---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### October, 1993 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 1, Number 4 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Center for Teaching and Technology, Academic Computer Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC Additional support provided by the Center for Academic Computing, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 This article is archived as ACKER IPCTV1N4 on LISTSERV@GUVM ---------------------------------------------------------------- INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC JOINT VENTURES: LEVERAGING EXTERNAL RESOURCES THROUGH TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND TRAVEL by Stephen R. Acker Paul Slaa Harry Bouwman Communication Dept. Communication Dept. Ohio State University University of Amsterdam Columbus, Ohio 43210 Amsterdam, The Netherlands INTRODUCTION This paper is divided into three major sections. The first section establishes a rationale for international academic joint ventures and briefly presents one that is currently ongoing. The second section describes some of the pragmatics of developing and implementing international joint ventures. The final section speaks to an integrated travel and telecommunications infrastructure designed to support international academic joint ventures. SECTION 1: THE NEED FOR INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC JOINT VENTURES In business, the importance and difficulty of conducting international joint ventures are both well known. Bleeke and Ernst (1991) examined the fifty largest companies (ranked by market value) in each of three market domains: the United States, Europe, and Japan. In over 80 percent of the cases, interviewees responded that the need for joint ventures was "compelling." "To open markets, to meet competition, and to leverage expertise [apply proprietary knowledge in multiple markets]" were the most often reported reasons to form joint ventures. However, in spite of this importance and the presumed energy put into making joint ventures succeed, "two-thirds of the cross-border alliances ran into serious managerial or financial trouble within the first two years" (Bleeke & Ernst, 1991, p. 127). Players in the academic "marketplace" have comparable reasons to form international alliances. Many U.S. and European institutions draw students from beyond their national boundaries, a multicultural student/faculty body is a positive in times of social diversity, and specialized expertise is useful around the world. In addition, students benefit from the broader range of courses offered by collaborating universities. However, academic institutions face even greater challenges than their commercial counterparts in developing joint ventures. A lack of venture capital and the difficulty of evaluating educational outcomes are well known problems facing new academic enterprises. A third, and more central challenge, is that academic collaborations are somewhat unique in the exchange of resources on which the joint venture is based. In traditional collaborations, each partner contributes a different resource to the joint venture. A joint venture in steel production might bring together a supplier of coal and a supplier of iron, a retail collaboration might bring together manufacturing and distribution processes, and a study abroad program exchanges a standard curricula for "guest" student fees. The defining factor of these joint venture is that each contributor has a "natural advantage" in the resource area that it contributes, and that the collaboration expands the value of the other's natural advantage rather than threatens it. What happens though, when the resource exchanged is "information?" The distinction here is that the "natural monopoly" on information is not as strong as on the resources exchanged in other types of joint ventures. In the process of sharing information (exchanging competencies), each partner is relinquishing its expertise to the other. Each partner becomes more self-sufficient rather than more interdependent over the life of the collaboration. Thus, competency-based academic joint ventures have less inherent stability than do resource-based collaborations, and they need special nurturing to survive (see Lane & Beamish, (1990) and Pucik, (1988) for a discussion of resource and competency based collaboration). Despite their frailty, competency-based joint ventures among academic institutions offer significant advantages to the partners. In the face of declining internal resources, external collaborations may become the required "exoskeleton" to support higher education . As we argue in the next section, institutions may be compelled to form joint ventures to fulfill their academic missions. Institutional needs: Generalists in an age of specialization Higher education is caught in an apparent double-bind. On one hand, there is such a vast accumulation of knowledge to be transferred, that universities have partitioned research and education among subdisciplines. On the other hand, arcane expertise divorced from arenas of application is trivialized in the public's eye. In economically stressed times, the popular cry: "Do more with less" results. Administrators are faced with severe problems created by overspecialization. In the largest budgetary area, personnel, they approve contracts of faculty hired on reputations and competencies often narrowly drawn. They must allocate library budgets ample to maintain