Intercultural aspects in ICT

This year, ITK conference 2006 has its first English program. There were not many English presentations in the conference, however, as a foreigner who are not yet speaking Finnish, it is a good opportunity for me to understand what is going on in the field of educational ICT in Finland.

One interesting presentation was given by Byoma Tamrakar entitled “Guidelines for Intercultural Competence”. She discussed about some aspects of intercultural competence. Intercultural competence enables someone to act effectively and appropriately in cultural, ethnic, race, gender and age diversities. One of important aspects of intercultural competence is ability to understand the context. This requires sufficient knowledge and suitable motivation. She gave several interesting examples about cultural competencies, for example differences how Finnish or European people and Asian people remind their colleagues when they make a mistake.

When reflecting to my own research, intercultural aspects should not be neglected when developing any ICT applications and services, particularly if the applications and services will be deployed a multicultural environment.