Learning Cultures in Online Education
Symposium convenor: Robin Goodfellow
Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, r.goodfellow@open.ac.uk
Symposium Introduction
The papers in this symposium are based on contributions to an edited collection of work that addresses the theme of 'learning cultures in online education', to be published by Continuum books later this year (Goodfellow & Lamy in preparation). Research on online learning cultures is an important corollary to the use of e-learning to develop 'transnational' and 'cross-border' education markets if the social and pedagogical benefits from these developments are to keep pace with the corporate and institutional ones, but it is also a corollary to the teaching of the increasingly diverse learner cohorts that inhabit formal online learning communities, and to the increasingly blurred distinction between these learning communities and the more informal ones that are appearing in a variety of sites of online social networking. The work collected in the book addresses issues such as the continuing relevance of a conceptualisation of culture that equates it with national identity and locates it in the behaviour of individual learners, the processes through which identities and value systems are negotiated amongst individual and institutional actors in virtual learning environments, the complex role of technologies themselves as cultural actors, and the relationship between formal educational and popular media cultures. The three papers in this symposium address: the nature of research into culture in online learning to date, and the new directions proposed in the forthcoming book; the role of ritualised and textualised language in the construction and presentation of identities online; and the influence of the 'behaviour' of technical environments on the cultural ecology of online learning communities.
New Directions in Research into Learning Cultures in Online Education
Robin Goodfellow
Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, r.goodfellow@open.ac.uk
Abstract
This paper introduces the theme of culture in online learning and a forthcoming edited collection of research that addresses the theme of 'learning cultures in online education', to be published by Continuum books later this year (Goodfellow & Lamy in preparation). It argues that research on online learning cultures is an important corollary to the use of e-learning to develop 'transnational' and 'cross-border' education markets if the social and pedagogical benefits from these developments are to keep pace with the corporate and institutional ones, but that it is also a corollary to the teaching of the increasingly diverse learner cohorts that inhabit formal online learning communities, and to the increasingly blurred distinction between these learning communities and the more informal ones that are appearing in a variety of sites of online social networking.
Some of the research into online learning cultures to date is reviewed, and broadly characterised as motivated by either: i) a concern with the influence on international learners' individual and group identity of prevalent 'western' approaches to online education (social constructivism, techno-rationalism), and the English language; ii) a desire to understand the ways that online learning is played out through language, where the presentation and disclosure of identities by learners is inflected by their own cultural backgrounds and/or by the reduced cues of the electronic medium, which hide indicators such as accents, appearance, age, gender etc.; or iii) an interest in the emergence of 'new' cultural and social identities in virtual learning communities which draw on contemporary cybercultures of the internet, as well as systems of cultural relations inherited from conventional educational or corporate settings.
Some of the new approaches to issues of culture in online education taken by the contributors to the book are then discussed. These include the contribution of Charles Ess, addressing the continuing relevance of a conceptualisation of culture that equates it with national identity and locates it in the behaviour of individual learners; Charlotte Gunawardena's work on the processes through which identities and value systems are negotiated amongst actors in virtual environments; and Jay Lemke's and Caspar van Helden's discussion of the relationship between formal educational and popular media cultures.
The two other papers which comprise this symposium are briefly introduced, being Leah Macfadyen's account of the role of ritualised and textualised language in the construction and presentation of identities online, and Anne Hewling's discussion of the influence of the 'behaviour' of technical environments on the cultural ecology of online learning communities.
Two directions for future research are proposed. One involves switching attention away from the generalisations about the behaviour characteristics of local consumers of global online learning products, and turning it on to their possibilities for re-purposing these products. The other involves the investigation of learners' uses of the social web and the attitudes to learning that this is becoming associated with.
Constructing ethnicity and identity in the online classroom: linguistic practices and ritual text acts.
Leah P. Macfadyen
Skylight (Science Centre for Learning and Teaching), The University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, leah.macfadyen@ubc.ca
Abstract
In any new learning environment, diverse learners are expected to engage intellectually with peers, course materials and instructors, through argumentation, discussion and critical reflection on ideas. This expectation presupposes, however, a wealth of background understanding: shared assumptions, shared concepts, shared understanding of methods of argument. If learners do not arrive with a common cultural (and intellectual) heritage, they must negotiate or co-construct a new learning culture in which the ‘rules of engagement’ are understood and shared, before fruitful intellectual engagement can begin. In this paper I argue that development of a new group culture requires that individuals can first effectively enact their particular identities. For any learning community to develop, for the construction of a learning culture to begin, learners must first be able to enact their authentic and differing identities in the learning space.
