Track 4 People and technology: societal aspects
Title of paper
Name of presenter(s)
Hello, England Calling…
Angela Goddard, Rosalie Mesker
and Manon van der Laaken
This paper focuses on issues of language and culture as mediated by digital video technology.
The research arises from a collaborative, internationally taught module where undergraduates from 4 different countries – the UK, the
USA, Sweden and the Netherlands – use discussion forums within a VLE to discuss lan-guage-related topics. Within this larger
community, a specific project integrating digital video into the VLE allowed Dutch students to present their papers to their UK peers,
and for UK students to record a set of responses, to agreed guidelines.
The focus taken in this paper is to consider the affordances of this technology for giving and getting feedback across cultural
boundaries, and for intercultural communication in a wider sense. At a time when higher education providers are particularly concerned
with internationalising their provision, but where students find international mobility difficult for financial reasons, digital video appears
to offer much potential for meaningful connection. However, there are important issues about how groups in different cultures are
positioned by the purposes of such video exchanges and the nature of the larger project within which they function (see various papers
in Herring 1996 in this regard).
In this paper, we focus particularly on the roles taken up by the respective groups within the partnership and con-sider ways in which
video communication enriched the learning experiences of the participants. We also consider some particular ways in which global
issues of language use impacted on the project to frame the communication events.