PEER-EVALUATION IN MULTI-CULTURAL CONTEXT: LANGUAGE AND CULTURE ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATIVE PROJECT E.Zaitseva, F.Bell, J.Whatley Information Systems Institute, University of Salford Salford, Greater Manchester, UK J.Shaylor University College Chester Chester, UK ABSTRACT This paper presents the results of an online collaborative activity from an on-going project, Collaboration Across Borders 1 . Intercultural aspects of the work have arisen from the original conception of peer-evaluation of multimedia presentations between five educational institutions from UK, Spain, Netherlands, Germany and Australia. Analysis of discussions’ transcripts highlighted some intercultural differences in students’ collaborative behaviour and language performance, emotional level of postings and attitude to the projects they evaluated. The results of post-collaborative questionnaire were used to investigate students’ attitude to the intercultural collaborative experience, as well as to understand problems and difficulties they experienced during the collaboration. Some conclusions are drawn relating to the benefits and drawbacks of international collaborative projects, followed by suggestions for improvements of such activities. KEYWORDS Collaborative project, intercultural interaction, communication behavior, foreign language skills 1. INTRODUCTION Information and telecommunication technologies have been used increasingly, not only to share existing knowledge but also to create an opportunity for knowledge generation through collaboration (Hughes, 2002). The project, Collaboration Across Borders (CAB) (www.cabweb.net), was organized to satisfy the trend for international collaboration of tutors and students by means of incorporating flexible, short-term collaborative activities in everyday teaching and learning practice, without a major overhaul of the curriculum of the collaborating students. A particular feature of the student collaborations is that they are established to deliver mutual, though sometimes asymmetric, benefits, based on experience of multi-cultural dialog , as proposed in the paper by Bell and Whatley (Bell&Whatley, 2003). Our experience confirms previous research findings that establishing an international network for educational collaboration between students and staff of higher educational institutions from Europe and beyond is a demanding and challenging task (Kim&Bonk, 2003, Vilmi, 1997, Warschauer, 1997). International collaboration can be quite complicated from an organizational point of view, since partners have to deal with different academic schedules, different curricula and time of assessment, different group sizes. On the other hand, globalization adds new dimensions to student teamwork, requiring students to handle collaboration that is cross-cultural, and linguistically challenging (Daniels at al, 1999). 1 This project is supported by EU Minerva funding (Project Number is 110681-CP-1-2003-1-UK-MINERVA-M) ISBN: 972-98947-7-9 © 2004 IADIS 122