Urban encounters: juxtapositions of difference and the communicative interface of global cities

This article explores the communicative interface of global cities, especially as it is shaped in the juxtapositions of difference in culturally diverse urban neighbourhoods. These urban zones present powerful examples, where different groups live cheek by jowl, in close proximity and in intimate interaction — desired or unavoidable. In these urban locations, the need to manage difference is synonymous to making them liveable and one's own. In seeking (and sometimes finding) a location in the city and a location in the world, urban dwellers shape their communication practices as forms of everyday, mundane and bottom-up tactics for the management of diversity. The article looks at three particular areas where cultural diversity and urban communication practices come together into meaningful political and cultural relations for a sustainable cosmopolitan life: citizenship, imagination and identity

e-Venture: The Making of 21st Century European Learning Regions

In: A.J. Kallenberg and M.J.J.M. van de Ven (Eds), 2002, The New Educational Benefits of ICT in Higher Education: Proceedings. Rotterdam: Erasmus Plus BV, OECR ISBN 90-9016127-9Within the context of the evolution of 'Europe of the regions' this paper examines the role of higher education in the information age. It contrasts two perspectives on contemporary society in relation to higher education. Ritzer's (1998: 151-163) Post modern perspective which positions McUniversity in the Consumer Society of mega-malls, fast food restaurants, television shopping networks and infomercials. And Postman's (1999) perspective, derived from the eighteenth century, which re-examines our values and calls for a 'future connected to traditions that provide sane authority and meaningful purpose.' Paradoxically, the world-wide information explosion and increasing global competition has resulted in the most enduring competitive advantage being created on the local level within the 'triple helix' (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2001), that is the emerging clustering of inter-connected firms, institutions of higher education and government (Porter 1998). A new feature of the triple helix is the increased need for higher education to connect and relate with industries and the government and exchange knowledge for funding. It requires the fostering of new partnerships and the adoption of new and better higher education strategies to identify potential 'complementors' with whom to co-evolve towards a value net, that generates a relation rent. The operation of the resulting system is e-Venture designed to support the rapidly emerging field of event management, a medium which responds to the needs of the consumer society and the values that provide meaningful purpose and contribute to the creation of cosmopolitan citizenship. The focus of the e-Venture project is on the critical linkage of both e-content in higher education and relationship management that enables the Triple Helix to support and realise ‘The Making of European Learning Regions'

Learning about Chinese-speaking cultures at a distance

This chapter focuses on the challenges posed by curriculum choices and pedagogical frameworks to the study of Languages of the Wider World in the UK. These languages reflect complex linguistic and cultural realities that do not fit into the traditional constraints of language education, which raises questions about the extent to which we can address the global and local dimensions of the target languages and cultures. I examine in particular the case of Chinese – a language family with multiple varieties and spoken by many communities in Asia and other parts of the globe – in the context of distance education. Issues surrounding language learning at a distance are discussed, as well as the role that teachers and technology play in supporting the development of language learners’ cultural awareness. While teachers can, in a face-to-face situation, exploit, expand and discuss cultural information, this possibility is very limited in distance learning. We will see how, at present, technology has taken on a major role in both formal and informal education, facilitating contact between learners and between learners and teachers (however distant they might be). For example, the Open University’s beginners’ Chinese course discussed here makes use of online forums to enable cultural interaction; initial examinations of these forums reveal the students to be diverse and mobile, and they also give us a sense of their cultural stances, and of the shapes of the beliefs, values and attitudes supported by their individual cultural backgrounds

Multimodal representation in virtual exchange: A social semiotic approach to critical digital literacy

For agentive and influential involvement in online communities, language learners and teachers need to develop critical digital literacy (CDL), conceptualized by Darvin (2017) as an awareness of “how meanings are represented in ways that maintain and reproduce relations of power” (p. 5) and thus privilege some and marginalize others online. Virtual exchange (VE) provides an ideal socio-cultural and socio-semiotic context for fostering CDL (Hauck, 2019) as it is an educational intervention that is—by default—digitally mediated. In this contribution, we examine the employment of semiotic practices for multimodal representation and how they “shape power relations with others” (Bezemer & Jewitt, 2009, p. 1), thereby drawing on a social semiotic approach (Bezemer & Kress, 2016) to CDL (Bilki et al., 2023). Our insights stem from a six-week VE between two higher education institutions in Turkey and the UK, which brought together 48 future English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. The task-based exchanges yielded a rich dataset which allows us to illustrate how CDL is materially achieved through transformative processes observed in multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal interactions. Our findings speak to Kern’s (2014, 2015) appeal for a relational pedagogy and highlight the need to promote CDL in EFL teaching and teacher education to foster critical reflection on meaning-making conventions while exercising agency to establish powerful online relations with others

A Cross-Cultural and Bilingual Experience in LIS Education--A Case Study

This paper describes a case study involving the synchronous delivery of portions of an undergraduate course on web technologies taught across three campuses and in the context of a multicultural learning environment. The case study focuses on issues around internationalization and localization, one portion of the course where students learn techniques for developing Web content that supports multiple locales, languages, and written scripts. Another important component of the case study presentation will report student experiences in engaging in collaborative work using an array of synchronous technologies such as teleconferencing; synchronous multi-modal virtual meeting rooms and the like. This portion of the course provides experiences that students will likely encounter in their future careers, as they find themselves working in organizational contexts that require collaboration over long distances, across languages and cultures, and across national or continental boundaries. The challenges of distributed collaborative work across three cultures and two languages are presented and discussed