TMDU×Waseda Discussion Café on December 5th, 2020
Our 15th Discussion Café, an ongoing collaboration between TMDU and Waseda University, was held on Saturday, December the 5th. The event brought together about 40 students with diverse backgrounds from both universities via Zoom!
Just as for the last DCafé held in October, we used a web conferencing system (Zoom) for this event to avoid face-to-face interactions. This time, TMDU Task Force members were in charge of facilitating the event. We took advantage of the online environment, and made several different groups of smaller numbers of people than usual to make it easy for all participants to share their own opinion.
This time, students tackled the topic of Media Literacy. We talked about fake news and stereotypes and then filter bubbles and echo chambers. We thought about the kinds of social problems that exist along with these things and how to prevent them. All the discussion groups had interesting viewpoints and shared insightful thoughts such as: “With the advent of social networking platform, anyone can send information to people around the world, so we are now more likely to get fake news or uncertain information than the past,” and “Personalized information keep us in comfortable zone by showing only information which will match your opinion, so it is important to try to know different perspectives.” In the end, we set an ending question which asked everyone to share their own thoughts on media literacy. This event was a good opportunity to reconsider how to deal with media or SNS especially in the current time where we are largely depends on online services.
Discussion Café is a fantastic opportunity to practice English communication skills as well as to network with students from a wide variety of majors, career goals and cultural backgrounds. This event would not have been possible without the hard work of Waseda University’s ICC staff, and the assistance of TMDU’s Task Force, who all worked very hard to prepare for this event!
The next Discussion Café will be held on Saturday July 3, 2021. We hope to see you all then!
Just as for the last DCafé held in October, we used a web conferencing system (Zoom) for this event to avoid face-to-face interactions. This time, TMDU Task Force members were in charge of facilitating the event. We took advantage of the online environment, and made several different groups of smaller numbers of people than usual to make it easy for all participants to share their own opinion.
This time, students tackled the topic of Media Literacy. We talked about fake news and stereotypes and then filter bubbles and echo chambers. We thought about the kinds of social problems that exist along with these things and how to prevent them. All the discussion groups had interesting viewpoints and shared insightful thoughts such as: “With the advent of social networking platform, anyone can send information to people around the world, so we are now more likely to get fake news or uncertain information than the past,” and “Personalized information keep us in comfortable zone by showing only information which will match your opinion, so it is important to try to know different perspectives.” In the end, we set an ending question which asked everyone to share their own thoughts on media literacy. This event was a good opportunity to reconsider how to deal with media or SNS especially in the current time where we are largely depends on online services.
Discussion Café is a fantastic opportunity to practice English communication skills as well as to network with students from a wide variety of majors, career goals and cultural backgrounds. This event would not have been possible without the hard work of Waseda University’s ICC staff, and the assistance of TMDU’s Task Force, who all worked very hard to prepare for this event!
The next Discussion Café will be held on Saturday July 3, 2021. We hope to see you all then!
