Designs for Networked Learning: Using Personal Learning Networks to Build Intercultural Competence

Participants will explore the use of a Personal Learning Network (PLN) for building intercultural competence. A PLN is a collection of people, information resources, organizations, and other connections that a networked individual values because the connections support and contribute to learning interests. Throughout our exploration and development of PLNs, participants will identify how these might be used to make “visible” our culturally based assumptions about identity, knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, and the knowledge most worth having. Workshop emphasis will be on both pedagogy and research and stems from recent literature on connectivism and networked learning

Intercultural Connectivism: Introducing Personal Learning Networks

Global connectivity makes intercultural communication an increasingly common experience. Providing students with insight and practice in intercultural communication is increasingly imperative. As Thatcher (2010) stated in the inaugural issue of this journal: We have a large task ahead of us: to develop and operationalize models of intercultural rhetoric and professional communication in the context of globalization (p. 14)... We need to especially pay attention to how new communication and information technologies require different etic frames for common human thresholds of interaction… How do we assess communicative purpose and media selection in global contexts? How do we plan for audience-author relations, especially as mediated by new communication technologies? (p. 27). Growing in parallel with global communication networks, learning networks intensify the need for participants to reflect on communicative purpose and author-audience relations when contributing to intercultural learning environments. As our epigraph emphasizes, paths to shared information do not necessarily lead to shared meaning. The social life of information in intercultural networked environments is subject to conflicting meanings whose impacts are compounded by culturally grounded motives for learning—such as learning to serve the self versus learning in order to serve a social purpose in league with others (Parrish & Linder-VanBerschot, 2010, Table 1). Another key challenge in culturally diverse learning environments is that of facilitating learning in social contexts in which attitudes, dispositions, practices, and identities have few cultural origins in common

Intercultural Connectivism and Personal Learning Networks in Course Redesign

As the call for proposals to this special issue states, “the need to share our pedagogical knowledge is paramount.” We agree that “the assumptions underlying much of contemporary communication pedagogy are oversimplified and fraught with groundless stereotypes” and that pedagogical change amid the increasingly globalized and networked classroom has been too slow. Participants need multiple means to understand and increase their capacity for working interculturally and in global virtual teams. One such means is through the pedagogical deployment of personal learning networks

Redesigning TAPP for developing critical understanding for managing global virtual teams

Translators and technical communicators increasingly perform their work as part of global virtual teams (GVTs). To prepare students for developing critical understanding for such work, instructors can assign readings, asking students to reflect on the importance of building trust (Crisp & Jarvenpaa, 2013), cultural intelligence (Li, Rau, Li, & Maedche, 2017), and strategies for managing multicultural teams (Behfar, Kern, & Brett, 2006). More important for developing critical understanding, however, is the experience of managing a “real” Global Virtual Team (GVT). Research questions for this work include the following: How does attention to and work with international translators influence critical understanding for managing GVTs? and How does situatedness influence critical understanding of the many requirements and factors in a translation project? This article provides a brief theoretical background to the project and then details our redesign of the standard collaborative formats of the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project (TAPP) and associated assignments to focus on student development of critical understanding for managing GVTs. We include identification of themes from a subset of literature relevant to student practice in managing a translation team; description of the TAPP redesign in which University of Minnesota (UMN) students serve as project managers of teams of University of Trieste (UT) students practicing translation; and a brief summary of results from deployments of this model during 2019 and 2020. We conclude with emphasis on the need to redesign the TAPP format to meet evolving learning needs of students

“Scaffolding” revisited: How TAPP collaborations support learners and instructors from different disciplines and backgrounds

In social-constructivist approaches to learning, scaffolding is “the support offered by the teacher to assist learners in the collaborative construction of their mental models” (Kiraly 2000: 45). It is not “pre-determined support” and can take a variety of forms. It is like “the placing of helpful signposts on the path as the learners create it”. It does not break down a task into components so as not to prevent learners from extracting meaning from the whole learning situation. In a collaborative project, scaffolding might also be seen as including the support that instructors offer to each other, especially when they come from different disciplines. In this paper, we provide an overview of the iterations of an online collaborative project within the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project (TAPP) network. In particular, we describe how over a five-year span we collaborated to re-adjust and fine-tune the project so as to learn more about each other’s discipline and cater to the learning needs of two groups of students coming from programs with different educational focuses: one group (based at the University of Trieste, Italy) comprised students from a bachelor degree program on translation; the other group (based at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, U.S.A.) comprised (mainly graduate) students from a class on international professional communication. Based on our use of collaborative autoethnography, our overview discusses: 1) the ways in which we developed and re-adjusted our scaffolding strategies; and 2) the ways in which such scaffolding and online collaboration helped us, as instructors, make better sense of the cross-disciplinary nature of the students’, and our, collaboration

Making Sense of the Response to COVID-19 in Higher Education: A Case Study of Crisis Communication in Two Universities

