2009 Project Description Taken From http://www.vicadis.net/set/files/pedagogical_settings.pdf, Page 39 and following
Name TalkTech’09 – Multimedia Technologies (“Politehnica” Univeristy of Timisoara, University of Palermo, Bentley University)
Category Level 1: Inter-university cooperation Short Description of Piloting Case 40
TalkTech’09 – Multimedia Technologies was the second year pilot of a project that focuses on how computer mediated communication over the Internet may be used to foster information technology and web 2.0 literacy skills of students enrolled at business and technical universities, while at the same time, promote cross-cultural awareness. The pilot was a partnership between first year business students in IT 101, an introductory information technology course at Bentley University in the United States, and Bachelor in Telecommunications students in the Technologies of Multimedia (TMM) course, in their final year at the “Politehnica” University of Timisoara (UPT) in Romania, as well as towards the final students in the second year from University of Palermo, Italy studying The Use of technologies in Linguistic. Approximately 12 American and 37 Romanian and 22 Italian students participated in the project, with six students per group. These students partnered over a period of 6 weeks in November and December, 2009, to explore a variety of Web 2.0 tools to create a multimedia presentation on a topic related to multimedia, technology, and culture. The tutors introduced the proposed topics and at the end they needed to present as a group their project result. Their activity was marked and they earned credits for it.
Pedagogical Settings of the Piloting Case
The main aim of this pilot was to generate a familiar context for digital students in which they had to work effectively with international partners in a project, and to analyze the implications of such an experiment of international collaboration on digital students. The research questions are: • Are these students digital students? How do they behave when working in an international online project? (investigated by using a pre-project questionnaire and student observation) • How does participating in an international collaborative environment for learning change students’ perspective over their subject of study (multimedia and internet technologies)? How important are cultural differences in learning about and using new technologies? • What technical and cultural challenges will students identify in working globally, and how will they overcome them?
Theoretical Background for the selected Pedagogical Settings
The Internet has evolved in the early part of the 21st century to an interactive platform for collaboration and communication. This evolution, often referred to as Web 2.0, now encompasses rich web applications that facilitate instant messaging, Voice Over IP Internet telephony, live video streaming and conferencing, and social networking within a web browser. In recent years, the advent of Web 2.0 tools for collaboration and communication (O’Reilly, 2005) has enabled both businesses and individuals to form global partnerships. “For the first time in human history, the potential exists for exponential growth in direct international interchange. It is an interchange that has the ability to heighten cultural awareness and provide opportunities for direct life applications of the knowledge gained by crossing traditional boundaries of nation, language, time and culture.” (Gragert, 2000, p. 1) Asynchronous collaboration has been useful for several different cross-cultural conversations. Students of (Liaw & Johnson, 2001) exchanged email messages to improve their writing skills while learning English as a second language.In a later study, their students “read articles on topics of their own culture and communicate 41 their responses with speakers of another culture” (Liaw, 2006, p. 59) using computer-mediated communication tools. Students communicated fluently, with lesser reliance on online language tools as the project continued. The literature notes that an outcome of the online exchanges was also to foster awareness and curiosity about the other’s culture as well.
The Use of Social Media in the Piloting Case
The special technology intensive section of IT 101 is offered as an alternative to the traditional introductory IT course required of all first year students at Bentley University. The course introduces IT topics through the lens of Web 2.0. The TMM course is a course for senior students at UPT that covers the development of new media and Internet technologies for communication. During this course the students have different tasks to do: to use multimedia technologies in new ways and to develop a full, multimedia interactive website. Prior to this project, students in both classes have accomplished similar technical tasks: they made personal web pages, posted online videos, and created PowerPoint presentations; they are web literate; they are familiar with social networking sites, search engines, email, instant messaging, and other applications. The pre-project survey given to both students groups made it clear that these students belong to the group of digital students. (Andone, 2008) This project introduced many of them to virtual campus as new collaboration tools that many had not used previously. Approximately 12 American and 37 Romanian and 22 Italian students participated in the project, with six students per group. All of the Romanian students, who volunteered out of the 75 students enrolled in the TMM course, spoke English comfortably.
The goals of this project were to create a virtual learning environment which encouraged students to: • work with students from another country (Romania, Italy and the USA) to create a multimedia presentation showcasing research on a topic related to technology and culture • choose and use both synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated-communication tools to communicate with international partners • choose and use Web 2.0 collaborative tools to facilitate and chronicle group process, progress, and collaboration to produce a tangible work product within a designated period of time. The students’ goal was to use these different technologies to work together to create a multimedia presentation that shared their understanding of a current issue in technology and culture. Sample topics included “what are the mobile phones of the future and why”, “how does the Internet change the way people communicate,” and “how a green computer can be built?” The format of their final deliverables was left open to the students, but could take the form a web page with images, a video, a PowerPoint, a recorded audio conversation, or a combination of any of these. By introducing these principles, both course leaders tried to match the ideas of learning ecology (Seely Brown, & Duguid, 2000) and of the virtual campuses and open personal learning environment as introduced by (Andone, 2007).
