ICT in the service of multiculturalism

In our global reality, living together and accepting differences while building on commonalities has become crucial to everyday life. Yet in many places in the world, galloping globalization is accompanied by a growing trend toward cultural, national, and religious individuation and separatism. 

The OICH Model
The online inter- group contact hypotesis model is based on an extension of the contact.
 The online inter-group contact hypothesis (OICH) model is based on an extension of the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954). Its aim is to adapt the original contact hypothesis for online connections between groups in conflict. The model is applicable to various levels of professional/project-oriented collaboration among culturally diverse groups: academic staff at teaching colleges; trainees in the teaching colleges; teachers in schools, who are program graduates; and pupils in schools who collaborate on educational projects.

In order for the model to work, the project must meet a number of conditions, which are outlined below:

• be fully supported by each participating institution,
• involve collaboration among groups rather than among individuals,
• deal with general subjects and not with conflicts,
• be based on a need for participant collaboration rather than competition,
• ensure  participants have equal status,
• progress gradually over a period of at least one year, beginning with exchanges via the Internet followed by text and voice exchange and finally, after a positive online experience, by face-to-face encounters among the partners, and
• employ teachers who themselves come from the different cultural groups and who “team teach” the course in a collegial environment.

Course content areas reflect subjects taught within the formal education system. The tasks are relevant to the teachers educations and to students' needs.