This executive summary presents the main findings from the EVALUATE European Policy Experiment Project. The EVALUATE project was a European policy experimentation funded by the European Commission's Erasmus+ programme (EACEA/34/2015). The aim of policy experimentations is to assess the effectiveness and potential scalability of innovative policy…

The long and winding road is a metaphor for a journey, often used to describe life journeys and the challenges encountered. The metaphor was used for the title of my keynote to refer both to the journey towards the current position of virtual exchange in education policy -- but also the long road ahead. This paper aims to explore the emergence of…

This paper presents a pilot project which uses a translanguaging approach in order to subvert the power dynamics whereby language learners, refugees and migrants are positioned as defective or ineffective communicators of a target language. The project seeks to create a space, an engineered "contact zone" in which the negative,…

There has been considerable talk about the future of research and practice in education. Occasionally the discourse tends to the euphoric, sometimes it strays more to the dystopic. Public debates often explore how educators can and should meet society's demands in the globalised, interconnected geopolitical situations of today. Voiced concern…

This paper reports on two distinct models of telecollaboration--the Soliya Connect Program, a synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) project, and the Intercultural Franco-Irish Exchange, an asynchronous CMC project--which seek to provide students with a learning space to promote a more politically engaged and reflective pedagogy…

Students of initial teacher education need to be prepared for the classrooms of tomorrow. Teachers require the necessary skills and competences to teach in culturally diverse contexts, to collaborate across disciplines, and to use technologies in innovative ways; but the Digital Economy and Society Index reports that only 20-25% of students in…

Communicating and collaborating in online contexts can be quite different from face-to-face situations and requires students to acquire multiple literacies in addition to foreign language skills and intercultural communicative competence. This paper looks at how the development of multiliteracies can be included in the EFL classroom through the…

This qualitative study explores the impact of potential linguistic, technical and educational hegemonies on the learning outcomes for English language students in Hebron, Palestine, and Padova, Italy, who were involved in the Soliya Connect Program, a telecollaboration project developed to explore critical issues that divide the "West"…

Telecollaboration is an approach to intercultural learning that uses Internet technology as a tool to facilitate intercultural communication between classes of learners in different countries. The question of what language learners can gain from telecollaboration is fundamental in putting the case forward for its place in a language course. This…