Aims of the project
- to continue the international intercultural online exchange (UK-Mexico) between Coventry and UDEM
- to enhance the intercultural awareness and communicative competence of all participants involved
- to promote virtual international mobility and digital literacies
Los Cinco Amigos are...
- Alec Ranford (co-leader)
- Hafsha Choudhury (secretary)
- Helena Terry (IT expert)
- Kayla Donald (co-leader)
- Yimeng Sun (Time Management)
Use of technology
Our starting point for communicating with our Mexican group was through open moodle, but then we took these conversations to email, to Facebook and then to Skype. We 'became friends' with our group members on Facebook and this really helped us interact with them and organise times for talking. It also gave us the chance to acquire instant, or almost instant, responses depending on the time difference.
The skype interviews were crucial in task 4 as they gave us an opportunity to have a nice long discussion with our partners without any constraints. Through the video chat we were able to discuss a whole range of topics, everything to the food they eat to how they feel about the drug problem in their country. This was very informative and greatly changed our opinion about Mexican people in general and it was interesting just how similar to us they are.
One issue we had at this stage was the girl we were interviewing not being completely comfortable talking about a certain problem in a public place. We approached this subject delicately but she was quite worried about what the people around her would think, and so she decided to type her answer and send in via Facebook instead.
Overall this online communication was a very positive experience that we believe went extremely well. However, one thing we could have decided to do which we did not was to talk to more members of the UDEM group, perhaps people who were not in our partner group, to get more of an insight into their culture and see the variation in answers due to the person responding.
Introduction
Hello and welcome to our mahara page! We are Los Cinco Amigos, otherwise known as Alec Ranford, Hafsha Choudhury, Helena Terry, Kayla Donald and Yimeng Sun.
We chose the name 'Los Cinco Amigos' or 'The Five Friends' as we are working with Mexican people on this project, who obviously speak Spanish. 'Cinco' because obviously there are five of us, and 'Amigos' because we wanted to connote a sense of friendliness and closeness of our group- presenting ourselves as one equal front. This helped us stand out from some of the other groups, who used less creative names such as 'Group (insert number here'
As this is a collaborative activity, we have tried to incorporate all members of our group in each of the tasks, both within and outside of seminars. However, we understand that we all have our personal skills and attributes that we can bring to improve the outcome which is why we organised ourselves into job descriptions. Alec and Kayla, both being strong, decisive members of the team were appointed co-leaders. Hafsha was appointed secretary, Helena as IT 'expert' and Yimeng as Time Management keeper.
GrupoCompetencias Interculturales
As well as communicating directly with our partner group, several members of Los Cinco Amigos also 'became friends' with this page on Facebook run by the head of the Monterrey intercultural group. This enabled us to talk to more students from UDEM, see their ideas and help them out when needed such as the tagging of our faces on our group picture. They posted some really interesting topics all to do with cultural awareness and were very helpful in us finding extra information that we could later comment on.
Research into cultural awareness
English as a foreign language
As the majority of Los Cinco Amigos are native English speakers that only speak one language this video was very engrossing in looking how difficult it must be when people are learning English as a foreign language. This is something we have not really considered before as obviously to us English was easy to learn as it was a first language and we grew up using it. In the video you can tell how many of the words are very similar and all blend together to make it hard to recognise. We considered this throughout our project as we knew that the Mexican partners we were speaking English as their second language, and so we tried to be considerate and speak clearly. However, we were very impressed with the level of English of our group and thankfully did not experience any difficulties with language barriers.