skype and try to make contact with several individuals. Students might construct interviews beforehand. Think of the information that they could find out.

In my efforts to find somebody in China whom I could ask, I've just put out a Twiiter call. I haven't used Twitter that much so not that many people are following me. But, we'll see what happens.

Finally, I also found a teacher in China, on epals.com, who's students are interested in interacting with other students to discuss the Olympics.

How else do you think I could do this?