Symposium 7: Cultural Ecologies in Online Learning

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.