The site has an News forum where the students or the instructors could post announcements, a home page with a description of the project and related milestones, and a groups modules, where students signed up for groups and selected topics. The instructors placed a Meeting planner gadget displaying the local time in both countries, to remind students of the time difference (7 hours) when planning real time meetings with their international partners. Despite this, students still found managing time zone differences to be difficult. The instructors created a 42 set of modules for each group to share their work and collaborate. These modules included a blog, a forum, a wiki and an upload section. On the blog students can record work on the project, or leave messages for their partners. Newer posts appear above older ones. The upload are served as a common online repository for students to share images, videos, presentations, and other files that they generated as part of their work on this project. Students used their group’s Forum and Blog to present their findings, include links to references or other resources and to embed multimedia that they created as part of the project. Some groups simply provided hyperlinks to their final documents which were external files or websites. They need to use new information from the one received from their professor in the class and to relate it to their culture, their background and their everyday life. They had the freedom to use anything they want (Skype, IM, wiki, PPT, etc) to communicate and to produce the presentation, but in this presentation they needed to include also the process – proofs of each student contribution – in the personal blog, at the end credits, to record the communication (skypecast or IM archive) and to integrate it in the resources area, file upload. The tutor continuously supported the students online during the project.
Topics were related to ICT, multimedia, the technology and the Internet & WWW. Each group did one topic. Students subscribe to one topic in the online ViCaDiS, by selecting the group in which to be part, according to the subject and student interests. http://www.vicadis.net/campus/course/view.php?id=56 During the project students were free to use any communication tools they wanted. At the beginning of the project, students were asked to provide their IDs on different instant messaging and VoIP tools. The evaluation investigates how students used the various communication applications, and for what purpose – by observation of their entries in the blog section of each group and during the online survey (a set of 9 questions).
Of the 16 groups, 13 described on the blog their methods of communication online: the most preferred one being synchronous meeting using instant messaging (IM) (such as AIM, Yahoo messenger or Google Talk) or VoIP. The use of IM was also reported in the open question as the preferred beside the live VoIP especially by the Romanian students: “it was easier to write then to talk”, “writing it gives you time to think a bit what are you saying”. Several students also reported that the most important decisions regarding the project work were taken during live IM chats and not in emails. During the instant messaging communication they discussed about the division of tasks, organizational details (when to ‘meet again’ and how), “getting to know you”, and “difficulties we were facing”.
Almost all the students found working across time zones and the process of finding compatible synchronous meeting times on their own to be difficult (all 16 groups listed this). Several students had similar sentiments that it is “hard … to coordinate a meeting schedule with 5 different students with different schedules when two of them are 7 hours ahead. We sometimes didn’t meet as a whole group but usually had at least 4 or the 5 people present.” They enjoyed the freedom using any tools they wanted for communication but, as their project result was graded, they wanted to know exactly how their work would be evaluated. Some complained about their work being more complicated and challenging than that of other groups, with a direct sense of competition between them. One Romanian student mentioned that the most important aspect on this project was the motivation to do it and to “show how good you are… to identify yourself with the work you’ve done and the quality of the final product”. Two Romanians suggested also that to increase the student participation and motivation to run the project as a competition between groups with final prizes to be done in the future.
The biggest impact of this project on students was a tangible lesson in the global reach of the Internet and the global impact of technology. This remark was representative of many of the students’ experiences: “Technology can help you communicate no matter where you are in the world. You don’t need to be face to face in order to do a project together.”
For many of the American students, communicating online with their Romanian partners was a novelty: as one student put it, “I got to talk to my first Romanian person.” Several students commented that their partners were very much like themselves. “They entertain themselves the same way [that we do] with multimedia,” said one student. “They don’t seem all that much different from [us],” remarked another. Some students noted the differences in language and reported that they had to be careful when communicating with their international partners to be sure everyone was clear on their tasks. Said one group: “We moved at a snail’s pace because we didn’t want any misunderstandings in communication.”
A third of the Romanian students reported that they had difficulties in using English as a working language but all of them reported that their knowledge and understandings of English and of American culture increased after the project: “Americans are open persons” “Find out more info about American elections”, “understand what is a social network stalker”. Both Americans and Romanians found themselves as “very friendly” and “enjoyed chatting with” each other. To some extent their assumed perspective of how “the others are” has changed in a better and more realistic view. the upload area for their joint project work Summary The course leaders observed that almost half of the groups weren’t fulfilling equally their work. The groups that spent the most reported time communicating with each other, or who were gossiping about different issues online, have had the most accomplished, structured and comprehensive final projects. Better communication between the partners on the same project (“got new friends”), leads to better work results even if they never met face-toface and their communication is just online.. . They all reported that this project was interesting and that they 45 learned “a lot of new things”. They described the experience of using all the instant communication tools to be fast and efficient, as was the pace of the project: “ we learned more things in a month that in a year.” They found the project useful and high quality as trying “to use new tools made the project experience better”; TalkTech2009 was a social environment to share ideas with peers, see what others are doing and, as one student said, ‘give’ them ‘confidence that they are on the right track’ with their studies and understanding of technology. It is significant that the students placed great value in tools that enabled communication not just between themselves but also with the course leaders, who used the same tools to plan this project.
This project entrusted confidence into the students’ online abilities and skills especially for using them in an international context. Throughout the project, the instructors worked to provide support, build a common learning-communication environment through the TalkTech module. Despite these efforts, the fact that students sometime found other alternatives (such as in the use of Yahoo Briefcase for file sharing, or tools to create their own websites, or Wikipedia to show cast their result) shows that, even within a rigid institutional setting, it is increasingly they and not us who create and control their learning ecologies. In a sense, it may be seen that they are creating their own classrooms and project spaces, using the tools and virtual spaces that work best for them. Rather than expecting students to adapt to the spaces we create for them, it is increasingly that we must adapt to the spaces they choose to create and inhabit.