In my first post for Off the Bus I mentioned that, in addition to persuading myself that submitting a question to Monday's CNN/YouTube debate was a worthwhile endeavor, I also made the argument to students in the Ben Franklin Transatlantic Fellows (BFTF) program. Inspired in part by my Off the Bus post, my colleagues and students at the BFTF created an entire curriculum that produced a great collection of submitted questions.
The questions range from global warming to Kosovo and include graphics and voice overs. But what most interests me is the idea of a Norwegian student asking a likely future president of the United States about global warming while noting that Italy and Australia are committed to doing more than the U.S. is. Or the Andoran student asking candidates how to resolve inconsistencies between the U.S. human rights record at Guantanamo and the war on terrorism.
My class was about media criticism and politics in the age of the internet. We compared and contrasted Ben Franklin's pamphleteering, often pseudonymous, with contemporary blogging. Another class was on globalization. The YouTube project is a great fusion and application of this otherwise abstract knowledge. Instructor Damien Pfister's blog is a treasure trove for people who want to learn how to ask the most effective questions in this debate format. The YouTube debates, if they accomplish nothing else, have created an opportunity for the next generation of leaders from around the globe to learn how to begin to think about and participate in the politics of the twenty-first century.
The U.S. president is often referred to as the "leader of the free world." Perhaps the YouTube debate will help us see how our candidates respond to the next generation of leaders from around the world.