"A New Course Design for Advanced Communication: “Debate and Beyond…” A Technology Enhanced Course for Communication Incorporating Empathy"

Abstract

Based on the fundamental concept of the communication being mainly composed of logic in information, the university in Japan has just begun offering such courses as logical thinking, critical thinking, and debate as subjects for the general education to freshmen and sophomores before they begin their special areas of study. However, after the natural disasters since the last year, the society has realized that the basis of communication may be supported not mainly by logic or critical thinking but more or less by some empathy driven factor. Because the university has the mission to raise promising potential members for the future society, a new concept for a course has come out in which the successful communication consists of both logical and critical thinking on the one hand, and emotion or empathy on the other. This paper attempts to propose a new course to such issue enhanced by the information technology available to us.