The Youtube channel of the Global Nomads Group (GNG), an NGO that fosters intercultural dialogue and understanding amongst the world’s youth, offers 272 free videos that portray how young people from all over the world live, what they think, and how they discuss and cooperate with others from different countries. Many of the videos show how groups of young people (usually secondary school classes) from two completely different countries meet each other, listen to each other, and learn about each other’s realities through online classroom exchange, known as Exchange 2.0. Many other videos also show interviews with young people and portraits of their lives in the US, Uganda, Haiti, Spain, Vietnam, and many other countries.

AFS-USA, AFS Indonesia, AFS Malaysia and the US Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam have cooperated with GNG for a media literacy project called the Global Connections: one LENS program. This program is sponsored through the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Through this project, opportunities were offered to students and educators from Indonesia, Malaysia, the United States, and Vietnam to develop their media skills and to get to know each other better through working towards a common goal. The students met online (through video conferences and social networking), and later also in person. The project ended with a local media festival, where students had the opportunity to showcase their public service announcements or digital stories. On the Youtube channel below, you can find videos that were taken during the completion of this project.

This cooperation of AFS and the Global Nomads Group was a big success. It has become more and more common for us, especially for young people, to connect to others via online tools and video conferences. AFS and the Global Nomads Group have pioneered in the area of facilitating youth exchange using these tools, and their positive and very successful experience lets us hope that there is more to come in this area.