research collections even as the universe of new journals grows by 5,000 titles each year (Rogers & Hurt, 1989). Alumni, boards of governors, and boards of regents demand comprehensive curricula, particularly from publicly-supported institutions whose charters emphasize universal coverage of knowledge. Unless the university community can respond to the paradox of specialization, education will be driven toward superficial breadth. Funding reductions are forcing institutions to rethink the relationship between specialized faculty and broadly educated students, those trained to be involved citizens and workers able to adapt to a changing world. Academic joint ventures in general, and those with an international dimension in particular, may offer a way to deal with the paradox of specialized faculty seeking to provide this broadly-based education. We would argue that student breadth through faculty depth is the intellectual justification for collaborative work. Bringing faculty together to attack a common problem from dissimilar perspectives permits students to develop as generalists through a comparative process. The key conceptual issue of collaboration is to create a partnership that promotes this general knowledge without diluting specializations. The key pragmatic issue of collaboration is to avoid intellectual jealousy between the different perspectives. The selection process that brings partners together is the operationalization of the conceptual and pragmatic issues of successful collaboration. Through the EC's Eyes - An international academic joint venture Through the EC's Eyes is an international academic joint venture between Ohio State University (OSU) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Telecommunications policy is the focus of the collaboration. Because of its ideal fit with comparative analysis and its topicality, we chose "1992 and the European Community" as the initial focus of this joint program. In Spring quarter of 1992, the OSU faculty member taught a pre-trip seminar to OSU students on the European Community (EC). The course was structured as a meeting of 12 ministers to the European Council, each representing one of the 12 EC countries. Their responsibility was to develop telecommunications policies that would serve the common good of the Community without raising insurmountable objections from any one country. In addition to a weekly face-to-face meeting, the students contributed to a policy simulation implemented as a Macintosh- delivered group decision support system (GDSS). Because this group decision support system is an important part of the infrastructure proposed to support these academic joint ventures, it is described in detail in the third section of the paper. In some respects, this educational environment provided a pre- test of the integrated travel and telecommunications environment on which the OSU-UvA collaboration is based. A formative evaluation of the combined face-to-face and computer-based learning environment was conducted by outside researchers. They found that the principal benefit of the hypermedia simulation was that it allowed students to reflect on their contribution to the group decision making process rather than react "off the cuff" as occurred in the face-to-face meetings. The backward trace of the public reasoning process also was valued by users. On the negative side, the slowed pace of exchanges was felt to restrain the "brainstorming phase" of decision making (Davey & Vlasko, 1992). Taking advantages of these virtues and cross-canceling the vices of face-to-face and telecommunications-based exchanges became important in the overall design of the academic joint venture. After the Spring preparatory course, nine OSU doctoral and masters students traveled to the Netherlands. The excursion to Holland began with a welcoming party of Dutch students at the airport and an evening reception hosted at the University of Amsterdam. The emphasis at this stage was on the formation of social relationships. At this time, we decided that policy subareas would be researched by student teams represented by at least one U.S. and one Dutch student. This strategy was nicknamed "twin peaks," and it clearly highlighted the important role of interpersonal communication to the course structure. Over the next three weeks, these social relationships would evolve into working relationships. The visit was organized around almost daily trips to agencies in and outside of Amsterdam and frequent guest lectures by local experts. Early in the visit, the entire study group consisting of both student groups and faculty traveled to Brussels, the headquarters of the European Community. This proved important as a bonding experience in which both Dutch and American students found themselves needing each other's support to face the vagaries of foreign travel. During the three weeks, student teams produced a preliminary and final report on various comparative aspects of telecommunications policy, such as "Should the EC have an FCC?," "What is the nature of universal service?," and "DBS as a transnational broadcast service." The final report was presented orally and served as the basis for an article in a Proceedings published two months later. The Proceedings were created after the OSU students had returned to Columbus. The Proceedings required substantial library work and occasional Internet exchanges between "twin peaks." A videotape of the European phase of the course also was finished in this