Communicating across Cultures in the Classroom using an online 3D Virtual World

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry is inherently a global industry. As such, it requires workers to collaborate across timezones and different cultures. There is little scope for undergraduates of ICT to directly experience this sort of cross-cultural environment whilst studying. The project outlined in this paper describes the need to introduce students to cross-cultural experiences in a work environment and how this was achieved using an online collaborative 3D virtual world. Students from 3 geographically distant institutions collaborated in the online construction of a 3D Tower of Babel. How they went about this and their inventive methods for overcoming cross-cultural communication difficulties is discussed. This paper forms the basis for a keynote talk at ICHL2011.