Cultural awareness and distance communication

This chapter reflects upon technology-mediated projects used to discuss and foster cultural awareness and proposes a methodology to be implemented in international, educational environments where communication could easily be hindered by cultural dissimilarities leading to conflict. More specifically, it seeks to answer two main questions, namely, whether technology is an aid or an obstacle in effective communication between students that never meet face-to-face and which obstacles, generated by technology-mediated communication in virtual teams, affect the intended outcome and how. These questions were raised during the participation of the authors of the chapter over a number of years in the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project, where the complex process of learning-by-doing was achieved through peer interaction and the completion of realistic collaborative activities performed by North American and Portuguese students, prospect technical writers, and translators, respectively.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The adoption and usage of smartphone media technologies as a source of news by Egyptian university students

Copyright © 2019, IGI Global. This study examines the adoption and use of smartphones as a source of news by Egyptian university students. The study was applied on a random sample of 400 university students, whom already have smartphones. This study was guided by the uses and gratification theory to explore the use of smartphones among university students as a news resource. The study used quantitative research methodology in the form of a survey. Information was collected using a self-administrated questionnaire between March 2018 and April 2018. Findings showed that although Egypt is not one of the oil-rich countries, most of the university students are heavy smartphone users and the vast majority (87.5%) of them are accessing news via their smartphones. More importantly, the findings revealed that university students mainly used smartphones to get general information (47.5%), Egypt’s news (37.5%), entertainment (29.25%) and follow world’s news (27.75%). Finally, findings showed that (70%) of students use their smartphones to follow current affairs, while 67.5% said that smartphones helpe them to communicate with their friends