interlude. In preparing for the Dutch visit to Columbus in the Summer of 1993, faculty taught parallel courses at OSU and UvA in Winter/Spring of 1993 and maintained contact by fax, phone and Internet. In May of 1993, a 112 kb/s videoconference was used to finalize the Dutch summer visit to Columbus. In June, 28 students, four faculty, and two librarians came together in Ohio to consider social, economic, and technical issues surrounding personal communication services (PCS). DEVELOPING AND IMPLEMENTING INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC JOINT VENTURES This section details areas that are important in creating international academic joint ventures. Begin with pre-existing relationships The initial contact in the OSU-UvA collaboration was made in 1991 between two friends, an OSU faculty member and a UvA development officer. This pairing facilitated thinking about each university's competencies and resources within a relationship of mutual trust. Without this mutual trust, the ambiguity of information exchanged via telecommunications and the unexpected time lags between contact would have killed this project prior to its inception. This supports a theme consistent throughout this project; interpersonal communication formed the basis on which tele- communications could function effectively. Select a partner with comparable resources but different competencies OSU and UvA match up well with respect to resources. Both are large schools, offer extensive library holdings, and have a well developed computer/telecommunications infrastructure. The missions of the two universities also are comparable. The important point here is that the resource contributions were equal, but the competencies of the faculty (U.S.-based expertise and EC-based expertise) were complementary. Consider all subsystems of the academic system Initially, we felt this collaboration would sell itself to participants, the universities, and to funding agencies. After all, at the suprasystem level the benefits of sharing faculty expertise seem irrefutable. Students receive greater exposure to new faculty, new worlds, and new issues. Each institution retains the "credit" for educating their respective students. There is apparent synergy operating because each contributing institution leverages its resources and gains proportionally greater benefits. "On paper," the rationale for the joint venture is clear. Nonetheless, the high proportion of failed joint ventures suggested we should examine this apparent synergy more carefully. What our experience makes clear is that the suprasystem level benefits are delivered if, and only if, each of the contributing subsystems accrues benefits. In this case, those subsystems are: (1) students, (2) faculty, (3) the library, (4) the computer support services, and (5) the institution. Small diseconomies in any subsystem will unravel the collaboration even if suprasystem level benefits are large. Maintaining collaborations beyond their initial stage requires that needs in each subsystem are satisfied. If any subsystem's interests are not met, the lost allegiance of that important resource or competence will undermine the joint venture. Student level Students must be convinced that an international joint ventures offers an educational experience that is out of the ordinary. Participation incurs costs, disrupts daily life, and promises surprises, some of them unpleasant. Students need to garner the rewards of traditional teaching arrangements. They must receive appropriate course credit, develop networks valuable to their future, and sense equity in the work expected of them for the benefits they receive. Only then do the excitement and opportunities of travel and participation in new electronic meeting fora make sense from their perspective. Faculty level Faculty from each institution must receive "credit" for teaching the course. The collaboration will dissolve if the project is conceived as a reciprocal overload. International collaborations offer the powerful incentives of an opportunity to work with colleagues from other institutions as well as foreign travel. However, if the work of collaboration is seen as a faculty-born "cost" by the faculty's administration, the collaboration is vulnerable to competing demands made on the faculty members' time. Information/infrastructure level In general, library and computer support personnel encourage use of the resources they control. However, if new demands are made on them because of new institutional relationships, they legitimately should expect resources and benefits to be provided. In our project, the key librarians receive travel support. This allowed the librarians to extend their professional horizons and to enjoy the pleasures of travel. It offered them incentives to deal with yet more students and faculty. The computer support people also should be encouraged to travel. However, the main reason this group participated is that distributed systems is a major research area in their field (Kling, 1991; McConnell, 1991). Technical collaborations require human support systems and shared problem solving skills. This application provides a defensible rationale for experiments in distributed systems that is attractive to computer professionals. Select participants carefully and prepare them for the unexpected aspects of cross-cultural collaboration Experienced travelers who are tolerant of the ambiguity that is part of experiencing foreign cultures make ideal participants. A