Which strategies of self-presentation and identity construction are available to learners when the new learning environment is virtual? Cyberspace (and, in particular, virtual learning environments), remains primarily a 'written world' (Feenberg, 1989), one in which bodily markers of identity such as physical attributes and vocal accent, are often invisible and bodily participation in gesture and ritual is impossible. The body has, to a large extent, been banned (Zurawski, 2000) from the ‘discursive and rhetorical discursive spaces’ of the Internet (Nakamura, 2002), and yet an individual’s authenticity – a term that in English connotes ‘truth’, ‘accuracy of (self)representation’ and ‘trustworthiness’ – is commonly assumed to be guaranteed by physical presence (Feenberg, 1989) and the evidence of the senses.
Concerns therefore persist about the Internet as a problematic site for meaningful learner interaction and negotiation of learning cultures that can support ‘engaged collaborative discourse’. Can there be learning cultures that do not depend for their existence on physical presence? If so, how can we best characterize their nature and development? I will argue here that, as in face-to-face classrooms, learners in text-based virtual learning environments begin the process of co-constructing a virtual learning culture by performing and sharing their unique virtual identities, and that one of the key strategies that individuals and newly forming virtual communities make use of in this process is ritual.
To investigate how learners enact their identities in a virtual classroom, I examined web-based student communications in an international online undergraduate course, Perspectives on Global Citizenship, in which participating students represent a great diversity of national, cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. I present, here, some of this data, with a focus on ‘ritual text acts’ that participants seem to perform. I draw attention to the ways participants not only ritually perform their affiliations with established national, ethnic or ‘racial’ groups through the use of stylized language, but also how they then ritually challenge these essentialized models of identity. In particular, I explore apparent ritual performances of new hybrid global identities, and moments of ritual resistance to expected learner identities or practices.
Based on these findings, I argue that in virtual learning environments, learners transfer and transform ‘first life’ rituals of identity formation and community building into forms that exemplify (new) cultural values and practices. Learners perform themselves through a range of ritual text-as-speech acts that do not simply describe pre-existing identity but also construct it. Transferring elements of real life rituals (for example the use of coded language) to the virtual space, they ritually restate details of their ethnic or national membership (or non-membership) in order to clarify or trouble the identity they possess through a range of other group affiliations, attesting their individual identities in relation to others. Together, these practices help learners establish authentic virtual identities that permit the establishment of a new learning community with a shared learning culture.
Cultural Ecologies in Online Learning
Anne Hewling
Library and Learning Resources Centre, Open University, a.hewling@open.ac.uk
Abstract
This paper will explore the metaphor of 'cultural ecology' as a conceptual framework for understanding the complex ways that technology used in online education, especially delivery platforms, influences learning activity and the identity work of participants.
Learners can now not only access education 'anywhere, anytime' that they can find a place to access the Internet (as early providers boasted) but - via mobile phones, PDAs, and other wireless devices - they can now find it on the way to or from 'anywhere' too. Furthermore, Web 2.0 applications help learners create, and generate content for, online spaces in which they can be independent of any need for offline resource. Equally, learner access via mobile networks using phones able to deliver education materials increasingly permits areas of the developed and developing worlds with limited electricity or telephone resources to gain online access too.
Meanwhile the basic structural design of the majority of institutional learning systems is still based on a particular model derived from North American and European face-to-face educational practice. Conventionally, the issues of culture which this raises have been explored through frameworks which equate culture with nationality, but essentialist concepts such as nationality are unhelpful when culture is conceptualised as continually evolving process with, and in response to, the participation of those involved. Furthermore, prior cultural experience and knowledge are not the only things that determine how students approach learning online. In the online context there are entirely new elements actively involved in interaction - differentiating it from face-to-face classes, familiar or otherwise, and presenting challenges for those wishing to understand discursive practices online. In particular the role of technology itself, and specifically delivery platforms, is influential.
Two specific online education contexts are considered in this paper: a masters level class using a Blackboard virtual learning environment and an informal repository and discussion space for tutors created using blog and wiki software. Data from these two contexts suggests that apparently passive elements in the organisation and operation of activity in the online systems, such as the software itself, were regarded by users as playing an active, in fact interactive, part in the work that users expected the system to do. Moreover, not only did users, content, and other elements in the system have multiple roles, these seemed to change over time. The idea that physically inanimate technology may behave with - or as if it has - some kind of agency is difficult to reconcile with much existing literature in the field. In this paper I draw on the term 'information ecologies' and on other uses of the ecology metaphor in order to propose an alternative to existing understanding of the cultural environment online and further explore the notion of technology as a cultural agent in online learning in these studies.
| About NLC |
2008 Conference Papers
| Conference Committee| Keynote
Speakers
| Papers from previous NL conferences |Research Seminars| Current Conference
| Sponsors | Contact
|