Page 106 - Education in a Digital World

Local Variations 93

have a significant influence on the implementation and use of educational technol-
ogy. Yet in making sense of local variations in educational technology use, it is
important to also acknowledge the more nebulous issue of ‘culture’ as an additional
set of significant contextual influences. Here we are using ‘culture’ to denote the
shared understandings, assumptions, beliefs, values and ideas of any particular society
or group – be it in terms of local cultural values, traditional forms of knowledge or
ways of thinking. Thus as Alison Carr-Chellman (2005, p.17) observes, any form
of technology-based learning cannot be considered to be acultural, “but rather is
highly dependent on the culture and context in which the learning and learners
are embedded”.
One of the most prominent cultural variations between countries is that of
language. Although estimates vary, there may be up to 5,000 languages and up to
200 writing systems in use around the world. It is no longer the case that English
(even the simplified versions of ‘global English’ that are used around the world) is
the only lingua franca, or that the Roman alphabet is the common standard writing
system. Any instance of educational technology is therefore set against the linguistic
pluralism of the contexts in which it is being implemented. In countries such as
India this can entail over twenty different spoken languages and dialects co-existing
within a few hundred miles of each other. Language is a practical and political issue
in many other countries, from Nigeria to Israel, and Canada to Belgium. This
situation is complicated further by the importance of dialects – such as the different
forms of English that can be found around the world such as Jamaican patois and
other forms of English-based creole. In all these cases, “language becomes a repre-
sentative proxy of culture, and thus asking any one culture to cede to others
[through technology use] is particularly problematic” (Carr-Chellman 2005, p.69).
Aside from the immediate matter of language, another important cultural influ-
ence relates to the dominant traditions of thought that underpin the historical
development of countries and regions. In a basic sense, these traditions and philo-
sophies can be traced back to the various dominant ‘world’ civilisations – such as
the Sinic (Confucian-based), the Western, the Islamic and the Latin American
(cf. Huntington 2003). While it may appear anachronistic when seeking to explain
the use of contemporary digital technologies to hark back to the influence of these
civilisations, they constitute an important background to any educational technol-
ogy analysis. For example, as Joel Spring (2009) argues, despite the dominant secu-
larist tendency in the vast majority of educational analysis and theory, we would do
well to consider the underpinning influence of spiritual and religious values on
contemporary educational technology use.
Indeed, it can be argued that clear differences are evident between the educational
philosophies and arrangements in Sinic, Japanese, Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu
cultures (see Zhao et al. 2011). One set of comparisons that is often made is that
between Eastern thought (i.e. deriving from holistic Asian philosophies) and Western
thought (i.e. deriving from Greek philosophy). As Latchem and Jung (2010) detail,
Western thought can be characterised along a number of lines – e.g. seeking