Proyek Sepaham: An Experiment in Cross-cultural and Collaborative Journalism Education

Proyek Sepaham, or Project Understanding, brought together staff and students at the journalism schools at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, and Universitas Multimedia Nusantara in Tangerang, Indonesia, for an exercise in cross-cultural journalism education in which each university separately wrote feature stories and produced multimedia reports in response to questions provided by the other university’s students. The questions reflected topics about which the students felt they lacked understanding about the other country. Once the questions were exchanged, the students produced journalism for readers at the other country’s university, seeking to generate greater understanding of the topics concerned. The results were then published on two inter-connected websites under the banner Proyek Sepaham. This paper explores the nature of the collaboration and discusses the key lessons learnt about the design and scope of the project and its practical day-to-day operation. It also considers how the model might be improved for future collaborative exercises.