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A webcam platform for facilitating intercultural group activities

Published: 20 February 2009 Publication History

Abstract

When children use webcams to conduct intercultural collaboration, communication efficiency is strongly influenced by social issues such as language and cultural differences and technical issues such as network delay. Current intercultural video-based collaboration sessions rely heavily on human facilitators and non-electronic tools, but the concept of providing system-based facilitation has not been well explored. Our extensive field observations indicate that intercultural webcam communication must be supported by five layers of facilitation. The five layers are, from top to bottom, the intercultural layer, collaboration layer, communication layer, network layer, and standalone layer. Each layer has a different form of facilitation and all are directed towards decreasing communication stress. Based on our observations, we propose a webcam platform that separates social issues from technical issues. We extend the normal video and audio channels with two redundant social channels: pictograms and machine translation. Visualization of technical measures of system performance such as network delay is introduced to facilitate users' awareness of the separation of technical issues and social issues and thus reduce communication stress.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IWIC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 international workshop on Intercultural collaboration
February 2009
342 pages
ISBN:9781605585024
DOI:10.1145/1499224
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 20 February 2009

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Author Tags

  1. child
  2. facilitation
  3. intercultural communication
  4. machine translation
  5. pictogram
  6. stress
  7. video conference
  8. visualization
  9. webcam

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IWIC 09
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IWIC 09: International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration 2009
February 20 - 21, 2009
California, Palo Alto, USA

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