Participants by this time will have been placed in a sub-group specializing in one of the
aforementioned issue areas. Unfortunately, several students will invariably complain
that they knew everything beforehand and that the bibliographic instruction was a waste
of time. All I can say in response is that I always learn from these bibliographic sessions
at least one thing that I didn’t know before. I am happy if this is true for the bulk of my
students and if they learn to appreciate the value of a good reference librarian.
Another usual problem during Phase One is that students are prone to rely solely on
American sources as they conduct their research.
In addition, they sometimes act as if
everything they find on the Internet is unbiased and true.
A final difficulty is that in
practice it is very hard to get students to continue their research once the class has
completed its position paper.
Phase Two
During the second portion of the semester, students communicate and negotiate with
their peers at other institutions that are role playing additional countries. Closely guarded
by professors until the very end of the simulation is a list of what schools are representing
what country teams. In other words, if my students are pretending to be Spanish foreign
policy decision makers, students from other colleges will not learn this until the end of
the course. This is as it should be.
Years ago, the knowledge of hardware and software required by both students and
teachers to engage in ICONS was substantial. In those days, technical problems were
fairly routine. System crashes were common especially during the first batch of real-time
conferencing. Imagine how difficult it had to be run the show when country teams tried
to access the University of Maryland’s computers using a myriad of hardware platforms
and software protocols! Trails of messages were captured on dot-matrix printers (perhaps
4
Convention