Approximately 50 students, as well as faculty and media professionals, participated in the webinar in Erbil, Iraq.

Three faculty members from the Department of Journalism spent the morning of Oct. 26 discussing the benefits of integrating social media into their classrooms.

What made the presentation special was their audience.

Half a world away, the images of Associate Professor Chris Harper, Assistant Professor Susan Jacobson and Assistant Professor Shenid Bhayroo were received by students, faculty and media professionals at the Institute of Technology in Erbil, Iraq, via Skype.

The project was led by Moustafa Ayad, a new media specialist working with the United Nations Development Program in Baghdad and the International Research and Exchanges Board on an initiative to connect universities throughout the Middle East and North Africa with institutions in America and the United Kingdom to discuss media development.

“People really want to learn how to use these tools,” Ayad said. “This project is about creating knowledge bases [of people in Iraq] who can then pass it along to other media professionals.”

(L-R): Associate Professor Chris Harper, Assistant Professor Susan Jacobson and Assistant Professor Shenid Bhayroo participate in a Skype discussion with professors and students in Iraq.

The Temple University professors touched on some of the ways social media has pervaded the School of Communications and Theater. Harper discussed how WordPress runs philadelphianeighborhoods.com, the capstone of the Journalism Department, and the Facebook and Twitter pages that support it.

“Although the students and professors are Iraqi citizens, they are Kurds, which is a rather independent group and geographical area in the country. It is good to see how the school is already using social media tools in the curriculum,” Harper said.

Bhayroo took a broader look at new media and how it’s used for research, while underscoring the importance of verifying and fact-checking every piece of information found on-line.

“The questions from our colleagues and students in Erbil highlighted their concerns about verifying identities and information obtained online. Their questions also highlighted security anxieties about publishing stories online, and the challenges they face in building transparent and representative media in the war-ravaged country,” he said.

Jacobson rounded out the webinar with a discussion on social media optimization: “how journalists are starting to use social media networks to increase their online audiences.”

“One of the professors told us that people in Erbil often use … social media sites to disseminate news when it was difficult to get information because of conflict,” Jacobson said.  “[A] professor asked why we would use social networks for news in the United States, when the flow of information is much freer.”

She replied with the notion that the trend toward social media is being driven by the young generation of media consumers.

Connecting people around the world through the Internet brings its fair share of challenges, especially in Iraq, where power outages are the norm. Ayad said they tested other technology, such as online streaming services and an open-source option that could be viewed by anyone. But he decided Skype proved to be the most reliable technology and would work the best for this project. The session at Temple, the first to connect with an Iraqi audience, was briefly impacted by a bandwidth issue, but it otherwise ran unhampered.

“We want to help media professionals and to create better media students and a better media environment through these collaborations,” Ayad said.

While discussions on this subject on Western college campuses aren’t out of the norm, Ayad said they’re vital to the future of Iraqi media. “This is a meaningful form of collaboration,” he said. “It’s a way to connect with viewpoints that you’re not otherwise going to have a chance to interact with.”

Ayad said many Iraqis are on Facebook, but the access to the Internet – and reliable electricity – can be tough to find. He said estimates on the percentage of Iraqis online ranges from 1 percent to 25 percent of the population. Active users, though, tend to see Facebook as solely a social entity

He hopes future webinars between Iraqi and Western universities can focus on issues such as curriculum development, media law and other subjects.