Page 108 - Education in a Digital World

Local Variations 95

instance, other authors have questioned how dominant Western notions of educa-
tional technology use correspond with the Islamic prioritising of the sacredness of
the text and associated preference for ‘teaching-to-the-text’ and encouraging text
memorisation. As Latchem and Jung (2010, p.15) reason, “in Arab countries,
teacher-led, face-to-face instruction is considered quality education and ICT is pri-
marily used for information transmission and passive learning”. Thus it has been
argued, for example, that the strong face-to-face, oral, kinship and respect traditions
within Islamic understandings of education may mitigate against the relative success
of autonomous forms of online learning. As Usun (2004, n.p) observes:

Turkey’s roots in an oral tradition, along with its emphasis on rote memorisation
and the sacredness of text, make learning independently less suitable … The
transition from teacher-centred education to individual-based learning, where
students learn alone and support is minimal, creates many difficulties for
Turkish distance education students.

To take another example, it has been conversely reasoned that the customary
preference within Maori education for face-to-face (kanohi-a-kanohi) situations
and the cultural recognition of the need for an intimate connection between
teacher and learner leads to a potential preference for synchronous rather than
asynchronous forms of online education (Anderson 2005). Accurate or not, arguments
such as these certainly act to highlight the significance of differences in collective
understandings and values.
We must, of course, be mindful of slipping into (over)generalisations and stereo-
types when identifying the importance of these local cultural variations. It could be
argued that the use of digital technologies for what Latchem and Jung identify as
“information transmission and passive learning” is by no means a uniquely Islamic
trait. Conversely, many forms of East Asian education are not bounded by rigidly
Confucian, Taoist or Zen principles, and many instances of technology-related
innovation do occur within these countries. Indeed, as Cameron Richards (2004,
p.342) reasons, “abstract ideas about learner-centred pedagogy, life-long education
and flexible learning are well known and even perhaps the theoretical orthodoxy
today in many Asian contexts of education”.
These caveats notwithstanding, it would seem sensible for any account of edu-
cational technology to give greater acknowledgement to contextual differences in
cultural values and perspectives. This is perhaps also important with regard to any
specific ‘national ideologies’ that could be said to stem from broader philosophical
and spiritual traditions. As anthropologists such as Florence Kluckhohn have long
observed, national understandings and norms can be seen to differ in terms of peo-
ple’s relationships to others – in particular the valuing of the individual as opposed
to the collective and the autonomous as opposed to the authoritarian. In these
terms, then, differences in the positioning and the privileging of the individual
within national cultures underpin many local variations in educational technology