Confessions of an elearning skeptic

As part of my study of online communities I came across a journal article by Alexandre Ardichvili, Martin Maurer and Tim Wentling entitled “Knowledge Sharing Through Online Communities of Practice: The Impact of Cultural Variations”.  The article explores a side of online communities that I had not considered before, that of the impact of culture on participation in virtual communities of practice.  This is particulalry relevant to my study as both the community that I participated in, and the community my group is designing for assignment two, span international borders.  Why is culture important?

The research conducted by Ardichvili et al indicted that, for some cultures, the way participants engage with an online community will be quite different.  Their study points out that common design is based around the individualistic culture (eg most western cultures) that “place personal goals ahead of the goals of a larger social group”.  This style of design tends to disadvantage participants from more collectivist cultures (eg China, Brazil and Russia) who tend to ”give priority to the goals of the larger collective or group”. 

How does this impact design?

(1) Expectations in relation to participation in online discussion may need to be modified for different countries as participants from some cultures will not be as forward with their ideas as those from other cultures.

(2) One size does not necessarily fit all and the look and feel of a site may need to be varied from one country to the next.

(3) Guidelines for usage, netiquette etc need to be very clear and not make any assumptions about the users underlying knowledge of the rule for social interaction as these may not be consistent across countries.

(4) In some countries it may be necessary to run a local community beside the global community and use ‘knowledge intermediaries’ to bridge the gap between the two.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 4:23 am and is filed under Online communities, Ponderings, elearning research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.