Social Web Applications for Intercultural Projects – Results of a Japanese-hungarian Collaborative Teaching Experiment

This paper presents a model for using an interrelated set of Web 2.0 applications for making intercultural learning a social cognitive process that constitutes a cycle of personal and social knowledge-building. Relationships between individual minds of different socio-cultural backgrounds are established through internet based, individual, pair and group work. Our model is based on the trialogical learning theory (Paavola, Lipponen, and Hakkarainen, 2002) that emphasizes collective knowledge construction through work around shared knowledge objects. Collaborative knowledge-building environments (e.g., Facebook, Google Docs and the MapIt discussion software) were used to facilitate an intercultural collaborative course aimed at having students articulate their own cultural identities and understand verbal and multimedia expressions of others. Social web tools as well as learning designs were evaluated both by teachers and learners in Japan and Hungary in terms of the efficacy of this model for intercultural studies using Web 2.0 media. This paper presents theoretical and methodological considerations as well as examples of student work to illustrate the potentials of this instructional method in higher education. .