Dutch-U.S. collaboration involves two cultures both relatively tolerant of ambiguity (Hefstede, 1980). Of course the paradox is that foreign travel may be most beneficial to those who have never experienced another culture. To prepare the diverse mix of students involved in this project, a pre-trip meeting on cross-cultural team work was held. We used a conceptual structure laid out by Bantz (1993) to help participants develop expectations for their collaborative, cross- cultural work. Bantz identifies the influence of power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, language, cultural norms, status, and politics as important dimensions of cross-cultural work. Dealing with the difficulties of coordinated intercultural work relies on tactics that fit four common threads: (1) gathering information, (2) adapting to different situations, (3) building social as well as task cohesion, and (4) identifying clear long-term goals (p. 19). Produce demonstrable outcomes and evaluate with multiple methods Partners that collaborate across institutional boundaries must demonstrate the benefits of the joint venture. Observability is a key factor in the success of diffusion of innovations (Rogers, 1983). Many critics will argue that an institution's resource base is too small for its own members, let alone to share with others. To address these arguments, collaborators must have concrete ways to showcase the benefits of their project. In our case, we addressed this issue by jointly publishing a twelve chapter Proceedings of the students' research, by creating an 11-minute videotape that portrayed the activities and outcomes of the project, and by retaining the student contributions to the computer simulation as an objective record of learning. In addition, students assessed the course at each stage, when possible using standardized instruments for comparison to typical university offerings. Finally, administrators and faculty were involved from the beginning in formative evaluation activities (Bouwman, 1992). THE DESIGN OF AN INTEGRATED TRAVEL AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS ENVIRONMENT Combining travel and telecommunications Travel and telecommunications both offer important contributions to academic joint ventures. Because the social context of policy has deep cultural roots, participants should experience in common each other's societies to appreciate the cultural influence on policy. The benefits of this reciprocal travel are twofold. First, the cultural "taken for granteds" surface when the host culture is viewed through "alien" eyes. Second, questions posed to the hosts create debate and destroy the notion that there is a stereotypic Dutch or American perspective on issues. By fracturing deep-rooted cultural assumptions, influences on the policy process surface and are called into question (Hefstede, 1980). An example of fracturing deep-rooted cultural assumptions can be seen in student responses to the different ways in which cable television is offered in the two cultures. In the Netherlands, the cable franchise is held by the city government which also operates the system. In Amsterdam, 20 channels are offered and the revenues from subscription fees are used in part to subsidize low-income housing. In comparison, the U.S. system visited was owned and operated by the Time-Warner Corporation. The system offers 63 channels, and in time will use compression techniques to offer hundreds of channels of programming. Before their visit to Warner Cable, nearly all Dutch students felt that offering hundreds of channels of television programming was absurd, not a cause for excitement. In Amsterdam, OSU students initially found the relative lack of program diversity on Amsterdam cable a negative. Travel changed the opinions of some participants on both sides, and at the very least gave everyone a better sense of policy trade-offs. Visiting a country relatively free of the problem of homeless citizens [in part because of quality publicly-subsidized housing] allowed the U.S. students to understand virtues of the Dutch approach to cable ownership and management. Similarly, the relatively frantic pace of the U.S. society and the instant gratification of finding something to "snatch" from the television was appealing to several Dutch students during and after their U.S. visit. This comparative evaluation is best fostered through direct experience, and because of this we feel that travel is absolutely essential to international academic joint ventures. At the same time, we realize that the opportunity to truly reflect while in another culture is made difficult by the newness and sensory overload associated with being outside of one's own society. Electronic meetings, conducted after travel, allow the benefits of cultural immersion-- sensing, talking, and experiencing-- to be amplified and balanced by more careful reflection over time. This reflection occurs back in the home environment where research and study options are well-known and easily utilized. The more carefully-paced exchanges of written and spoken arguments between collaborating students can occur over electronic mail, through videoconferences, and through the mail and by telephone. The benefits of face-to-face interaction in a common environment cannot be replicated via telecommunications, but the cost of extended travel makes the educational experience prohibitive for many students who can make strong contributions to such a program. For example, several married