*Goals

We're approaching the face-to-face time and wrappping up some of your other courses, so I'd like to you take a little time to reflect on the question, "Why are we doing all this?"

What are the goals of digital pedagogy? 

• 
  Is it wise to entrust education to a technology like computers? The Computer Delusion
• Is Google making us stupid?
  
• Is is possible to use these new technologies without changing our societies? Critical Digital Pedagogy: a definition

It's generally considered wise to assume that powerful people don't want to give up power, and rich people don't want to give up wealth. Therefore, it's not too big an inference to think that rich and powerful people with fancy tools probably won't encourage the use of those tools to take away their wealth and power. Was Aubre Lorde right in saying, "The master's tools will never dismanlte the master's house"?

Or, think of it this way: culture is the combination of communication, routines, and tools passed on to generations. Nothing in history has changed communication, routines, and tools as quickly as the Internet and moble Web 2.0 technology - and by teaching digitally, we're passing these changes on to the next generation. 

How certain are we that this won't result in unforseeable cultural changes?  

For instance, for about 50 years, researchers of culture have been studying the deep, often unacknowledged, values that differ between nations and ethnicities. Check out what Inglehard and Welzel found as the trend in the World Values Survey. Across the world, there's been a general movement from traditiional values to secular-rational values, and from survival to self-expression:

Another major cultural researcher, Hofstede, had found six dimensions of cultural values to be amazingly stable over time on national levels. Yet, my research indicates that the use of Web 2.0 for online distance learning may result in relatively quickly decreasing the cultural values of power distance (e.g. formal roles and hierarchy) and masculinity (e.g. competition, prestige, and direct displays of power).

Also, consider this interesting little finding. Do you remember that long survey you took at the beginning of this course? Well, I've given the same survey to over 80 teachers across Central Asia since early 2019. (You don't need to study the survey results, but here they are, if you're interested.)

When you took the survey, you didn't know that it included questions from Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions survey. The questions are on a different scale than the 100-point scale shown above, so they don't let you compare yourselves with others around the world. But they do let you compare yourselves with the other Central Asian teachers who took this exact survey! 

Here are the results:

Again, this doesn't show that you, as a group, have a higher value of individualism (IDV) than people in other countries, but it does show that you're quite a bit more individualistic than other Central Asian teachers. In fact, it shows some pretty big differences between you and other Central Asian teachers in several areas. 

So, it it possible that being in online AUCA courses has changed some of your values? Or is it possible that the people who take online AUCA courses have some different values than others in their culture? 

My point is not that it's wrong to have cultural values change. Culture, like human brains, are dynamic: we change or we die. But when we introduce new means of communication, in new spaces, and with new tools, we might be surprised by how much changes. 

Your Task:

Write a 350-500 word summary of this material, along with 3-5 thought-provoking questions for your colleagues. Then reply to their responses. 

Try to include citations, at least one new source, and a video in your summary.