Facilitating collaboration across borders.

Teresa MacKinnonPrincipal Teaching Fellow

University of Warwick Language Centre.

Our context:

• Language Centre, 3500 students a year, 8 languages for academic credit.

• 50 staff, many part-time.• Interest in ICT for teaching and learning.• Assessment review and alignment with CEFR.• Increasing importance of oral/aural skills.• Need to provide tailored resources.

Why telecollaboration?

virtual mobility• achievable not through time spent abroad, but

through participation in networks facilitated by technology and involving students and institutions abroad.

The INTENT project

“For communication to be successful, the receiver must understand the message that sender intended to send, and both the sender and receiver must agree that the receiver has understood the message”

Clark, H.H. and Wilkes Gibbs, D. "Referring as a Collaborative Process," Cognition, 22, 1986, 1-39.

“We believe that the key to effective use of media is to match media capabilities to the fundamental communication processes required to perform the task.

Because most tasks require individuals to both convey information and converge on shared meanings, and media that excel at information conveyance are often not those that excel at convergence. Thus choosing onesingle medium for any task may prove less effective than choosing a medium or set of media which the group uses at different times in performing the task, depending on the current communication process (convey or converge).

Media switching may be most appropriate.”

From: Denis, A and Valacich, J. Rethinking Media Richness. Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999

Important factors

• Negotiation of meaning• Immediacy• Appropriateness• Relative advantage• Social presence• Trust

Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.” (Garrison, 2009)

Kearney et al, Research in Learning Technology Vol 20, 2012 http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/14406/html

Thank you for listening.

t.mackinnon@warwick.ac.ukwarwicklanguage on twitter and youtubeTeresamac in SL, slideshare and ning.

Please keep in touch!