students could arrange to be gone for three weeks, but could not participate if they would be away from home for several months. By exchanging many of the educational activities via telecommunications, more students with stricter time and financial restraints could participate. In addition, the familiar library and faculty resources "at home" give participants easier access to background material on the topic of study. Yet without the initial travel and promise of a later reunion, there is less incentive for collaborators to participate in e-mail, audio, and video exchanges (Acker, Clift, and Branco, 1985). The important point is that telecommunications and travel leverage one another's contributions which results in a richer learning environment that can extend over a twelve month period. To summarize, travel offers the benefits of cultural immersion and telecommunications-based distance education offers relative economy and convenience for the student. Travel-based activities promote strongly formed impressions and offer an interpersonal environment in which to test them. Telecommunications- based activities offer greater access to background material and can electronically capture discussion for later reflection. Incorporate a group decision support system In addition to travel and electronic meetings, we have developed a group decision support system (GDSS) called "Meeting of the Minds" to support this collaboration. The GDSS allows each student to contribute information and opinions to various communication fora that represent domains in which policy is created. Specifically, Meeting of the Minds contains: (1) The library/newsstand, which serves as a depository for scholarly, trade press, and mass media material associated with the topic under study. Depending on how these sources are entered, the materials are either full-text searchable, or, if scanned, contain accompanying visual images, (2) The Pub - the visual setting of this forum is a bar and it collects PUBlic talk. Students type in ideas, rumors, and speculations. Comments made in the PUB can be either anonymous or signed at the author's discretion. The Pub encourages controversial "leaks," pointed critiques, and allows students to "test the waters" with various ideas before committing to positions, (3) electronic mail - the mail facility allows private exchanges outside of public scrutiny. E-mail is used to form coalitions behind the scenes, (4) The soapbox - this program module encourages extended, and ideally impassioned, positions. Soapbox monologues are all attributed and allow individuals to express their own ideas at length, (5) The Conference Room - here students create formal policy recommendations. These recommendations can be made as short videos (QuickTime format), audio recordings, or, more commonly, as typed entries. Since the Conference Room models a group discussion around the table, all contributions are attributed to individual speakers. Ultimately, after consideration of all of the policy recommendations, a vote is taken in The Conference Room to ratify a policy, or to sanction the outcome of the group discussion. The importance of the GDSS is that it creates a record of the kinds of argument and information used in the decision making process. It provides a vehicle for reflection and refinement not available in face-to-face meetings. For individuals who are socially reticent, or slowed by a stipulation to use English (a second language), the slower pace of Meeting of the Minds offers advantages. The challenge we currently are facing is to make Meeting of the Minds operational across the Internet, rather than within a local area network. See Acker (1992) for a fuller discussion of this particular group decision-support tool and Aiken (1993) for a general discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of GDSS. A caution: Telecommunications and the distance-space distinction We acknowledge that telecommunications offers convenience and costs savings for human interaction. However, we are concerned that the success telecommunications has had in overcoming distance is understood as capturing the contribution of space (attributes of rooms, buildings, etc.) to human activities such as learning and working. This is a key argument for augmenting telecommunications with travel. Electronic meetings span distances but they leave collaborators in "bubbles," the surfaces of which only rub-up against each other. The boundaries are not permeated so that collaborators actually share space. In short, telecommunication-based exchanges support shared contact but not shared context. We are not yet sophisticated in our understanding of what sharing space offers to collaboration, but the multisensory aspects of memory is probably one basis (Paivio, 1975). Bachelard's (1964) describes the primacy of space in our activities and memories this way: "[The space in which we are housed] is a group of organic habits. After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would recapture the reflexes of the 'first stairway,' we would not stumble on that rather high step. The house's entire being would open up, faithful to our own being. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands" (p. 14-15). Shared space implies relationships suspended in physical context, a misanthropic metaphor of two or more caught in a spider's web comes to mind; the positive image is two dancers in studio. In either scenario, and in face-to-face meetings, the interactants are in a common physical space that influences their actions, their understandings, and their memories. Distance spanning telecommunications technologies remove the spatial context of information exchange. Although we cannot now assess this loss, we can avoid it by using travel to share space for at least part of the collaborative relationship. