About the Assignment
In response to a request from the President's office to integrate this year's World Leaders Forum with the educational mission of the University, CCNMTL proposed to use its premier video-interaction software, VITAL, to involve students and faculty in the creation of critical, multimedia essays based on at least two of the videotaped events (speeches by Musharraf and Talabani). These essays, commissioned by CCNMTL, are linked from the World Leaders Forum Web site, and serve the public as points for reflection and academic debate. For the Columbia community, these resources represent curricular possibilities that exist not only around the speeches made by this year's roster of world leaders at the Forum, but by the use of the modalities of media analysis and interaction enabled by a tool like VITAL.