O n f e r e n c e

participants’ sense of intimacy and social presence in the community
(Gunawardena, 
1995), we designed a self-introduction activity, About-Me-Bags, as the first form of 
contact between the two groups of participants. Each of the participants was required to 
select three objects to represent their past, present, and future, and then introduce them 
to their intercultural learning partners by posting PowerPoint files and text documents on 
a project website. All of the participants then read, made comments on, and 
asked/answered questions about any of the postings via an online forum. The purpose of 
this activity was to create social affordances (Kreijns & Kirschner, 2001) that allow the 
participants to engage in sustained, topic-focused exchanges on which their sense of 
intimacy and community could be based.
According to Gunawardena (1995), in online collaborative learning situations, it is 
through dialoging that the participants relate to each other, work together towards a 
common goal, and share a sense of community. Unless positive affective relationships 
between participants have been established, collaborative learning will not take place. 
Gustafson, Hodgson, and Tickner (2004) postulate that examining dialogues can help us 
understand the ways online identities are constructed in networked learning 
environments which then affects the experience of social presence and also potentially 
influences the learning conditions in those environments. Therefore, 
all of the “About
-Me-
Bag” object descriptions and interactive postings written by the participants were 
collected and analyzed to gain insights into the dialoguing among the participants. 
Bakhtin’s (1986; 1981) notion of 
audience and addressivity were relied on for the 
analysis of how the participants constructed self identities, positioned themselves, and 
related to others during the dialoging processes.
There were several difficulties that the researchers had to overcome when designing and 
implementing the project. The first challenge was to decide on the activity that would 
have the potential to help the participants open up to someone they had never met 
before and further build mutual trust and a positive affective relationship. Through 
discussions and careful considerations, the researchers finally decided to try out About-
Me-Bags.

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2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
Although it worked out successfully, not only the researchers had the opportunity to 
observe and analyze the processes of interaction, but the participants also enjoyed it 
very much.
It was not without doubt, at the beginning, that the participants might not find it 
interesting and the design of the activity itself would affec
t the participants’ enthusiasm 
to communicate.
The means of communication was another important decision that the researchers had to 
make. To allow the students to post images and texts of their selected objects, the 
researchers created an official project website. The project website provided an easy way 
for the researchers to gather data and for the instructors to manage class assignments. 
However, the participants later decided to move communication to their own choices of 
venue for more “intimate”
exchanges. While this showed encouraging signs of 
established affective relationships between the two groups, it also created difficulties for 
the researcher to collect research data. At the same time, gaining full access to the 
students’ performances fo
r progress assessment also became somehow problematic.
As for data analysis and interpretation, although Bakhtin’s conceptual framework is very 
useful for our project, the number of participants of the project and the amount of 
entries and postings generated by the About-Me-Bags were quite huge and rendered the 
analysis laborious. Since our analysis was qualitative in nature, constant communication 
and checking for agreements on the emerging themes between researchers was 
imperative.