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS Reduced access to traditional funding has made it important for universities to find new ways to maintain comprehensive educational opportunities for their students. This need can be served with academic joint ventures that allow faculty and students with different perspectives and expertise to work together in research and in the classroom. Joint ventures allow specialized faculty to complement one another in team teaching approaches that help students develop generalized knowledge. One way to structure these collaborations is to combine travel and telecommunications to establish relationships and to conduct joint work. Short periods of travel, most appropriate for today's time-limited and job-constrained students, can be integrated with audio, video, and computer-based exchanges to extend joint educational experiences over longer periods of time. Travel and telecommunications leverage the strengths of each other. Travel provides personal experience best questioned, sifted, and assimilated over time. Telecommunications retains the links among people so that questions and answers can be exchanged, and access to library-based resources can round out the idiosyncratic understanding earned through travel. A final component of this travel/telecommunications mix should be some form of group memory. In our case, a group decision support system called Meeting of the Minds is designed to provide archived information, fora for opinion exchange and discussion, and a way to represent the group consensus with respect to an issue with different social interpretations. The success of collaborations is most dependent on selecting your partners wisely, on finding those that are comparably resourced, differentiated in their competencies, cognizant of subsystem needs, and able to establish trust among all levels of both systems. Technical competence and system compatibility are also important, but secondary. We are pursuing this international academic joint venture as based on social relationships facilitated and extended with the aid of telecommunications. We know that this interpersonal basis provides the memory engrams, the vestiges of social presence, that empower telecommunications-based meetings. This is our response to the realization that a shared distance- spanning connection is not the same as shared space.TV1E1HS0=0+FCLASS=0 Learning environments that rely only on travel, only on telecommunications, or only as group decision support systems certainly have their place in modern educational and research practices. However, an integration of the three offers particularly rich opportunities for collaborative inquiry. REFERENCES Acker S. (1992). The storyteller's toolkit: Designing hypermedia group use knowledge systems. In M. Lea (Ed.), Contexts of computer- mediated communication. London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf. Acker, S., Clift, C. & Branco, S. (1985). A two-way telecourse, interactive in both audio and video channels: A model for inter- institutional cooperation. Issues in Higher Education, 14, 16-23. Aiken, M. (1993). Advantages of group decision support systems, IPCT Journal, 1(3). Archived as AIKEN IPCTV1N3 on LISTSERV@GUVM.CCF.GEORGETOWN.EDU Bachelard, G. (1964). 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McConnell, D. (August, 1991). Computers, electronic networking and education: Some American experiences. Educational Training and Technology International , 28(3), 171-187. Paivio, A. (1975). Perceptual comparisons through the mind's eye. Memory and Cognition, 3, 635-647. Pucik, V. (Spring, 1988). Strategic alliances, organizational learning, and competitive advantage: The HRM agenda. Human Resource Management, 27(1), 77-93. Rogers, E. (1983). Diffusion of innovations (3rd. ed.). New York: The Free Press. Rogers, S. & Hurt, C. (October 18, 1989). How scholarly communication should work in the 21st century. The Chronicle of Higher Education, A56. ---------------------------------------------------------------- BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Steve Acker (contact Slaa and Bouwman for theirs) Steve Acker is Associate Professor of Communication at Ohio State University and Research Associate of the Center for Advanced Study of Telecommunications (CAST), also at Ohio State University. His research interests are in multimedia, distance education, and international aspects of telecommunication. Harry Bouwman (PhD) is an assiatant professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Amsterdam. He teaches telecommunications, multimedia and information provision and communication reserach. He has published several books and articles on New Media, Telecommunications Services and Multimedia. recently he contributed to Steinfield et al. (eds.) Telecommunications in Western Europe and together with Christoffersen edited Re launching Videotex --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1993 Georgetown University. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by Georgetown University. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Gerald Phillips, Editor IPCT-J GMP3@PSUVM.PSU.EDU