A Design for Intercultural Exchange – An Analysis of Engineering Students’ Interaction with English Majors in a Poetry Blog

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The analysis of the postings clearly demonstrates how the students position themselves and collaborate in a joint writing project. Disciplinary background and local cultural belonging is presented or revealed in a number of places throughout the blogs, offering a meeting between two very contrasting groups.

This openness caters for flexible ways of sharing individual reflection as a collaborative enterprise and as mutual opportunity for learning. Consequently, the analysis suggests that despite the fact that cultural, individual as well as collective causes influence the ways students perceive Internet communication tools, and thus their learning, informed design and use of virtual environments can facilitate learning not easily achieved in traditional environments.

The intercultural poetry exchange was designed as part of two single-term university literature courses, Fiction for Engineers in Sweden and World Literature in the US.

All in all there were 15 students from Sweden and 21 from the US. The students from the Swedish university were technology students, primarily master’s students from various engineering disciplines, such as computer science, mechanical engineering, biotechnology, chemical engineering and interaction design. From the US, the students were mainly freshmen, majoring in English, but also one student with a history major and one with a double major in English and vocal performance.

The students were requested to read the three poems by Tomas Tranströmer that were posted on the blog and then respond to one, two, or all three. They were to choose words or short central phrases, motivating their significance and suggesting a theme of discussion.

Central concern was to investigate student blog interaction in an educational environment and how it was possible for two such diverse groups with different backgrounds, regarding academic discipline and nationality to make sense of each other’s viewpoints.

Concerning the content of the blog postings, topics for discussion were put forward by the students themselves. The development of the content into discussion threads was founded on the students’ discussions of the poems, emanating from the various topics based on the translations provided and their understanding of the poems.

The exchange took place in spring 2010, for a period of less than two weeks in the middle of term. The students were set to analyse the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, as part of their respective literature courses which involved reading works by different authors

A Design for Intercultural Exchange – An Analysis of Engineering Students’ Interaction with English Majors in a Poetry Blog

A key aspect highlighted in previous studies is the fact that users’ previous experience with digital tools has a bearing on their communication. Thorne (2003) describes three case studies of NSs meeting NNSs where computer mediated communication (CMC) tools create conditions for language learning and building linguistic as well as cultural relationships.

The nature of “production, consumption, and co-construction of meaning and intention when intercultural communication is mediated by such tools” is investigated.

Studies of intercultural digital exchanges commonly describe miscommunication between participants caused by several issues. Frequently, there is a combination of conditions involved, related both to the digital tool and to the differences in nationality and language background

A sociocultural perspective on culture promotes questions of how people relate to and interact with one another.

Through web based interaction, new venues for groups are created, which in turn have raised questions of how individuals become members of such groups, and how they contribute to the group’s identity and culture

Web based writing platforms allowing for exchanges across the world are increasingly being used in education

These recent forms of textual practice are highly related to conditions offered by the technology, allowing users, who previously were primarily consumers, to become producers of text.