Contribution in edited book
The ABC's as a starting point and goal: The online Intercultural Exchange Project (ICE)
Publication Details
Authors: | Finkbeiner, C.; Knierim, M. |
Editor: | Ruggiano-Schmidt, Patricia; Finkbeiner, Claudia |
Publisher: | Greenwich, CT |
Place: | Information Age Publishing |
Publication year: | 2006 |
Pages range : | 213-244 |
Book title: | ABC's of Cultural Understanding and Communication: National and International Adaptations |
Journal acronym: | LIT LANG LEARN |
Start page: | 213 |
End page: | 244 |
Number of pages: | 32 |
ISBN: | 978-1-59311-463-3 |
eISBN: | 9781607527077 |
This chapter reports on three subsequent implementations of the Intercultural Exchange Project (ICE). The ICE is a web-based intercultural learning project which is situated in the university setting in Germany and in the United States. Undergraduate students in the United States collaborated online with their partners in Germany, who were students in three and four-year foreign language teacher education programs. The ICE project originated With the idea of transferring our experiences in previous face-to-face ABC's projects to an online learning environment so that it would allow for cooperative transatlantic intercultural learning and exchange. As the ABC's had not been used online, at the time we started, and the Cultura project (Furstenberg et al., 2001) had already been proven to be a very successful online intercultural learning project, we decided to first collect ideas by following and adapting the Cultura design, then develop the ICE project and adapt it to our specific needs in qualifying future foreign language teachers. This helped us gain highly valuable insights into intercultural learning online, which now allows for the implementation of an ABC's into a web-based learning design.