A webcam platform for facilitating intercultural group activities

  • Authors:

  • Toshiyuki Takasaki;Yumiko Mori

  • Affiliations:

  • Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan;NPO Pangaea, Kyoto, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2009 international workshop on Intercultural collaboration
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

When children use webcams to conduct intercultural collaboration, communication efficiency is strongly influenced by social issues such as language and cultural differences and technical issues such as network delay. Current intercultural video-based collaboration sessions rely heavily on human facilitators and non-electronic tools, but the concept of providing system-based facilitation has not been well explored. Our extensive field observations indicate that intercultural webcam communication must be supported by five layers of facilitation. The five layers are, from top to bottom, the intercultural layer, collaboration layer, communication layer, network layer, and standalone layer. Each layer has a different form of facilitation and all are directed towards decreasing communication stress. Based on our observations, we propose a webcam platform that separates social issues from technical issues. We extend the normal video and audio channels with two redundant social channels: pictograms and machine translation. Visualization of technical measures of system performance such as network delay is introduced to facilitate users' awareness of the separation of technical issues and social issues and thus reduce communication stress.