From: Language and Cultural Diversity: Global Realities & Challenges.

Thang Siew Ming

et al., eds. Malaysia: University Putra Malaysia Press, pp. 89-105.

CHAPTER 6
Building an Online Learning Community in Japan:
The Challenge of Distributed Learning in a Social Network
Thomas Schalow


1 Introduction
When I made the decision in the spring of 2006 to develop a social networking site for my
students, it seemed like an organic development from my past work with learning
management (LM) and learning content management (LCM) software. After four years of
working in the open-source Moodle e-learning environment, I had decided to move on to a
more collaborative software platform, and to what Lave and Wenger (1991) describe as
learning through peripheral participation. I felt the new direction would allow me to update
my own skills and give my students the benefits of a more authentic learning environment.
Over the years, I had become increasingly concerned that all of my efforts with Moodle
amounted to little more than pouring old wine into new bottles. As Herrington, Oliver,
Herrington and Sparrow (2000) noted in a conference paper presented to the Australian
Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education, traditional top-down education is
still alive and well on the Internet, thriving in LM and LCM environments. I was worried
the content-driven, teacher-centered approach to education Cuban (1993) criticised was not
providing my students with the learning culture or skills they would need to take with them
into the 21st century.

So it was that I began my search for social networking software that would provide the
collaborative learning environment, or professional learning communities (PLCs) (Roberts
& Pruitt, 2009) much in favour now among educational theorists. After a great deal of
research and experimentation, I finally decided to use a commercial software known as
phpfox, first introduced by Ray Benc in 2005, to build my learning community. The
decision to build my social network (SN) on the phpfox platform was based on my
assessment of the features offered by the software and its unencrypted php code, which
allowed for a certain amount of customisation and modification.

In the spring of 2006, Facebook was less than two years old and had only just opened to
high school students, expanding from its original base of university students. MySpace and
Friendster were older siblings from the US. Mixi, the most popular social networking site
in Japan, had just been discovered by my students. It seemed like the right time to put
social networks to work in the service of education.

Of course, I could have merely asked my students to open an account on MySpace, or
asked them to invite me to join them on Mixi, as colleagues at neighboring universities here
in Japan would later attempt (Halvorsen, 2009; McCarty, 2009). However, I desired to
retain some control over the network, both in order to protect my students from online
predators on open networks and to provide me with certain administrative privileges I could
not have enjoyed on other networks. I desired to engage my students as a peer, but I also
wanted to retain some control over the activities I felt the students needed to be engaged in.

Out of the box, phpfox is rather spartan in appearance, and lacked some of the key features
I wished to provide for my students. However, the software was reasonable in price,
customisable and fairly easy to install and administer on my dedicated server. A variety of
themes and templates are available to brighten the drab interface and there is an active
developer-base creating the mods, or modifications, that would empower the LAMP
software to do what I required of it.

I have for some time been convinced of the validity of the function in form relationship
common to architecture and industrial design for achieving effective web-based learning. I
was therefore determined to adhere to the criteria described by Keller and Suzukis (2004)
ARCS model in constructing the social network, and believed my modified phpfox
platform would attract Attention, was capable of being Relevant and of establishing
Confidence, and thus had the potential for creating Satisfaction.

My students were initially impressed with the shiny look of the software, but after two
years of trying to promote student interest in the network I began to realise it was not an
easy task to grow a vibrant network.
As Drotner (2008) has noted,
Few young producers of digital culture become interested in blogging, texting, or
gaming because they are fascinated by the technology itself. Most enter the universe
of digital production because they want to communicate on a simultaneous and
ongoing basis with others, because they want to be entertained, or because they
want to find out about things (p. 169).
Japans most successful social network, Mixi, had made it seem so easy, but the more I
learned about the secret for Mixis success, the more I came to understand the limitations of
a social network for promoting my original pedagogical goals within the broader Japanese
culture.

2. The Distributed (Parallel) Model of Learning
Communities of practice (CoPs) are created by groups of people who participate in joint
activities in order to create and share knowledge. In an educational environment they are
more commonly called knowledge networks or learning networks. The concept was
developed by cognitive anthropologists, and is most associated with people such as Rogoff
(1990), Lave and Wenger (1991). CoPs are characterised by 1) a shared domain of interest
and a desire to develop competency in that domain 2) community activities through which
learning experiences are shared and 3) the development of shared resources (Anklam,
2007).

