Equipping Educators Engaging in Cross-cultural & Cross-media Digital Communication with an Essential Toolset

Abstract

Many educators have become accustomed, consciously or unconsciously, to teaching with one unchanging style in the conviction that it is the responsibility of the students to adapt to them and to their cultural framework. This has never made for the best approach to education and in the highly globalized world of modern tertiary education it fails basic standards of competency and professionalism for a number of key reasons. In helping educators working online become better teachers we need to be encouraging in them an awareness of the need to be constantly be adding to their toolbox and an understanding of how they can do this. We must help them acquire and learn to a comprehensive range of tools. These tools are, in the first instance, neither items of technology nor elements of mastery over technology, necessary though these things are. Rather, the tools are conceptual and cognitive in nature and are concerned with aspects of perception, analysis and communication and their application to teaching in a culturally plural and technologically hybridized environment. These tools help educators understand students from different cultural background or settings and respond to them in ways that maximize the effectiveness of the teaching-learning exchange.