Logistics and Challenges of an Intercultural Technical Communication Collaborative Project between Two Japanese and German Universities

This project highlights collaboration between two technical universities from Japan and Germany. This technical communication project showcased collaboration between graduate students at a premier German university and primarily undergraduate students in a Japanese computer science university. As part of English language coursework, the university students in Japan completed assignments related to 3D printing and information design, and then coordinated with the German students who took the content of the assignments from the Japanese students and did ontology and metadata modeling towards creating a content delivery portal. Team processes included collaborative writing, web-conferencing and shared brainstorming. For the Japanese students, this was a wonderful opportunity to develop English language proficiency, project management skills and intercultural communication ability. 9 students participated from each side. This entire semester-wide project ended with a week-long conference at the University of Aizu, where the student groups further collaborated in an intercultural setting with many faculty members and students in workshops, presentations, and exhibitions. Student comments suggested that they were satisfied with the experience and achievements. This paper explained how the project was handled, the processes, resulting outcomes and made suggestions for future project planning.