CoPs are also characterised by what Lave and Wenger (1991) called legitimate peripheral
participation. According to Lave and Wenger (1991), people most often initially form
weak attachments to communities from positions at the periphery, where they engage in
learning. As they become more competent they become more involved in the community,
developing a stronger attachment, and move towards a more central position in the
network.

Within Lave and Wengers (1991) model, derived from observations of Yucatec midwives,
Vai and Gola tailors, meat cutters and other groups, individuals learn FROM the
community. It is the community that reifies and validates the knowledge and passes it on to
the membership. The community serves as a type of central processing unit (CPU),
processing all the information that passes through it. As Grama, George, Vipin Kumar and
Anshul Gupta (2003) note, however, computer science has recognised for decades that
processing all information in one central location is inefficient and contributes to
bottlenecks in various processes. I would also argue it is inimical to creativity within the
context of human environments. What I sought to promote in my networks was a type of
learning I refer to as distributed or parallel learning.

Distributed learning is most commonly understood to be identical to distance learning, or
associated with advanced distributed learning and sharable content object reference
model (SCORM) standards. Lea (2001) has taken a broader view of the term and suggested
it might involve learning as a shared enterprise distributed between individuals in several
different contexts (p. 2). My definition, though, once again relies more on computer
science and the analogy of the CPU, and involves distributed processing of information
occurring among multiple CPUs operating in parallel. Within the model envisioned,
information is reified and validated at the level of the individual, rather than at the level of
the community. It is then integrated by the entire community in order to achieve a learning
goal or accomplish a task.

What I hoped to achieve in my learning community, therefore, was in essence a type of
self-directed learning, with the results of the learning to be shared by the community. The
teacher, as CPU, would no longer determine what was appropriate to study, or how
information should be processed. Rather, the community, with its shared domain of interest
and needs, would determine the course of study, and the teacher would merely function as
another information processor, working in parallel with the students to produce a truly
collaborative learning experience.

This model, of course, threatens the privileged position of the teacher in the present
educational system. One might even jump to the unfortunate and mistaken conclusion that
there is no longer any need for the teacher in such a system. Yet, within this system there is
as much a need for the teacher as there is for the student. In fact, there is perhaps a greater
need for the teacher than there is in our present educational system, and the reason this is so
should serve to redefine the importance and role of the teacher within society, as well as
concepts of leadership.

Quite simply, our present educational system, and society as a whole, has lost sight of the
fact that a network is only as strong as its membership, not its leadership. This is a theme
that Tapscott and Williams (2006), Rheingold (2003), Shirky (2008) and many others have
recently rediscovered. This does not mean, however, that the leadership qualities a teacher
can bring to the learning community are useless. A teacher who is able to motivate other
members of the learning community and contribute to the learning goals of the community
with knowledge and skills has performed an invaluable service to the community. The
learning community is much stronger as a result of the efforts of that one member (the
teacher) than it would have been in that member's absence. However, ALL community
members have a responsibility to contribute to the network and to actively work to make it
a success. Students must become active learners and take responsibility for their own
education in a PL system. They must become shareholders in the learning community.

SN-based parallel learning communities do allow for, and encourage, students to achieve
this shareholder status. They cannot force students, however, to accept their responsibilities
in the way that top-down LM and LCM systems did. SN-based parallel learning
communities rely on their ability to activate the natural curiosity present within all human
beings at birth. If that curiosity has been killed by a culture that rewards compliance, or
stifles creativity with an emphasis on conformity, however, the system will inevitably fail to
achieve its goals, as I discovered during the course of my experimentation with parallel
learning in the SN environment.

An Experiment in Parallel Learning

Social networking platforms excel, of course, at connecting people to each other, and that is
precisely what I wanted to do with my SN. My initial goal was to connect a group of 128
Japanese students at my university with a group of 11 foreign exchange students from
another university in Japan, bringing them together to form friendships, opportunities for
language exchange, and knowledge exchange.

