During the Fall term of the 2006-2007 academic year, a teleconferencing class called “Broadening Perspectives: Understanding Culture Through Photography” (henceforth referred to as UCTP) was held between Emery Secondary School in California and Reitaku University and Keio University in Japan.
Analysis of the photographs the students chose for the four areas selected for discussion —Self-Introduction, Family, Friendship, and My Culture— as well as of their interactions in class showed that although the students began with differing concepts of the “Self” and different ways of expressing themselves and understanding others, they eventually developed sensitivity towards their own cultural assumptions and towards potential misunderstanding between cultures.
Teleconferencing provides a unique opportunity for students who otherwise would not have had the chance to “meet” across the Pacific. Face-to-face meeting and actual exposure to each other’s cultures could have developed the friendships they began to develop as well as deepened cross-cultural understanding. However, the UCTP class has shown that the new technology born in the past decade can provide a novel type of interaction, one that could not even have been imagined before the dawn of the Internet Age.

研究論文