LEARNING IN DIGITAL CULTURE

What is culture? And what is the importance of it?

Culture is related to the development of one's attitude. One's culture plays an important role in shaping the principles of the individual's life; culture shapes the personality of a community. The cultural values of an individual have a deep impact on his/her attitude towards life. According to the behaviorist definition of culture, it is the ultimate system of social control where people monitor their own standards and behavior. The importance of culture cannot be stressed enough as it is an integral part of living. On the other hand now the new culture is developing which is called digital or cyber culture.  Digital culture is an environment where teachers and students use   available ICT technology.

Digital culture has following characteristic in contrast to conventional culture:

1.  Constant availability

2.  Wide range of information

3.  Easy access

In spite of above mentioned benefits one major obstacle in cyber culture is growing use of passwords and monetary involvement to restrict information.

On the other hand free information is also available in abundance but authenticity and quality cannot be assured.

As the present world is becoming mainly commercial oriented digital information is also commercialized.

The example of Digital culture is like an umbrella where all sides of cultures merge in to it, where the information can be obtained and passed on without any hesitation, instead of F2F culture where people will be hesitant and shy in communicating with each other.

Recently I completed my PGCTHE course in e-learning in higher education. This course was entirely based on digital culture and it gave me the experience of digital leaning in cyber culture.

Development Task

Development Task

For the authentic learning development task, my chosen topic is “Social Values”.

Now the question is that why have I have selected this topic? In fact, growing commercialization has resulted in selfishness. A society where people are selfish is devoid of “social values”. Social values are like a life for the society. Without social values a society will be considered as dead. Though social values might be slightly different in various cultures, generally these values are common across the borders.
It is of paramount importance for the young generation to have full realization of these values as lack of these leads to corruption.
I have been following “student centered learning “approach for the last few years in my classroom.

I intend to assign this topic to all the groups of my students. They will be given reasonable amount of time to complete the topic. At the end of it, every group will bring their findings, and these will be summed up into blog posts for the whole school to review.

I have divided the topic into sub topics and each group will work on their designated topic.
The sub topics are below:

1.  Values of parents-children relationship

2.  Values of neighborhood

3.  Values of teacher-student relationship

4.  Values of elders-youngsters

5.  Values of relations

After planning their work with the teacher’s help, a discussion will ensue. Each group will write a blog and other groups will comment on it.

The students will visit the E-libraries, web sites, online encyclopedias and other cyber resources.

All the groups’ work will be assessed on the quality of their performance.
The whole process will be carried out in accordance with the underlined nine elements of authentic learning. This will promote Multicultural authentic learning environment among students.
 In accordance with nine elements of authentic learning for this task I have chalked out my strategy as under:
 

Element of authentic learning	Guidelines for implementation	Implementation
Provide authentic context that reflects the way the knowledge will be used in real-life	• a physical/virtual environment that reflects the way the knowledge will ultimately be used	Purpose of the course is to gain the knowledge which can be applied to own personal life in order to attain balance.
	• a non-linear design to preserve the complexity of the real-life setting	Selection of the topics for each group will be flexible to suit their situation.
Provide authentic activities	• activities that have real-world relevance	Authentic knowledge will be applied on real life.
	• ill-defined complex activities that provide an opportunity for students to define the tasks and sub-tasks required to complete the activity	“Social values” is the main subject students will define activity relevant to their sub topic.
	• a sustained period of time for investigation	The tentative duration of the task will be around four weeks.
	• the opportunity for the detection of relevant versus. irrelevant information	Information will be monitored for detection of irrelevant material.
	• tasks that can be integrated across subject areas	Whole task will be integrated across subject areas.
Provide access to expert performances  and the modelling of processes	• access to expert thinking and modelling processes	Accesses to authentic source of information will be provided e.g. online discussions, forums and video interviews.
	• access to learners with various levels of expertise	On line discussions will provide learning with different level of expertise.
	• opportunity for the sharing of narratives and stories and access to the social periphery	Blogs, comments and classroom discussion will provide access to information sharing.
Provide multiple roles and perspectives	• different perspectives on the topics from various points of view	Different perspectives of the topic will be unfolded from various point of views of the participants.
	• the opportunity to criss-cross the learning environment	Students will have flexible and multi role environment.
Support collaborative construction of knowledge	• tasks are completed in pairs or groups rather than individually	Student centered groups will provide collaborative construction of knowledge.
	• appropriate incentive structure for whole group achievement	The assessment is done on group level based on the article and group work (activities during the work).