What I soon discovered, however, was that while IT-mediated social networks facilitate the
formation of new friendships, they most commonly function to maintain and deepen
previously existing friendships. This was certainly true for the social network I had created.
Even when the Japanese students made their personal information available online, as they
were able to do with the social networking software, this information did not provide the
basis or motivation for forming new friendships based on shared interests. Students might
browse the personal information of people who were personally unknown to them, but they
were still reluctant to initiate contact based solely on this information. Consequently, the
number of friend links between students, or ties in the jargon of the social network
analyst, remained low, and seldom expanded beyond the initial number created at the
beginning of the semester. The density of the network, to again use a term employed by
social network analysts, was also therefore quite low.

The social network I was attempting to create among the students at my university was, of
course, more than just a means for friends to stay in touch with each other. My intention
was to create a distributed or parallel learning community, characterised by self-directed
knowledge exchange within the network. The exchange of knowledge was to be facilitated
by the ability to post blogs, video and audio resources, initiate forums and discussions, and
post other miscellaneous information via the social networking software. The degree to
which the network would successfully function as a vehicle for the exchange of knowledge
was directly related to the quantity of information published, and its relevance to the lives
of the members.

The information available on a social network can be classified as basically public
information or semi-private information. My Japanese students were not particularly
inclined to post public information, such as forum postings about upcoming school events,
job vacancies, or advice about school or everyday life. This may have been due to the fact
that students have traditionally required authorisation to post official information, and they
may have been uncomfortable with a freedom they did not yet entirely understand.
Likewise, students were not totally comfortable with the idea of posting opinions in the
form of rating the pictures, videos, music or blogs of other members. As a result, it can be
said that the amount of information produced on and by the network was meager.

Unfortunately, my Japanese students remained directive-motivated. They were not
motivated to explore the network and its possibilities on their own, and did not actively use
it as a means to engage in information sharing. Little knowledge was created on the
network unless it was produced as a result of an assignment required by the teacher. Blog
pages remained empty until themes were assigned, forums were deserted, and postings in
general were for the most part absent. In short, the network failed to sustain itself and
would doubtlessly have failed in the absence of direction provided by the teacher. This
conclusion correlates with similar findings for Asian-American students in research
performed by Iyengar and Lepper (1999).

The paucity of information generated by the students on their own volition was the major
reason I judged the network a failure, and the failure relates to the Japanese educational
systems failure to create a true learning culture. In contrast, the American educational
system, although plagued with numerous weaknesses, exhibits great strength, I believe, in
its ability to nourish inquisitive minds that question known facts, accepted authority, and
commonly held beliefs in a constructive manner. These strengths are, for the most part,
entirely lacking in the Japanese educational system. As a result, textbooks are accepted as
unerring, teachers as authorities, and questions as signs of either disrespect or ignorance
(Warrington & Jeffrey, 2005). These factors all work against the sharing of information and
knowledge.

I found the foreign exchange students in my study, who had initially shown much
enthusiasm for the network and its ability to connect them with Japanese students, to be as
frustrated by the passive nature of the Japanese students as I was. The foreign students,
probably familiar with Facebook profile pages, were initially very active in their attempts to
design a profile page that would be appealing to other members. They frequently posted
information, and also uploaded pictures that would inform members of their activities,
friendships, and interests. They were also quite interested in changing their personal login
picture. (Initially, I had used the pictures from the class roaster we had created on the first
day of class for login profiles. These pictures were set in the classroom, and provided only
the headshot needed to remember the students by name and face.) The Japanese students
seldom chose to redefine their images, but the foreign students almost invariably uploaded
new login pictures to complete their image transformation. Clearly, the foreign students saw
the network as a chance to increase their network of friendships and present their profile to
the world. They were ready for the new educational adventure I had sought to create, but
the Japanese students were not.

4. Mixi Lessons

Had I know more about the Japanese social networking site Mixi when I set up my own
social network I would probably have been less surprised at the poor results I achieved with
my efforts to use SN technology to produce a parallel learning community. Mixi has
become successful in part because it has not attempted to do much more than provide a rich
media enhanced always on form of communication to maintain existing friendships. It
has subsequently been able to monetise its user database to become commercially
successful as well.

