Individuals as the problem: cultures, subcultures and learning styles

Hybridization in online classrooms thus evades extant frameworks of cultural analysis: moreover, the individual learner likewise escapes such frameworks – first, as we have seen, as the individual is more than simply a token for a presumptively monolithic national culture. In addition, individuals represent a constantly shifting intersection of multiple cultures and subcultures, which in turn alter over time at varying rates, that is, from national/linguistic cultures that change relatively slowly, to youth cultures, which change very quickly (e.g. as we have seen, with regard to such fundamental notions as privacy and the nature of the self).

A given individual may further reflect some number of ethnic and/or other subcultures, including those shaped by economic and social class. Insofar as each individual may be thought of as a distinctive construction and inflection of each of these diverse levels of ‘culture’, she or he may inhabit a near-infinite continuum of possibilities that are only poorly and incompletely captured by the five cultural dimensions articulated by Hall and Hofstede.

More radically, as we have seen, the cross-cultural online learning environment facilitates such individuals’ creation of distinctive new syntheses and amalgams of diverse cultural elements that again escape overly simple frameworks of cultural analyses. Hewling (2005), for example, documents forcefully how students in one of her intercultural online classrooms repeatedly exhibited communicative behaviours and values that (a) either could not have been predicted by using Hofstede or, worse yet (b), directly contradicted whatever predictions one might have made on the basis of those schema. So Hewling finds that among her students – Canadians, a North American, and a Sudanese – concerns about authority are expressed primarily by the (North) Americans. But according to Hofstede’s framework, (North) Americans, as members of a low-power distant country, should be least concerned about issues of authority.

Rather, as members of an individualist country, according to Hofstede, these students should be most likely to express their opinions directly and without hesitation. Hewling (2005), however, shows that this was not the case. For her part, Hewling proposes a content analysis methodology that she argues is more appropriate for analyzing the intercultural communication that takes place in online classrooms (2005) – a methodology that we can understand to incorporate both Koch’s second approach (‘culture as text’) and third approach (‘culture as community and practice’) to cultural analysis (Koch 2006: 221ff.).

Additional frameworks for cultural analysis have also been proposed. One of the most notable has been developed by Cantoni and his colleagues. Their frameworks take up Baumgartner’s much more complex matrix of cultural dimensions, one that adds to Hall and Hofstede an additional seventeen cultural factors developed in part from the theoretical work of Gould (2005). The resulting framework is then applied to a project involving ICTs for teacher-training in Brazil (Cantoni et al. 2006).

But again, this sophisticated enhancement of Hall and Hofstede as a framework for cultural analysis of intercultural online learning reiterates the point already made regarding intercultural communication online: while Hall and Hofstede (among others) may be used in initial ways, these frameworks provide only limited, and sometimes profoundly misleading, approaches to the realities of intercultural communication online.

While new, more comprehensive frameworks and approaches are being developed (e.g. by Cantoni et al.) that promise to offer us better understanding of online intercultural communication – and thus, of how we can shape both our technologies and their uses to foster the most effective intercultural communication and e-learning. We have only just begun.
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Revolution versus reality: The 1990s’ promises and the twenty-first century realities of online education

As we have begun to see, English-language conceptions and enthusiasms for ‘cyberspace’ – the metaphorical place inwhich human beings and machines (such as artificial agents) may communicate with one another by way of networked ICTs – were marked early on by a presumed Cartesian, radical split between mind and body. In the terms made popular by William Gibson’s seminal novel, Neuromancer, the body belongs to an openly despised ‘meatspace’ – while the mind can enjoy god-like freedom in ‘cyberspace’ (e.g. Gibson 1984: 239).

The peak of techno-utopian optimism regarding such liberation in cyberspace is represented in Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the independence of cyberspace’ – a declaration that likewise calls for ‘liberation’, largely in the form of escape from ‘meatspace’ (Barlow 1996). The 1990s rhetoric of ‘revolution’ via ICTs was further fuelled by a prominent theory of communication – one affiliated with the work of Innis (1951), McLuhan (1962, 1964), Ong (1982) and Eisenstein (1983) and for discussion, see Chesebro and Bertelsen 1996).

