However there has been a reasonable amount of discussion of issues and observation of effects over the past two decades, going back to Henderson’s cultural critique of the design of multimedia (Henderson 1996), then two seminal special journal editions on culture: the British Journal of Educational Technology (1999, volume 30, number 3), and Distance Education (2001, volume 22, number 1), and more recently Edmundson’s edited book on globalized e-learning (Edmundson 2007).
And there has also been discussion and empirical work on culture-related issues in other disciplines – including the sociology of communication, organizational studies, foreign language learning and intercultural studies, the social-psychology of the internet – much of which is relevant to online education. The scope of this discussion and the cross-disciplinary dimension of the research are two other reasons why we hesitate to attempt a definition of culture in the early part of this book.
Better, we think, to let the range of approaches to its problematization adopted by the contributors to this book tell the story. In compiling ‘Learning Cultures in Online Education’, therefore, we are not looking primarily to fill a gap in existing empirical research, but instead to draw together perspectives that problematize the workings of culture in online education from a range of theoretical and disciplinary positions.
This, we hope, will help define a gap that we ourselves, and others, may be motivated to try to fill empirically in our future research. We are also, in the interests of cross-disciplinarity in educational research, setting out to draw attention to drivers of educational change other than the purely instructional or pedagogical. In particular, we consider the following general educational and sociotechnical developments to be significant for our work:
- The growth of multiculturality and ‘widening participation’ policies in national systems of higher education, which are intended to address the increasing diversity of learners and their family, community, educational and work backgrounds.
- The rapid expansion of transnational e-learning, including enrolments of ‘foreign students’ and staff development of corporate, governmental, agency and other ‘noneducational’ providers.
- The spread of new media communication practices (i.e. internet community, socializing and informal learning practices), which are beginning to influence educational development through the incorporation of Web 2.0 technologies into course design.
