In an effort to restore quality and flexibility to the tutorial provision on some undergraduate courses, first, second and third year psychology students at the University of Southampton have been inducted into the use of ‘skywriting’ as a medium for learning support. Email messages from students and tutors, primarily focussed on issues arising from the course content, are directed to a course list so that all participants receive them; both tutors and students may reply to these. The course tutor maintains a Web‐based archive of threaded discussions by the occasional modification of message subject lines. Within this archive, the exchanges can be searched and read by theme, by participant, or by date. This provision is in addition to the usual lectures and face‐to‐face tutorial meetings. This paper examines students’ participation in skywriting on three courses. Participation is examined in relation to gender, and to attitudes and experience with computers. Levels of contribution to face‐to‐face tutorials and to skywriting are compared, and their relation to students’ learning styles is explored.

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Student mobility and trans-national collaborative modes of learning a/ University level have been strongly promoted within Europe. However, such initiatives are expensive, difficult to organise and do not a/ways attain their objectives. Recently there has been considerable interest in the extent to which computer-mediated communication between students in different countries can either supplement or substitute fur actual student mobility. This paper reports an evaluation of a project in which video-conferencing was introduced in the context of an established Anglo-Spanish programme in which UK and Spanish Fashion students undertake collaborative projects in each others' countries. Project aims included fostering and supporting second language use, providing an innovative context for collaborative art and design projects and offering an opportunity to simulate trans-national working conditions. Questionnaires, observation and interview data indicate that not all these objectives were realised, though student reaction to the technology and to the benefits it afforded for collaboration were broadly positive. The strengths and weaknesses of video-conferencing as a support 10 collaborative learning in this context are discussed.

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