Students of today need to be prepared to work in globally distributed organizations. Part of that preparation involves teaching students to work effectively in teams to solve problems. Students also must be able to work with individuals located at distant sites where there is no or very little face-to-face interaction. The Runestone project, an international collaboration between two universities, adds new dimensions to student teamwork, requiring students to handle collaboration that is remote, cross-cultural, and technically challenging. Runestone is a three-year project funded by the Swedish Council for the Renewal of Undergraduate Education. A pilot study in 1998 was followed by a full-scale implementation in 1999 with another implementation ongoing in 2000.Each time this global cooperation project is run, both students and faculty learn important lessons in how to work with each other in a virtual environment. This paper discusses both student and faculty learning outcomes for Rnnestone 1999.

The computer science discipline is well poised to provide leading examples of harnessing communications and computer technologies in order to encourage collaborative practices both within and between institutions. Students, academics, and institutions all potentially have access to their counterparts world-wide. This provides endless opportunities for sharing knowledge, accessing scarce expertise, making effective re-use of limited resources, collaborating to attract funding and influence policies, etc. Even so, within our own institutions we regularly miss opportunities to exploit appropriate technology for supporting both educational and administrative collaboration.The aims of this working group were to raise awareness of collaborative opportunities and practices, to investigate practically what collaboration means to academics, and to take practical steps towards promoting collaboration. The working group also aimed to identify technologies, i.e., techniques and tools, that offer pragmatic approaches to supporting collaborative schemes.