Culture & communication in digital worlds: A scholarly and learning resource

Project Title	Culture & communication in digital worlds: A scholarly and learning resource
Principal Investigator	Leah Macfadyen
Co-Applicants	Jörg Roche Esteban Morales
Faculty	Education
Funding Year	2023
Project Summary	With this project we seek to develop and share an open access database of work focussed on culture and communication in digital worlds. In 2004, seeking to understand how Internet and communication technologies might be influencing cultural identities and communicative practices around the globe, we undertook a an extensive review of available research and theory exploring these questions. Through analyzing work available at that time, we identified and described common themes, contemporary debates, and their implications. Building on insights gleaned from that project, I later co-developed the MET course ETEC 543 Culture and communication in virtual learning environments (https://met.ubc.ca/courses/etec-542/). This course has been offered several times annually since 2012, to both MET and LLED graduate students. Since inception, course activities have invited students to seek out new and current work on online culture and communication (and in particular with relation to teaching and learning). Both as a scholarly resource and as a teaching and learning resource, however, our 2004 project and output remained static as a printed work and there has been little capacity to update and share it in a meaningful way. Now in 2023, almost 20 years later, we are aware that the language, debates and issues surrounding ‘digital cultures’ have evolved and changed. Moreover, the integration of technologies into all forms of education, nationally and internationally, has proceeded apace. More than ever, questions of culture and language in digital worlds seem pressing, especially in educational contexts. New technologies now offer us the capacity to launch and share a new, updated, dynamic and open access database of published work on culture and communication in digital worlds which can then be added to to by colleagues around the world and integrated into course activities in our own ETEC 542 course and elsewhere.
Grant type	OER Rapid Innovation
Funded Amount	$2,000