Mixi is truly Japanese in a number of ways, as Fogg and Iizawa (2008) have noted. The
differences between Mixi and SN communities such as Facebook manifest themselves in
both positive and negative directions. On the negative side, it must first of all be said that
Mixi has not been localised for other languages. Members who do not read Japanese are
excluded from the network. In fact, Mixi is not premised on open membership. One can
become a Mixi member only by invitation from another Mixi member. It was probably
never expected, or desired, that foreigners would become a part of the network. Like
Japanese society itself, it is basically a jus sanguinis system, based on blood, rather than a
jus solis system based on residence, and is designed to maintain ethnic homogeneity and
cultural purity. The few foreigners who have been invited to join the network by students or
friends maintain an existence on the periphery of the network, and are still regarded with
suspicion by Japanese members.

Steve McCarty, a professor at Osaka Jogakuin College, knows how difficult it is to gain
membership. McCarty (2009) notes:
Approaching a group of students for an invitation is evidently more complex [than
approaching an individual student], despite or because of the fact that only an
individual can issue the invitation. The group may contain greater aggregate desire
for relatedness with the teacher, yet the individual extending an invitation becomes
a representative or leader, so she needs assurance of representing an unequivocal
group consensus lest she be singled out (p. 192).

When McCarty (2009) says, lest SHE be singled out, he has pointed out another
important aspect of Mixi that is not widely discussed. It is primarily a network for young
Japanese women, and women use the network in different ways than men. According to a
Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Soumushou) report issued in
2005, only 10-20% of members use Mixi as a way to meet new friends who share similar
interests and needs. 80% of the members use Mixi only as a means of staying in touch with
people they already know in real life. The implications are that young girls, Mixi's largest
membership, are not looking for new friendships on social networks. We know that in other
countries as well, men and women use networks for different reasons. Boyd (2008) has
noted that boys are twice as likely to use social networking sites to flirt and meet new
girlfriends as are girls (p. 121).

The difficulty of joining the network also indicates another aspect of Japanese society that
is important in a discussion of social networks. As Nakane (1972) has noted, uchi and
soto are important elements of the Japanese language itself, indicating whether one is
communicating with someone from one's in-group, or with an outsider. There is a great
deal of suspicion toward outsiders in Japanese society, but there is also a certain degree of
openness towards privileged outsiders that even someone within ones group does not
enjoy. Although this seems paradoxical, it can be more easily understood when one realises
that Japanese can be choked by the type of thick relationships that exist among uchi
members on Mixi and in the larger Japanese society itself (Takahashi, 2008, p. 14).
Opening up to outsiders is easier because they will be unable to betray private feelings and
information to members of one's own uchi group.

As a result of the need to hide one's private feelings from uchi members, Japanese people
seldom engage in deep or meaningful activity on social networks. Writing digital diaries,
or blogging, is by far the most common activity on social networking sites such as Mixi, as
Kawaura Yasuyuki, Masaki Sakata and Mitsue Matsuda (2005); Shtykh, Shunichi
Nakadate, Takeshi Hayata, Norihiro Kandou and Qun Jin (2007) have noted. In fact,
according to a Technorati report in 2006, there were more blogs in Japanese than in
English, despite the fact that there are only 125 million native Japanese speakers, while at
least 330 million people speak English as their first language. What is blogged about,
though, on these Japanese sites is certainly at least as trivial as the topics one often
encounters on English sites.
As one Mixi member relates:
I write nothing important, for example, cherry blossoms are in full bloom today!
and I put some photos of cherry blossoms in my diaries these days ... To tell the
truth, I want to quit Mixi. But if I quit, Im afraid of isolation ... If everyone quits at
the same time, I can quit, too (Takashashi, 2008, p. 24).

