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No sense of distance: improving cross-cultural communication with context-linked software tools

Published: 08 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Many studies have established the difficulties inherent in both cross-cultural and distance communication. Distance work interferes with close collaboration and trust. Physical distance and lack of time zone overlap can exacerbate cross-cultural misunderstandings. Nevertheless, international collaboration over distance is becoming increasingly common in many fields. Scientific collaborations, in particular, are becoming larger and more international in scope. There has been much research in the area of understanding cultural differences, but not as much in how technology might bridge such communication gaps in international scientific collaboration. In an effort to begin to form guidelines for such technology development, we undertook an empirical study of how computer-mediated communication tools facilitated cross-cultural communication over distance and led to greater team effectiveness in an international astrophysics collaboration.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
iConference '11: Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
February 2011
858 pages
ISBN:9781450301213
DOI:10.1145/1940761
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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Published: 08 February 2011

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  1. computer-mediated communication
  2. cross-cultural collaboration
  3. scientific collaboration

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iConference '11: iConference 2011
February 8 - 11, 2011
Washington, Seattle, USA

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View all
  • (2023)The Operationalization of Culture in HCICultures in Human-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-30243-5_5(53-69)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2023
  • (2014)Game design for bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure learningConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.326126:13(2303-2315)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2014
  • (2013)Human centered game design for bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure learningProceedings of the Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment: Gateway to Discovery10.1145/2484762.2484833(1-8)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2013

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