College Kids: A Day in the Life 

At the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain, students play fútbol, dance at discotecas and live in apartments or at home with their families.

Thousands of miles away, students at MIT in Boston build robots, play football and go to fraternity parties.

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A university-sponsored online community gives students from both places a virtual glimpse into college life abroad -- from complex lab experiments to volunteer work, sports and social events.

"Students who aren't aware of what universities are like outside of the U.S. often assume everything is the same," said Douglas Morgenstern, a senior lecturer in Spanish foreign languages and literatures at MIT.

The site, MITUPV, unites students from MIT and the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia to exchange views about cultural differences while honing their language skills.

Students shape the direction of the site, said Morgenstern, who is also the project's director. They meet and collaborate in chat rooms and online forums to share ideas, videos, music and images. The idea is to encourage everyone who uses the site to learn from each other.

"We're trying to form a new paradigm of how people exchange educational and cultural information over the Web," Morgenstern said. "It's an open community in that students and teachers are essentially on the same level."

"The site has shown me the drastic difference in the lives of UPV students and MIT students, but also the many similarities there are between college students everywhere, even in different countries," said MIT student Patrick Hart. "Students create all of the content, so we really determine what we want the website to be."

The project began two years ago as part of an online community design class at MIT.

The site follows MIT's philosophy of free knowledge exchange. The university recently launched its OpenCourseWare pilot project, which over the next decade will offer course materials from over 2,000 classes online for free.

Currently, anyone can log in and participate in the MITUPV project. The site isn't mediated, so anyone can exchange ideas in English and Spanish.

"The use of English/Spanish, depending on what the language is that you want to improve, is an essential element in building the personal exchange that takes place online," said Vicente Fores, visiting associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin.

But the project is more than just an opportunity for students to boost their language skills.

"(The site) covers the whole span of cultural, social and academic life," Morgenstern said. "It's a repository for what university life is like for students."

One of the most original aspects of the site is the exchange of multimedia files, which gives students "a naturally occurring hands-on experience in manipulating multimedia objects over the Internet," said Rafael Seiz-Ortiz, a lecturer in English at UPV.

Videos are edited using iMovie software and can be downloaded in two formats: QuickTime and Windows Media Player. With T1, T3 or other broadband connections, most of the clips download in just a few minutes.

These self-produced videos expose students to cultural differences and life in the dorms, on campus and in surrounding cities.

"There is no better way of understanding what, say, the 'Semana Santa' in Seville is like than by looking at a couple of pictures or a video," said Angeles Carreres, Spanish language coordinator at Cambridge University.

"The videos, pictures and so on are very useful and important to me," Hart said. "Words can only say so much, but pictures and videos can do a lot more."

The University of Texas, University of Cambridge and the Universidad de Granada recently joined the project, and others are expected to follow suit.

Right now, the project's greatest stumbling block is securing broadband access.

"In Spain, broadband isn't as accessible," Morgenstern said. "We have to find the right format for having more Spanish people participate."

Eventually, Morgenstern hopes to add streaming video to improve accessibility to the site.

Project directors are trying to determine the ideal size and features for the site. Six hundred people have participated since the community began two years ago. During a given semester, 100 to 150 people may be participating.

"The next step is a matter of scale," Morgenstern said.

The virtual exchange allows professors to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of their universities directly from the students.

"There is no end to the amount of topics you can deal with once you have opened the doors and keep motivating your students to talk freely and openly about anything they please to do," Fores said.

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More stories written by Kendra Mayfield