Tuesday, March 10thلAhmed Alanazi

Seminar in Theory of

Educational TechnologyELPS 896

Spring 2015

USING TECHNOLOGY TO PROMOTE CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING IN

HIGHER EDUCATION CLASSROOMS

Topic

The Significance Of This Topic

Educators are facing significant changes with the increasing number of

populations in schools (Damarin, 1998); and the rapid growth of technology

(Ryu & Byeon, 2011; Damarin, 1998).

(Quappe & Cantatore, 2007)

1-Parochial

2- Ethnocentric

3- Synergistic

4- Participatory

Four Levels Of Cultural Awareness

Outsiders And Insiders

When students interact with other students from different cultures and ask each other about their family costumes and traditions, both of the students step back and rethink about their traditions before they answer others’ questions (Hare, 1999).

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1- How can technology be a useful tool for facilitating cultural understanding in

higher education classrooms?

2- What are some strategies for using technology to promote cultural

understanding in higher education classrooms?

Online Instructional Resources

• Online instructional resources are tools and methods used to empower the use of technology for users to enact new learning environments, new communications between students and educators, and new teaching methods; they are advantageous and significant factors in understanding cultures (Dong, Xu and Lu, 2009).

Asynchronous Learning To Promote Cultural Understanding

Asynchronous learning occurs when instructors and students interact

independent of time and location. One of the advantages in using

asynchronous tools to help with cultural understanding in that they grant

students the ability to think critically about other cultures and deeply

percept what other cultures are like (Tomlinson-Clarke & Clarke, 2012).

Asynchronous Learning Tools To Promote Cultural Understanding

Tange (2011) defines wikis as collaborative websites that allow multiple authors to access them in order to edit the content they have asynchronously. Wikipedia is one of the most famous wikis worldwide. These types of asynchronous learning effectively help students to understand other cultures.

Wikis

Blogs

Boulos, Maramba, and Wheeler (2006) define blog as a combination of two words “web” and “log”; this word “blog” means an enriched online journal whose multimedia environment allows authors to work collaboratively to construct their knowledge.

Others

E-mails:Exchange e-mail programs.

Films or Videos:Educators found that “film in general and video programs in

particular represent an inexpensive, as well as a versatile, pedagogical tool” (Salaberry, 2001, p.41).

2- Synchronous Instructional Resources To Promote Cultural Understanding

It occurs when people learn together at the same time.

Synchronous Instructional Tools To Promote Cultural Understanding

Videoconferences

Videoconferencing is an advanced online educational form that allows

participants to communicate with each other face-to-face in the same time

(Journell & Dressman, 2011).

Skype

Skype basically transfers computers to telephones using a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology to enable users to communicate from anywhere in the world with other users.

Chat-based Online Discussions

Chat is one of the synchronous communicating forms that enables instructors and students to have discussions, conversations, and ask and answer questions in “real time.”

Example: “Ask a Librarian.”

3- Other Types Of Tools That We Can Use To Understand Other Cultural Regions

Geographic Information Systems

GIS is a universal and geographic program used to analyze, capture, store, explore, and visualize data from geographic areas worldwide (Environmental Systems Research Institute, 2014).

11% of the U.S. students could not locate their country on the map, and only one in seven could locate Iraq (13%) or Iran (13%) on a map of Middle East/Asia (Roper, 2002).

Communication Strategies

Tools or technologies without purposes do little more than entertain or waste time. Activities without the supporting tools fail. Harris recommends that educators who have ideas about how tools can be used in their classrooms apply the "is it worth it" test. To be worth using, tools must allow students to do things they could not otherwise do, or the tools must allow students to do a much better job than they could otherwise do (Harris, 1999).

Keypals

Keypals are activities that use electronic tools such as email, bulletin boards, threaded discussions or chat environments to provide opportunities for students to engage in communication with peers in other locations.

Global Classrooms

Global classrooms are activities where two or more classrooms study the same topic together. Real time chat environments and video conferencing support this type of activity quite well.

Electronic Appearance

Special guest speakers have long been used in classrooms. Electronic appearance activities extend this practice through the use of communication technologies such as chat and video conferencing.

Telementoring

Telementoring activities bring subject matter experts into communication with a student.

Question And Answer

Question and answer activities allow experts to serve as information sources to students. Like electronic appearances these types of activities can be one-to-group forms of communication. However in some question and answer activities individual students communicate with a single expert. These types of activities differ from telementoring activities in that there is seldom a personal relationship formed between the student and the expert. Often the questions and answers are archived publicly for others to use. There are a number of web sites that offer expert advice on a number of topics.

Advantages Of Using Technology In Cultural Understanding

Breaking social constrains and improving students’ performance

Creating collaborative learning and sharing environments

Hearing another voice

Discovering differences among students

The ease of accessibility

The ability to convert theories to visualized contents

Disadvantages Of Using Technology In Cultural Understanding

Takes time to get involved into discussion

Preparing and training teachers

Providing technology instructions

Technical issues

ConclusionBy tying technological tools and strategies to diverse classrooms in higher

education students would be experiencing a better cultural understand

which is essential to be more open-minded to other cultural contexts.

Effective educators need to create collaborative, motivational and

communicative learning environments in order to effectively and vitally

promote understanding of cultural differences in educational settings. To

achieve cultural understanding, teachers can successfully accomplish

their educational goals by using educational tools and strategies.

March 10thAhmed Alanazi

Done