Presentation to Platinum Circle Oct 2013.

1. Facilitating collaboration across
borders.
Teresa MacKinnon
Principal Teaching Fellow
University of Warwick Language Centre.

2. 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.

3. Why telecollaboration?
virtual mobility
• achievable not through time spent
abroad, but through participation in networks
facilitated by technology and involving
students and institutions abroad.

4. The INTENT project

5. “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.

6. “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 one
single 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

7. 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)

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

11. Thank you for listening.
t.mackinnon@warwick.ac.uk
warwicklanguage on twitter and youtube
Teresamac in SL, slideshare and ning.
Please keep in touch!