The need to write diaries, to comment on the diaries of others, and to otherwise maintain
social relationships already established, is what keeps most Japanese engaged in social
networks. These obligations are the source of what Giddens (1991) calls ontological
security, a sense of trust in and reliance upon the continuity of things or people in
everyday life. It contributes to what Doi (1971) calls amae, or the ability to indulge in the
understanding of persons within ones uchi group; a concept since elaborated on by
Miike (2003) and many others. However, none of this is particularly useful for creating the
type of information that can be turned into conversational knowledge, as the information is
basically useless to someone outside of the uchi group. Consequently, Japanese online
social networks are unable to increase what Tomlinson (1999) has called global-spatial
proximity, or what Appadurai (1996) has called deterritorialization. The online world
has not truly become non-spatial to Japanese participants. Concepts of uchi and soto
prohibit Japanese from ever doing more than touching the outside.

Japanese remain deeply suspicious and afraid of that which is outside of the uchi. As a
result, Serkan Toto (2008) estimates that fewer than 5% of Japanese people use their real
names or pictures on the Mixi site. Everyone within ones uchi group knows who you are
by your nickname, so there is no reason to let the outside world know anything about you
that might be betrayed by a picture or name. Revealing information is necessary only if you
are seeking to broaden your network, and this is not the purpose of social networks in
Japan. There are strong roots in Japanese culture to prevent the sharing of knowledge, as
Sakaiya (1992) and others have noted, and this will be a serious impediment to the creation
of knowledge sharing communities.

Another aspect of Mixi worth mentioning is that it has become a truly mobile network.
Figures provided by Mixi as part of its FY2009 First Quarter Results Earning Results
Briefing Session indicate that 60% of the site's traffic was through mobile telephones. This
is a very high number when contrasted with The Nielsen Companys (2009) report of
22.7% of UK social network members accessing sites through handsets, 19.2% of
American members, or 6.6% of German members (p. 12). This may account for the
tendency of Japanese members to use Mixi as little more than an online SMS or
microblogging site, posting short replies of no relevance to equally short and uninformative
blogs.

In many respects, I see the Japanese fascination with mobile telephones as an obstacle to
Japan's development as a globalised information society. I would argue the mobile
telephone has reorganised society, fracturing it into small friendship communities isolated
from larger networks in the outside world. Although there is a great deal of conversational
knowledge exchanged among friends on the same mobile telephone network, none of this
information becomes available to persons outside of the uchi group.

To better understand this we must note there are some key differences between a mobile
telephone-based community and a personal computer/Internet-based community. Mobile
telephone-based communities, unless they are connected to the wider Internet-based
community, produce information that is transitory, rather than archived and eternal. Verbal
conversations can be, and in fact are, often forgotten soon after they take place, making the
loss of knowledge a common occurrence. SMS messages remain with a closed network,
unavailable to those outside of the network. Until mobile telephones are better integrated
into wider Internet-based networks, they will be, ironically, an imperfect repository for the
type of conversational knowledge (CK) referred to by Waite, Jackson and Diwan (2003).

At this point, and particularly in Japan with its proprietary mobile telephone network,
mobile telephone networks truly are only limited friendship networks, and the information
they possess cannot be passed beyond a small circle of friends. Perhaps one of the greatest
strengths of Internet-based communities is their ability to link people who are unknown to
each other, and bring knowledge from unimagined sources into our lives. This feature
transforms the network into a vibrant learning community where diversity and originality
can be embraced. The mobile telephone-based network of friends, by contrast, tends to link
people who are similar in more ways than they are different, and cannot promote diversity
and originality without fragmenting.

I would also argue, however, that the mobile telephone-based network is actually perfectly
adapted to Japanese society as it is presently structured because it limits the exchange of
knowledge to others within the in-group network. It creates tight communities that are
essentially self-sustaining and isolated, with only minimal contact with the world outside
the immediate network. I see this as a real problem that Japanese society and culture needs
to address if Japan is ever to fully integrate into the global learning network that is
developing, and that will be a part of our classrooms. At present, however, online culture in
Japan remains quite different from online culture in the West.

