Developing Cross-Cultural Awareness in IT: Reflections of Australian and Chinese Students

To succeed within the increasingly global context of their work environment, today's IT professional needs to be equipped with both cutting-edge technical skills and a strong repertoire of "soft" skills. An important and often unrecognized soft skill is an appreciation of how various IT issues impact upon different peoples and what constitutes an acceptable professional practice in different societies. Australian IT students need to develop an appreciation of the impact of culture on IT issues in their own society and beyond. In particular, students require a global perspective on the impact of culture on responses to ethical dilemmas, security challenges, and privacy threats in the practice of their profession. The challenge for IT educators is how best to develop cross-cultural professional awareness in students. This article reports on the inaugural implementation of an innovative approach aimed at developing cross-cultural awareness in undergraduate IT students. The approach comprises formative assessment tasks based on real-life IT scenarios and work in culturally mixed students teams while immersed in a culturally different society (Australian students in China in this case). The article outlines the reflections of the Australian and Chinese students participating in the experience and comments on the perceived effectiveness of the approach. Student reflections pertain to two themes: one on privacy and social freedom, and another on cross-cultural awareness. The reflections endorsed the benefits of the approach reported in this article and, in themselves, are a further encouragement for planned future exchanges.