Two Screens and an Ocean: Collaborating across Continents and Cultures with Web-Based Tools

This paper describes the implementation and results of a cross-cultural pairing between college students in the United States and Romania who worked together over the period of one month to create a multimedia presentation that shared their learning about topics of multimedia and culture. Students could use any web-based collaboration tools of their choice, including email, instant messaging, voice and video conferencing to complete the project, and documented their results on a collaborative wiki. The project gave students an opportunity to use Web based collaboration tools to create tangible work products with international partners. This paper presents an analysis of the technologies they used and how they used them to complete the project, and examines their learning based a survey and their own qualitative remarks. Results show that students gained proficiency at selecting and using appropriate web based collaboration tools. They also overcame issues related to language, time zones and technology.