When Jim Nyce and his wife Gail Bader went to Romania for a holiday trip in 2003, they were surprised by the differences in technology among people living in the same villages.
The Ball State University anthropology professors witnessed some Romanians using cell phones while others used horses and carts to travel.
"Romania has a wonderfully interesting mixture of technology ranging from traditional forms to the most modern up-to-date stuff," Nyce said. "It's interesting to see how people in poorer villages would use the different technological items to solve different problems."
Nyce and Bader will spend their third summer in the southeastern European country from May 7 to May 28 with a group of 12 students to research how information and technology within a community relate to each other. For the first time, Ball State is sponsoring the six-credit trip that will cost $2,475, not including airfare.
The couple founded the Romanian program, but because Nyce previously worked at Emporia State University in Kansas, the program was a joint collaboration between Ball State and Emporia State, Nyce said. Now that Nyce is working at Ball State, he said the Romania trip is only a Ball State program, which allows for more Ball State students to participate.
"In the past, Ball State students have made up a minority of the number of people who have gone, but now they're making up the majority," he said. "There will be more of a mixture of undergraduates this time that in some ways will make the experiences in Romania challenging but more fun."
Bader said the students will try to find the different ways of information sharing in a village. The students, who will be broken into small groups with an interpreter, will start with a broad subject, she said. After about three days, however, the groups will begin to pick more specific areas of interest such as education or medical information and health care, Bader said.
"What we're teaching students is what kinds of information needs people have, and if we were to bring in computer resources what would we recommend to be helpful to the village," she said.
Ball State alumnus Adam Link, who went to Romania during the summer of 2004, said he had to adapt to Romania's culture.
"There were very few computers, everyone had a TV, almost everyone had a cell phone, but hardly anybody had indoor plumbing," Link said.
Link wanted to go on the trip because he had never been out of the country, and Romania was not a country a lot of people would think of visiting, he said. He stayed in a village of 4,000 people where nobody spoke English so it did not take long for him to be able to learn some of the language, Link said. He learned a lot from doing the field work, researching and interviewing people, he said.
"We were over there looking at technology use and specifically information technology around the Internet to see how the information was being utilized and distributed among people," Link said.
The trip to Romania helps students develop the skills needed to be successful no matter what their major.
Bader said she and Nyce's goal as instructors was to teach students how to do ethnographic research by living with people and doing participant observations. Her hope was that this experience will give students a sense of how technology will develop in the future in a global framework.
"By looking at what happens in Romania and then here in the United States, it gives you a better sense of overall global technology development," she said.
Nyce said the trip was a good example of an immersive experience because students learn intellectual skills and marketable skills for the future.
Nyce and Bader would like to adapt the program to have Romanians study technology issues in Indiana while the Ball State students are studying in Romania. This would allow Romanian students and Ball State students to learn from each other.
"We'd really like to get funding to do that so it'll be a two-way street," he said. "We want to involve Romanian students and faculty to partner with Ball State students and faculty because that would make the project really work."
Check it outFor more information about the trip and to see publications previous students have written, please go to bsu.edu/international/romania
For more infromation about Romania, please go to cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ro.html
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