Individual and Socio-Cultural Framing of E-Learning

Abstract

Considering e-learning as a socio-cultural system acknowledges that individuals are embedded within different contexts, influenced by the culture and the society the individual lives in. Designing beneficial e-learning scenarios means respecting these socio-cultural contexts and providing appropriate framing. This chapter introduces several aspects influencing e-learning from an individual and socio-cultural perspective. It firstly deals with the aspect of learners' collaborative knowledge construction in e-learning and introduces what this perspective means for the design and implementation of e-learning scenarios. The chapter looks at tools and shared external representations and shows how they can beneficially support learning processes and outcomes. In a third step, it looks at the individual's learning characteristics, for example an individual's prior knowledge, and socio-cultural biases relating to gender, ethnicity, and socio economic background, and discusses how these may be an obstacle for e-learning and how e-learning may help learners to overcome their biases. Finally, the chapter focuses on the issue on evaluation and provides suggestions to evaluate environments for e-learning from a socio-cultural perspective.