The COVID-19 pandemic brought extreme challenges and disruption to higher education, resulting in hurried adoption of online teaching. From the point of view of crisis communication, the COVID-19 pandemic as experienced in HE institutions represents an interesting case, because crisis management and communication were primarily, if not exclusively, directed at internal stakeholders (essentially, students and staff ). We present a case study that compares and contrasts the COVID-related responses of two different universities: the University of Minnesota, in the U.S., and the University of Trieste, in Italy. In particular, we look at the sets of documents issued by the leadership of these universities over a period of 23 months between February 2020 (the start of the health crisis) and December 2021. The analysis of the documents revealed that unexpected spaces of freedom empowered instructors. We identify four discursive traits associated with these spaces: definitional change, code glossing, and the use of engagement markers and permissives. However, this empowerment changed over time, as universities became eager to go back to “normal” and reinstate restrictions from pre-pandemic times

Building digital literacy through exploration and curation of emerging technologies: A networked learning collaborative.

People readily consume an ever-growing range of emerging technologies while largely unaware of their lack of control over the impact that such networking, devices, data, and processes have on their lives. Since college-educated people are huge consumers of digital products and are expected to participate in networked learning, it is critical to foster student development of an expanded understanding of digital literacy. To address this challenge, we have created instructional materials for instructor and student use of the internationally known repository, “Fabric” of Digital Life (https://fabricofdigitallife.com/). This research comes as the result of collaboration between the University of Minnesota’s Emerging Technology Research Collaboratory (ETRC, https://etrc.umn.edu/), a research group for investigating emerging technologies, and Fabric of Digital Life (https://fabricofdigitallife.com/) and its affiliated Decimal Research Lab at Ontario Tech University. Together, functioning as a collaborative in support of networked learning, we invite and facilitate research on building student digital literacy through examination, contribution, and/or curation of collections regarding emerging technologies. From Spring 2019 to the present, 13 instructors and associated students across nine institutions have developed and are using a set of instructional materials for student exploration and/or curation of collections in this repository. This paper documents initial instructor discussion and study of student development of digital literacy as a result of use and/or curation of Fabric collections on emerging technologies and the discourses surrounding them. We are beginning to study the abilities that students draw upon when exploring the collections and when determining which artifacts might be included in current collections as well as new collections that might be developed. Collaborative interaction with the editorial team at Ontario Tech University not only enhanced the repository content and development of instructional resources, it also further evolved the metadata for Fabric for external users and the public. At its core, this research examines the potential development of digital literacy through the act of exploring and curating collections on emerging technologies. Critical to this core is the networked learning collaborative in place to foster and support this work

Negotiating Networked Learning Relationships with Augmentation Technologies: Smart Education, Data Analytics, and Human-autonomy Teaming

The hosts of this round table discussion, members of the Building Digital Literacy (BDL) research cluster of the Digital Life Institute (www.digitallife.org), adopt a critical disposition (NLEC, 2021a, 2021b) toward emerging augmentation technologies that sit at the core of networked learning. Augmentation technologies, such as wearable devices that extend human senses, augment creative abilities, or overcome physical limitations (Pederson & Hill, 2021), represent the engine that drives the next generation of networked learning. As emerging augmentation technologies, use of data analytics, and “smart” technologies proliferate, we see the critical need for research, presentation, and discussion of the implications for networked learning. This round table invites conversation about the role of artificial intelligence, big data, and learning analytics in networked learning

Designing, deploying, and studying internationally networked collaboration: The Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP) model

Members of today’s diverse and global workforce increasingly perform their work as part of cross-cultural virtual teams (CCVTs). CCVTs are those teams connected via technology and comprised of people in various locations around the globe whose primary objective of virtual collaboration is to launch, develop, and complete its assigned task. In addition to discipline and technical knowledge, today’s working professionals need cross-cultural competence. As the majority of students will be expected to work effectively on CCVTs, it is imperative to include collaborative work on realistic projects as a means to develop language skills, project management skills, application of specialized skills and knowledge, and intercultural competence. Over the past 18 years, the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project (TAPP) has connected 29 universities in 16 countries on four continents, linking writing classes to usability testing and translation studies classes in collaborative projects. TAPP’s main aim is to share insights into collaborative writing across borders and cultures, and, in the course of this work, to gain intercultural competence. The network of partners participating in TAPP establishes links between students in different countries so that each learns from the other. In so doing, students become aware of the diversity of the world community in which their documents travel. The purpose of this workshop is to guide attendees in learning how to join TAPP or to design and run collaborative global virtual collaborative projects on their own. Presenters will share research and practice that addresses the structural, relational, interactional, and technological components of TAPP projects, with emphasis on the study of intercultural competence developed as a result of student global virtual collaboration. Participants will design an international collaborative project based on the TAPP model; this will include how to run and gain support for international collaborative projects in a political environment of rising nationalism