I am an expert. So, well...

I am now regarded as an expert because of my Fulbright Scholar experience.

I had been back just a month when National Public Radio's Dan Charles telephoned for information about Ukrainian environmental and energy issues. He was departing for Kyiv the next week. While he had assistants who were arranging interviews with Ukrainian youth, he wanted more information from which to craft questions.

When his Climate Connections: Profiles piece, “A Ukrainian Pop Star's Would-Be Revolution”, appeared, I could hear my backgrounding at work. For example, he discussed those little windows we all had in our apartments for letting out all the extra heat in the depth of winter.

“So, well…,” my Ukrainian colleagues would say if they read this, and then they would change the subject. They know I have much yet to learn of things in Ukraine. Yet, I can't believe how much I learned in one semester.

While we all write proposals for the committees to consider, the truth is my Fall 2007 project, Introduction to Convergence Journalism, at Lutsk Liberal Arts University, is only a small part of my Fulbright Experience.

Don't get me wrong; I count my project a small success. Despite warnings to lower my expectations, I successfully lectured to 45 students three-times a week on web-based journalism. The students then successfully created something they'd never seen before, an online journalism publication.

However, even if I'd fallen flat on my face, I would have been a success. The successful Fulbright experience is what happens beyond your project: Meeting new people, pursuing projects not in your grant application, and doing more after you return to the United States.

Teaching alongside Ukrainian academics was not like anything I expected. I worked with Japanese university faculty in Japan in 2004, but I was not a member of that faculty and subject to its rules. In Ukraine, I wrote syllabi, took role, and gave grades inside “their system.” At Cypress College, I can tell you my class schedule 18 months in advance. Ukrainian class schedules rotate weekly to accommodate national education requirements. While I was given the huge courtesy of a fixed lecture schedule, my students and peers never knew week to week what hours they would meet. And when it came to grading, I learned the collective ethic still survives-you teach the cohort, not the individual.

I became very familiar with my students. Taking role in the Cyrillic Alphabet taught me how diverse Ukraine is: which students are ethnically Ukrainian, Russian or Polish. But just to keep me alert, the students preferred to use their “English” names, often names not even close transliterations of their Ukrainian names.

The students became great friends. In the end, I wrote letters of recommendation for the best students to the editors of the new online media outlets forming in Ukraine. Email keeps us in touch.

I even have a “student” at the University of Warsaw. We went to church with her and her family. While I never taught Iryna in a classroom, she and I talk regularly using Skype.

While one socializes easily with English-speaking faculty members who have adopted American Midwestern openness, one must work hard to get to know faculty members who do not speak English. We learned people are not rude. It is just impolite to speak personally with people who are not long-time friends or family. But once we became “long-time friends” (given about two months), we were invited many places.

My wife, Rose Mary, volunteered to tutor at an English Language School that taught many members of the entrepreneurial class. We found we had much in common with them. We were invited to private homes that had private gyms and Jacuzzis, and even to a charity auction for the local orphanage. We regretted we only stayed one semester in Lutsk. We were just getting acquainted.

We also met Ukrainian doctors when my wife became ill. They actually talk to you and ask questions. I told a young American doctor this. He did not look up from the lab report he was reading, mumbling, “That's all they've got.” It was enough to cure my wife in 24 hours. And, of course, there were the women my wife met during her stay in the hospital. They took her to lunch in the dinning room, then returned to the six-bed room and opened their market bags and created a much tastier meal. They even helped her find her spoon after she turned it into the dinning room dishwasher. You always keep your spoon.

Rose Mary even got instant credit at the laundry. The lady, who had a daughter in Chicago, had seen us on TV during one of our many interviews. I don't want to remove the hand-stitched Mepcep inside my slacks. Now, that's a laundry mark!

We traveled in Ukraine both as tourists and as academics. I was a guest at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy's “Digital Future of Journalism,” , a program to train current, print journalists to be online journalists. While there, I met two Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication colleagues from the University of South Carolina and the University of Ohio. They were the guest trainers.

We traveled to Dnipropetrovsk for Thanksgiving with other Fulbrighters. There we toured Dnipropetrovsk University, meeting with both the psychology and journalism faculties as well as top administrators. Our conclusion -- what teaching technology Ukraine does not have today, it will next semester. (For example, the wifi installed in our apartment in September was the only one broadcasting in our city of 200,000. When we left, there were two new units in our apartment building.) The other conclusion is that every university in America should be partnering right now with another university in a developing democracy.

Of course, there are the moments where diplomacy is demanded. Because his student, immediately upon graduation, was refused employment by the New York Times, a professor said he had no interest in partnering with second-rate universities, such as those in Oklahoma. Everyone of our delegation had taught or published in Oklahoma. “So, well….,” our host, a dean, declared and we moved on.

As best we could tell, there were only four other Americans in our part of Ukraine. These Peace Corps volunteers provided us commiseration we needed at times. The volunteers being young, also left us a sense of optimism about the future of diplomacy in our nation.