Conclusions
I had expected students would rather effortlessly make the transition to an online culture
that differed perhaps quite radically from their own. I had expected technology would in
some sense erase cultural biases, and make all participants equally comfortable within
communities that are often biased toward Western norms of behavior. The truth is that
English-language-based chat rooms, blogs and wikis are essentially online versions of
communities and modes of expression that exist within Western real-world societies.
Although they are certainly capable of existing, and do exist, within non-Western
communities, our discussion of Mixi has demonstrated that they do not take the same form
within these cultures. There is, it would seem, an online Japanese culture that is quite
different from Western online culture. Merely conducting the exchange in an English-
language environment does not change the participants, any more than a real-world
conversation between a Japanese person speaking English and a native speaker of English
changes the beliefs, personalities, or cultural expectations of either of the speakers.
Consequently, online communities will necessarily create and nurture cultures that are
comfortable for members who would feel at home in a similar real-world culture.

One of the great lessons to be learned from globalisation is that cultures that readily
embrace change and emphasise their similarities with other cultures prepare their citizens to
feel at ease in the broader world, while cultures that stand apart from the outside world and
emphasise differences with the rest of humanity prepare their citizens to feel at ease only in
the local culture. When confronted with another culture these products of cultural isolation
experience uncertainty in negotiating within the new culture and a great deal of unease with
an unfamiliar situation, as was true in the case of my students. Unfortunately, the Japanese
sense of haji, or shame, at making a mistake during communication, further shuts down
the communication process, as Nakai (2002) has noted.

Japanese students are known to be passive learners, not ready to take the initiative,
(Kajiura, 2005, p. 129), creating what I call the inhibited learner. The virtual environment
of the online social network can help to ease the inhibitions of the Japanese student, but it
cannot entirely remove them. Likewise, the power structures of the real world do not
disappear into total insignificance in a Japanese learning community. In my experience the
students were as likely to look to the teacher for direction and expert knowledge in the
virtual world as they were in the real world. They were also as likely to accord respect (or
at least avoid confrontation) as they were in the real world.

This is true because when students enter our classrooms they bring with them their
personalities, belief systems and cultures. They do not shed these when they join an online
community, though their identities may become more plastic in a world where factors such
as race, nationality, and first language do not immediately define who they are. In this
paper, I have argued that identities are not so much redefined as amplified in an online
community. Few online participants are truly able to leave their real-world culture behind
merely as a consequence of joining an online community. Basic cultural assumptions
continue in the online world, perhaps because we feel most at ease while operating within
the parameters established by the culture in which we were raised. Although there may be a
momentary feeling of freedom within an online community, as there is for some people as a
result of foreign travel, few people are prepared to leave behind the comfort of the world
they know best and actively participate in a community where the culture is radically
different from their real-world culture.

Japanese society is, of course, an extremely networked society, but not in the same way that
Western societies are. Communities are a part of everyday life in Japan and one cannot, in
fact, effectively live completely outside of them (Sugimoto, 2002). However, Japanese
communities tend to be extremely local in nature, and as such are limited in their
membership and network reach. While it is possible to belong to more than one community,
in practice there will inevitably be one strong community that places such heavy demands
on the member, that holding competing memberships is difficult (Nakane, 1972). This is
quite different from societies in the West, where memberships might be weaker, but allow
time to be devoted to other communities, interests, and obligations. Japanese society is
often described with the term marugakae - completely engulfed meaning that all
communities seek to make their embrace so tight that other memberships become
practically impossible (Davies & Osamu Ikeno, 2002). Even religious memberships in the
US, certainly some of the tightest and most restricting forms of community, seldom achieve
the total embrace demanded within Japanese society.

Malhotra and Galletta (2004) have noted that networks that are poorly planned and
technologies that do not meet the need of users will inevitably fail. In my experience,
however, it was not the network or software that failed my students, but the culture. Like
species, cultures become dominant or fade into extinction as a result of their ability to adapt
to the environment. In a world of global networks and information exchange, it is essential
individuals and nations examine the degree to which their own culture and personality
contributes to global information exchange and internationalisation, or fails to embrace
emerging trends. It has become, in fact, a strategic necessity for nations and a survival
imperative for individuals that they nourish a learning culture and seek out lifelong
learning opportunities. Cultures that have become insular and closed, as has Japanese
culture, will need to transform themselves if they hope to survive in the globally networked
society of the 21st century. In a critique of present-day education in general, Drotner (2008)
has noted that if educational priorities remain unchanged, the obvious result will be a
widening not only of social, ethnic, and gender divides within particular societies, but also
a widening of divides between societies (p. 181).


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