Scott and I are visiting the three US universities that we’re doing a joint course with in August, and are having a fabulous time meeting all the students we’ll be working with in a few months! Scott cooked this whole thing up: we’re doing a week long joint course on Collaborative Creativity in New Media where students work together in US-Norwegian teams to create creative digital projects in Bergen. We’re collaborating with Rod Coover here at Temple University in Philadelphia, Sandy Baldwin at West Virginia University and then next week, we’re going to the University of Minnesota at Duluth to meet Rob Wittig and Joellyn Rock and their students.

Here are the students from WVU and Temple – all very excited to be coming to Bergen and full of interesting skills, ideas and backgrounds. And you can spot Rod and Scott in the second photo as well.

We’re also meeting with deans and coordinators and international relations people about setting up longer term exchanges, and there’s a lot of interest here. One point I find interesting is that in Norway (and Europe) we’re largely set up for semester long exchanges, whereas here there are a lot of shorter exchanges, 2-4 weeks seems fairly common. It might be interesting to set up a course at UiB that has an intensive two week session at start of semester that’s open to short term international students, and that continues at a less intensive pace for the rest of the semester for our local students. Many possibilities.