The meaning and Role of Culture in Learning and Continuous Building of Professional Identity

The definition of digital culture

It has been said that the concept of culture should be approached critically. Even culture based categorization, as any other classification, should be avoided. Everyone is unique. Even though everyone is unique, (s)he bears his or her cultural signature. Race, culture, ethnicity, and religion must be seen as “dimensions along which individuals and samples vary, rather than as categories in which individuals can be classified”. (Phinney, 1996 in Liu, 2007). I agree it´s important to remind that everyone is unique even we all have our cultural backgrounds. It would be too easy to just use stereotypes of different backgrounds, we are much more than just our cultural background. I believe it´s necessary for a teacher to understand different kind of cultures and learner´s backgrounds in order to support learning in an optimal way.

Each student brings their own specific culture to their education. This means that every classroom contains layers of multiculturalism and diversity. It means that educators must think outside their own comfort zone and area of knowledge to develop meaningful learning for all their students. (Harrington, 2010: ICT and the Multicultural Classroom http://www.slideshare.net/jha174/the-multicultural-classroom-and-eportfolios). For an educator it´s important to understand own background. That way own comfort zone and the limits are easier to recognize and it will help to understand different learners too.

 “I think that the first and most important lesson of culture is that it belongs to the people, it belongs to us, it is what we make, and we have tools now more than ever than we did in the past to make culture” (Downes, 2012). To me this is a very important statement. The culture is up to people. This is why culture can change and be different depending on people. This could also explain why one person can belong to different cultures depending on the group (s)he belongs to.

Online culture

Online or Cyber culture is a social place in which human beings interact and communicate and can be assumed to possess an evolving culture or set of cultures (cyber cultures) that may encompass beliefs, practices, attitudes, modes of thought, behaviours, and values (cf. Palaiologou, 2007, 79).

There are some concerns that the lack of face-to-face communication makes intercultural communication difficult and that may result ineffectivity in online education (Hannon & D’Netto, 2007.) This might be true, if online education is done like traditional education. Online education needs careful and different planning and implementation compared to traditional. In many studies it´s referred that online learning culture is something different compared traditional learning. It has been stated that an online culture is “negotiated” rather than “given” (2004, in Rutherford & Kerr, 2008).

This means that online education can be successful if the learners’ communication and knowledge sharing is supported and implemented to be an essential part of online education. Based on my own experience as a learner, I agree that online culture is negotiated assuming that there has been a space for communication and sharing. I have also participated to online courses which have been very traditional, no communication nor knowledge sharing between learners. I believe it´s much more effective learning to let the learners communicate and participate to culture creation. Some values maybe good to give to ensure the wanted direction for culture creation. When I participated inside a company to internal online trainings as an educator or learner, the culture of the company is already there. There is still space for negotiation but maybe less than at school.

If the online learning culture is different compared to traditional learning, how does that affect to whole learning process? It´s easy to assume that the whole learning process is different compared to traditional learning. Learner´s role and teacher´s role is changed. The learning is different. The assessment should be different. The different culture affects to the whole learning environment.

Online teacher

As it has been said, that the traditional, teacher-centered and content-driven learning culture does not produce learning that is needed today. It is crucial to develop learning designs that allow dialogue, reflection and collaboration. That will create a solid starting-point for the group to collaboratively create a multicultural learning culture. (Teräs, Leppisaari, Teräs & Herrington, 2012.) It´s easy to agree to this statement. Working life has also partly changed to this direction.  It seems that for learning, it´s challenging to implement new learning culture to the reality. The change seems to be quite slow anyway compared to working life.

When I was a student, the traditional and teacher-centered learning culture was the way of learning. I have a lot of work experience in modern technology and multicultural working environment, but still I think it´s important to gain also personal experience as a learner in multicultural e-learning environment in order to develop myself as an online teacher. Then also the learner´s way of working will be more familiar and easier to understand. That experience I can then utilize when developing my own way of working as an online teacher.