Sabella (1998) presented a list of computer applications that would be potentially helpful to peer leaders, helpers, and helpees that included multimedia presentations, databases, desktop publishing, electronic mail,
KeyPals, listservs, and the World Wide Web.
Students can also create their own podcasts or connect with
keypals through any VoIP application with the input functionality.
These structures range from "
keypals," which enables students to collaborate on a specific curriculum-based task via email to "parallel problem-solving," which lets students solve problems together and share their solutions and problem-solving processes.
Robert O'Dowd also examines the development of intercultural competence (Byram, 1997) in his contribution to the special issue, "Understanding the Other Side: Intercultural Learning in a Spanish-English E-Mail Exchange;" however, he explores the degree of intercultural learning in a range of intercultural dyads, rather than focusing on one relatively unsuccessful set of
keypals. Based on his experiences as a telecollaborative teacher in an exchange between King's College in London and Leon University in Spain, O'Dowd engages in ethnographic action research (Wallace, 1998) in order to characterize qualitatively those electronic dyads in which intercultural learning appears to have occurred.
He opened E-mail accounts for them, connected them with "
keypals"--and was stunned by the results.
People you contact online aren't always who they seem, even people who become penfriends or
keypals. People don't always tell the truth online - no one can see them.
"I got an e-mail from Sweden!" "So did I!" Soon a whole chorus of students excitedly proclaimed that they had heard from their "
keypals" in Sweden.
Keypals, Links for All Educators: http://www.keypals.com/
Many classrooms have developed
keypals (penpals) with students in other geographic locations.[5]
At the Sun Valley Elementary School in Winnipeg, Manitoba, 4th grade students regularly participate in "
keypals" activities to exchange cultural information with schools around the world.
* What information can we find out from our
Keypals that is otherwise unavailable to us?
Undergraduate students, many of whom had their belief systems challenged by a confrontation with otherness for the first time in the telecollaborative partnership under study, may be less equipped to negotiate heteroglossic diversity in their emails with
keypals than professional journalists in hard news stories.