John has raised this a few times and I think we are in danger of overlooking it - so I thought I'd open this page as an area where we can gather information concerning cultural issues.
Since CCK08 was an international and multi-cultural course (do we know how many countries were represented? Moodle participants came from 59 countries: United States 137, Canada 84, Australia 56, United Kingdom 47, Italy 20, Spain 18, Portugal 15, Germany 15, New Zealand 14, Brazil 14, Netherlands 10, Finland 9, Belgium 8, Colombia 8, India 7, Mexico 7, Israel 7, Argentina 6, Venezuela 5, Ireland 5, Iceland 5, Chile 4, Turkey 3, Japan 3, Hungary 3, Denmark 3, Sweden 3, China 3, France, Norway, Greece, Poland, Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Philippines, 2 each, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Croatia, Mauritius, Bolivia, Austria, Qatar, Uzbekistan, Uruguay, Ukraine, Sudan, Slovenia, Singapore, Luxembourg, Russian Federation, Indonesia, Peru, Palestinian Territory, Occupied, Nigeria, Viet Nam, Malta, Korea, Republic Of, Serbia, 1 each.), there may also be cultural issues related to whether people chose to communicate in blogs or forums. John - in the Skype chat that we had, you talked about the fact that in some cultures its not done to openly criticise the 'teachers'.
Language was also obviously a big issue for some and may have been a factor in whether they chose to communicate in blogs or forums. There will be other factors too and it might be worth trying to get some quotes from the blogs and forums. We could add them on this page.
I think John's point 1, 3, 4 were more severe than 2 was. And also the effect of the communication barrier was obviously not as severe as I would have expected (and as it was for me, regarding synchronous communication and length of moodle threads). There were quite a few German/ Dutch people on elluminate who obviously did not have such big problems as I did. Mathhias
Comments (1)
suifaijohnmak said
at 10:20 pm on Mar 3, 2009
Hi Jenny, I am posting my views here for our reference.
In reflection, I think there are some major factors which could affect the learning and communication in both the blog and forum:
(1) Communication and listening skills - As participants are coming from different social, cultural and educational backgrounds, the level of communication and listening skills (and the English literacy skills) could have a significant implication on how and why people blog or post in a forum. Blogging allows some participants to write the posts in their own mother language. Widget addition could be used to translate the post into English. So, as mentioned, blogging is within the control of the blogger partly because of this, correct?
(2) Cultural differences - As Heli has mentioned, she found it much easier to communicate with her workmates or network participants in Finland, but not in this "multi-cultural" environment. Would culture play an important role in the communication/learning process in CCK08? How to check it out especially in the forum setting? Could we deduce a casual relationship?
What are the implications of this on learning using blogging and forum posting?
(3) Presentation of content on blogs versus forum posting - It seems that blog posts could take the form of texts and multimedia (podcast, slideshows, pictures, videos etc.), but the content in the forum posting are normally restricted to written texts or links (under Moodle Forum) and these are expected to respond or comment on the related post or threads.
(4) Length of content - Blog post could be of any length decided by the blogger, whereas forum posts are expected to be short and concise (to be effective).
John
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