Telecollaboration 2.0 and beyond - Extended Collaborative Practice between Israel and Germany

The virtual exchange project Extended Telecollaborative Practice (ETP) presented here is based on six semesters of telecollaboration between undergraduate EFL students at the University of Education Karlsruhe, Germany and Kibbutzim College of Education Tel Aviv, Israel. It links research on teacher training at university level (Waldman, Harel, Schwab 2016, 2019) and an on-going empirical study on the display of L2 interactional resources during online student team meetings (Drixler).

Methodologically based on the EVALUATE framework (O'Dowd 2017), students from both educational institutions cooperate in joint online projects whereby group sizes are usually four to six students. Telecollaborative media such as Moodle, Skype, Zoom, Google Pages and Padlet are utilized for synchronous and asynchronous cooperation, thus integrating and advancing the Telecollaboration 2.0 approach by Guth & Helm (2010). To allow for sustainable incorporation of these concepts, ETP task-design is currently implemented in Israeli and German secondary schools. These class exchanges aim toward an integration of Web 4.0-tools in terms of cloud computing and augmented reality apps. The progress towards Web 4.0 has shown a constant changing user behaviour resulting on the in a closer and permanent connection to the internet. On the other hand, this progression is driven by an expanded awareness of data protection in the private sphere. Therefore, these factors are addressed and taken into consideration within these virtual school exchanges. 

In this presentation I would like to show the difficulties and interferences that students and teacher educators are facing during our exchanges and how these problems are dealt with on both the organizational and student level. Further, I will highlight the role of second language interactional competence (L2IC) in dealing with these problems.