Taking diverse forms of communication as (at least necessary) conditions of culture, this framework argued that modern institutions (e.g. democratic polity, natural science, the liberal state, etc.) were closely wedded to the communication technologies of print and literacy. As we have seen, Ong famously argued that an emerging cyberspace would be marked by a ‘secondary orality’. While for Ong, secondary orality of necessity rested on and incorporated both literacy and print, for postmodern enthusiasts caught in the spell of simple dualisms between modernity (as affiliated with literacy and print) and postmodernity (affiliated with secondary orality), Ong’s contrast, when (mis)understood dualistically, nicely supported the larger vision of an imminent and revolutionary overturning of modern institutions.

It is also the case (at least in the West) that ‘revolution’ sells, and so it is not an accident that more or less every new technology and technological development, ranging from personal computers to blogs, is introduced into the marketplace with breathless claims that technology X is ‘revolutionary’ (‘Join the blog revolution!’ etc.). Given this matrix of economic, political and theoretical factors, it is not surprising that higher education likewise jumped on the ostensibly revolutionary bandwagon inaugurated by networked ICTs and prevailing conceptions of ‘cyberspace’.

At least within the US context, proponents of distance education – now migrating from its primarily paper-based correspondence models and early efforts to exploit radio and TV into the online world – hailed the imminent end of the book, and with it, ‘bricks-and-mortar’ schools and their ‘seated’ classrooms (both pejorative terms defining traditional higher education from the standpoint of the purely ‘virtual’).

But as symbolized by the (in)famous dot.com collapse at the beginning of the twenty-first century, 1990s ‘proponents’ visions and claims of imminent revolution, whether in the political or educational orders, soon ran aground on several stubborn realities. In addition to emerging insights regarding the essential role of embodiment for the learning, knowing and enacting self, additional empirical research began to demonstrate that Cartesian assumptions regarding a radical mind-body split fail to materialize, so to speak, in a ‘cyberspace’ radically distinct from an ostensible ‘meatspace’ (cf. chap. 9: 120–131).

So, for example, while ‘virtual communities’ certainly offer unique facilities and advantages, in large measure, such communities remain closely connected with their participants’ real-world bodies, and thereby their real-world histories, values, traditions, etc. (e.g. Baym 2002; Slater 2002; Cavanagh 2007, ch. 8: 102–119). Similarly, what we may call the postmodernist (mis)reading of the Innis-Ong schema began to fray in the face of several challenges, beginning with a criticism of its tendency towards an overly simple technological determinism that is likewise no longer supported by empirical evidence (Ess 1999; Slater 2002: 534).

Perhaps most persuasively, emerging economic realities likewise confounded 1990s enthusiasms. In particular, contrary to hopes that distance education would serve as a lucrative cash cow for universities facing continuously increasing costs (Carr 2001), experience and a number of hard-nosed analyses demonstrated that the costs of designing, producing and implementing computer-mediated distance education far exceeded original assumptions and estimates (e.g. Rumble 2001; Trucano 2005; cf. Ess 2006). Finally, as institutions understandably sought to profit from a burgeoning global demand for online courses, two sorts of additional obstacles emerged, beginning with the manifold problems created by the diverse, and oftentimes conflicting, cultures of online participants.

As educators attempted to come to grips with the role of culture in shaping online interaction and communication by taking up a number of frameworks for cultural analysis primarily, those developed by Hall (1976) and Hofstede (1980, 1983, 1984, 1991) – a second difficulty emerged: namely, that of the individual learner who, for a variety of important reasons, confounded the cultural analyses initially sought by online educators as ways of resolving the problems and conflicts, ostensibly rooted in culture, which appeared in the online classroom.
Read More : Revolution versus reality: The 1990s’ promises and the twenty-first century realities of online education