We bonded with the volunteers as coaches for the high school girls' softball team the volunteers started. Sharing pizza and conversation at Felicita Pizza Parlor, or sharing an office at the university, we learned to respect the maturity they bring back to the U.S.

The girls' softball team was not our only extra-curricular activity. I also conducted a photography workshop for the students of Volodymyr-Volynskyi School #5. Ryan, the Peace Corps volunteer teaching English at the school listened to me describe the “photo expeditions” I conducted with my university students. We would take a marshrutka [minibus] to a ploshcha [square] in the city and practice street photography. The students had to shoot many photos and interview the subjects long enough to get name, occupation and a quote for a photo caption.

Three times I rode 70 kilometers over snow-packed roads to the high school. First, we tested the workshop with two high school students. The students photographed in the bazaar. Much like a permanent swap meet, the bazaar is where everyone buys almost everything, including fresh vegetables, meats, and cheeses produced on the dachas. Even flowers can be bought up until Christmas-Ukrainian Christmas that is celebrated on January 7.

Everyone in the bazaar loved the experience. That closed Ukrainian suspicion gave way to laughter as people insisted their friends pose with them. However, Ryan decided the DITLO workshop format worked better for the school. The Day In The Life Of School #5 workshop was underwritten by a state department grant. Using a variety of off-brand digital point-and-shoot cameras, students stalked the campus in 45-minute expeditions, returning to recharge batteries and download files. The last school hour was spent editing the take into selects for printing and framing.

I returned during a blizzard to watch the students sign their prints and frame them. Ryan had by that day returned to the U.S. and a corporate job in Houston. However, under the supervision of the principal, the 45 prints were hung in Ryan's classroom as a testimony to his work with School #5.

Rose Mary, a newspaper editor for 20 years, and I gave master classes as part of a professional journalist development grant to the Volhyn Oblast Press Club. Rose Mary lead the ethics class taking the students through a series of case studies we had developed for my LLAU Intro to Convergence class. Cross cultural ethics has no right answers. We teach the process. We found a conflict between the professional journalism ethic of objectivity and Ukrainian ethic of loyalty to family and friends. There was no right answers, just the right process of arriving at an ethical decision.

“From Idea to Air” gave me the chance to discuss the fact journalists have an obligation to speak of impolite subjects in the name of community development. I chose public toilets as a gender equality issue and an economic development issue. Now, we'll see if there will be a series of articles that will prompt WOG to clean up its gas station restrooms.

A Fulbright Scholar has time to think and experiment. Myron Stachiw, Fulbright Program in Ukraine director, asked me if a teleconferencing system could be worked out to unite Fulbrighters in Ukraine. It was a fun challenge, but one already solved by our Ukrainian Fulbrighters in Dnipropetrovsk. Taking their ideas, I choose to take them a step further and experiment with virtually uniting campuses in Ukraine with my students in Cypress College. No problem.

Returning to the U.S., I continued working on the idea with Iryna at Warsaw University. We tested the idea of creating a shared curriculum in a teleconference. We created agendas and we compared and contrasted media in Poland and the U.S. Iryna, having no fear, next hosted a teleconference on her campus for the Journalism Association of Community Colleges Annual Convention in Los Angeles. She shared the webcam with an American student enrolled in Warsaw. California students learned study abroad could be their first step into becoming international journalists. A Warsaw professor and I are now creating shared classes for this fall.

Also, Lutsk Liberal Arts University is permitting me to be their very first professor of distance education this fall, teaching my class from last fall online using teleconferencing. This is possible because the rector upgraded the campus broadband just for his visiting Fulbrighter. And James Mosher, LLAU's Peace Corps volunteer, teaching economics, has written a successful grant for the equipment to handle teleconferencing. Given what we learned about the communication noise that occurs lecturing Ukrainian students in English face-to-face, this will be a huge challenge.

Of course, this summer and fall, I'll be presenting on academic panels at conferences about international education in journalism for U.S. students.

But wait, there's more! I am also joining El Camino College's Global Education Through Technology Project, to create permanent links with Dnipropetrovsk University, also. Again, partnering virtually with other universities is an area every Fulbrighter should explore. Can we create a program of “virtual Fulbright Scholars?”

Finally, I am rewriting the entire Cypress College curriculum to include a significant international journalism element in every class. The Orange County Register just moved one of the layout functions of its daily newspaper to India. A layout room two floors below or two continents away -- it's all the same today. Our students must stop thinking about getting a job in California and start trying for a job in the world. By meeting students of journalism in Ukraine and Poland, my students will know their co-workers.

To illustrate this point, I connected a Los Angeles online education software developer with a Ukrainian website designer. This international tutoring start-up company also has offices in London and Beijing.

We've been home as long as we were in Ukraine. We have survived the feared “Menninger Curve.” I came back to wow my administration with new ideas, and fell into depression when I found they really wanted me to clear up the paperwork I abandoned seven months before. But hey, I'm a Fulbright Scholar! Weren't we told, by MyronStachiw, “Just do something.”

After all, I'm an expert. So, well…