A Cross-Cultural and Bilingual Experience in LIS Education--A Case Study

This paper describes a case study involving the synchronous delivery of portions of an undergraduate course on web technologies taught across three campuses and in the context of a multicultural learning environment. The case study focuses on issues around internationalization and localization, one portion of the course where students learn techniques for developing Web content that supports multiple locales, languages, and written scripts. Another important component of the case study presentation will report student experiences in engaging in collaborative work using an array of synchronous technologies such as teleconferencing; synchronous multi-modal virtual meeting rooms and the like. This portion of the course provides experiences that students will likely encounter in their future careers, as they find themselves working in organizational contexts that require collaboration over long distances, across languages and cultures, and across national or continental boundaries. The challenges of distributed collaborative work across three cultures and two languages are presented and discussed.