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This case study highlights findings from the first two years of a crossinstitutional and cross-national effort to link university students in South Africa with university students in the United States via a graduate seminar on globalization and the information society. The seminar is taught using synchronous and asynchronous web-based tools, providing students with the opportunity to participate in complex, cross-national learning teams. These Global Syndicates represent important stakeholders in globalization processes. Trust, culture, and ideology emerge as key factors for success in this distributed learning environment. Hindering factors include absence of group process skills, low levels of individual participation, cross-cultural differences in communication style, academic expectations, and work ethic.

Increasingly, international competence is considered an important skill to be acquired from an undergraduate education. Because international exchange presents a challenge to many students, there is a need to develop and implement alternative means for incorporating international and cross-cultural experiences into the undergraduate classroom. We report on the implementation of a semester-long, virtually shared course offering between a U.S. and a Bolivian university. As STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors tend to be under-represented in study-abroad programs, this class sought to provide a multidisciplinary experience that could be relevant to both hard and social science majors. Furthermore, the relevance and learning impact of this class was enhanced through the incorporation of a servicelearning component in conjunction with a rural Bolivian partner organization. The results of this experience show that virtually shared classroom experiences can successfully facilitate international experiences for undergraduate students.

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Discussing results of our joint project that examines the complex interactions among intergovernmental organizations and other transnational institutions and nonstate actors in the global Internet governance ecosystem, this study highlights themes related to the changing architecture and roles of international organizations from WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) until NetMundial. Attention is paid to old and new categories of organizations that emerged in this context; and how they have been recognized as stakeholders in the process. These organizations form a network, set in an environmental context, thus constituting the interorganizational infrastructure for internet governance today. Additionally, tracing knowledge flows and power differentials over time among the different stakeholder organizations helps to illustrate a major finding, the pro-active role of the international organizations studied here in the messy, complex, and cross-national internet governance ecosystem, shaped by and, at the same time, shaping the technical infrastructure.