That’s the title of a 10-15 minute presentation I’m giving soon for my Intercultural Communication classes at Yeditepe University, here in Istanbul. I designed it in such a way that it can also be enjoyed without my vocal explanations and here it is!
The Intercultural Communication course is likely to be the most innovative course I’ve taken during my higher education (sadly — universities should make more use of modern technologies). Every Tuesday, we get into a classroom at 4 o’ clock in the afternoon and have a video conference with a class in Lincoln, Nebraska, US. We present ourselves, our culture, customs, daily lives and our countries to each other. It’s fascinating, because both the Turkish class as well as the American class have students from many different backgrounds.
This part of the Intercultural Communication course, called Global Classroom, has been quite fun so far. We’ve managed to make 2 students from the Nebraskan class dance in front of the camera and they’ve managed to make 2 of our students wrestle in front of the camera (or was it Jiu-Jitsu?).
There’s only a few sessions left, so I hope I actually get to do my presentation, as our lecturer wanted everyone to prepare one, but there will be no time to actually execute all of them.
I hope the presentation has given you an insight into Holland’s liberal policies and if you have any questions please feel free to reply. I love answering questions about these issues.
How about in your countries, how is your government dealing with these issues? What is your personal opinion on these matters? Has the war on drugs failed? Is same-sex marriage morally wrong or is keeping it illegal a form of discrimination? What about prostitution?
Comments
8 responses to “Drugs, Prostitution and Same-Sex Marriage”
I put your presentation on Internations their web site.
One correction: the Netherlands is the second largest investor in the USA after Japan 😛
Hans´s last blog post:
Cool!
I’d change slides 4,5 and 6 to be graphical instead of textual, and then maybe have bars with the flag textures on them. In 6 slides so you can tell the story and the pictures show it.
Sweet presentation, seen this?
http://www.truthout.org/111208HA
Might be a good addition for research results =)
Peace
Len´s last blog post:
Oh I love the idea of a global classroom! Sounds very interesting. Too bad we don’t have any here. 🙁
Drugs trafficking is an offence punishable by death in my country. As for same-sex marriage, it finds no place too since homosexuality is itself a crime here. But I’m okay with gays, as long as they don’t exhibit their gay tendencies in my presence.
Nice slide show… !!!
Must be hard to give other people a good view of our “orgy”… 😉
@Len: seems like we read the same stuff, I also saw that one. Here’s another source (June 08 btw) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/us/14florida.html?_r=1&scp=9&sq=prescription%20drugs&st=cse
@Niels & Len:
Yep, I saw the same story before 🙂
Not including it though. Don’t want to make my speech too political, since I don’t want my audience to get defensive.
@Niels:
I kept 4/5/6 like this on purpose. Since I’m doing it for an American audience, of which half are young conservatives, I decided not to hammer too heavily on the differences. I have my opinions about the US system and the Dutch system, but I don’t want it to shine through too much… in making this graphical, it will be more obvious which policy is failing, but as said before, since I don’t want people to get too defensive while listening to me, I prefer to keep it like this.
This way they’ll listen to me without getting too defensive. I agree with you that it’s too much text/stats per slide though.
Thanks for the correction @Hans!
And thanks kyh and sjeltur for your comments!
[…] have tried it than the young people I know in Holland. While doing research for a presentation on The Netherlands – Drugs, Prostitution and Same-Sex Marriage, I already discovered that in the United States about 35% of all people have smoked marijuana at […]