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CHAPTER 22
TEACHING FOR THE FUTURE IN JAPAN:
ATTEMPTING TO PROVIDE DIRECTION FOR
PASSIVE, RECEPTIVE STUDENTS IN
ACTIVE, PRODUCTIVE CLASSROOMS
UTILIZING AN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORK
Thomas Schalow

University of Marketing and Distribution Sciences Kobe,
Japan

schalow_thomas@red.umds.ac.jp

Abstract
It is no secret the Internet is re-defining the roles of student
and teacher, and calling into question the methods and
content of instruction once considered basic to
comprehensive education. With the growth of what has
become known as Web 2.0, teachers and students are being
asked to move beyond the classroom management models
of the past to online collaborative learning. In this chapter
we look at the new skills required to make the transition,
and some of the challenges faced by students at a Japanese
university when asked to take control of their own education
using a social network designed by this instructor to
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promote distributed learning. Although self-direction,
motivation, and a desire to learn will be the key elements
that determine success or failure in the future, these values
were difficult for the Japanese students to embrace. Cultural
differences in attitudes toward learning and traditional
expectations about the role of student and teacher were
shown to present formidable obstacles to the introduction of
the new teaching methods at the heart this new form of
education.
Keywords
Distributed learning Japanese education learning
cultures learning management self-directed learning
social networks
An Introduction to Obsolete Pedagogical
Assumptions
Teachers are struggling. They no longer have a clear
idea of their role in the classroom. The facts they
possess seem outdated and no longer useful to
students. Students have a better understanding of
new technologies and disruptive innovations than their
adult instructors. What can teachers offer to students
in a world turned upside down?
The role of technology in extending the human
potential and defining the skills required for the 21st
century is an important and necessary consideration if
we are to adequately understand what will constitute
learning in the future. Computers and communications
technologies have made possible computations and
rapid access to facts our minds could not even have
dared to imagine a mere decade or two ago.
Therefore, to insist, as do some educational
psychologists such as Kirschner, Sweller and Clark
(2006: 77), that "the aim of all instruction is to alter
long-term memory. If nothing has changed in long-
term memory, nothing has been learned," limits the
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human potential to an age now long gone. This view
also threatens to move teachers back into classrooms
dominated by rote learning, and a "return to basics."
Pedagogical theories uninformed by technological
innovation cannot adequately explain either what
education is, or how learning will take place in the
future.
As Jensen (2008: 225) has noted, "even though the
dictionary definition of learning is quite simple - to
gain knowledge and understanding, or skill by study or
experience - when we attempt to measure learning,
the complexity of the definition emerges." In fact,
providing a definition for "learning" is such a difficult
task that most textbooks on the subject simply
attempt to avoid it. The result is that teachers, and
much research on education, commonly fall back on
the behaviorist assumption that "children enter school
with empty minds, and the role of school is to fill up
those minds with knowledge." (Sawyer 2006: 11) This
represents an immense error in a world where
information is easily available and in vast quantities to
both student and teacher alike - in a world where
Google and the Internet have the ability to function as
our collective long-term memory.
In fact, the basic fallacy of Kirschner, Sweller and
Clark and others arguing from a similar perspective is
they perceive the role of the teacher as "teaching a
discipline as a body of knowledge" (2006: 78), with
that body of knowledge organized "in the mind of the
teacher." (Shulman 1986: 9) Certainly, there is
knowledge and there are skills that our students need
to acquire if they are to be prepared to function in
society. However, we need to give more thought to
what those skills might be, rather than merely
accepting that they are the skills once considered to
be part of every "good" education. We also need to
more clearly define the role of the teacher in a world
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where knowledge - the focus of traditional teacher
training - becomes obsolete almost as soon as it is
created.
1. Future Skills and the Learning Process
In the pedagogical framework provided by Humphrey
and Stokes (1999), some of the skills identified as
being important to our students in a technology-
mediated future) are 1) People skills (including
listening and communication skills) 2) Team skills 3)
Coaching skills 4) (Business) Analysis skills 5)
Continuous improvement skills 6) Computer
(technical) skills 7) Project management skills 8)
Writing skills 9) Resource management skills. Trilling
and Fadel (2009) identify the following more general
skills as important for the 21st century 1) Learning
and innovation skills (including critical thinking,
communication, collaboration skills, and creativity) 2)
Digital skills (including information literacy, media
literacy, and ICT literacy) 3) Career skills (including
flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction,
social and cross-cultural awareness and interaction,
productivity and accountability, and leadership and
responsibility).
In regard to the learning process itself, Hung and
Chen (2001) have identified four principles upon which
learning must be anchored. They are 1) Situatedness
2) Commonality 3) Interdependency and 4)
Infrastructure. The concept of situatedness means
simply that most interesting information is socially
situated, socially constructed, and thus impossible to
merely package into neat units of knowledge that are
easily and wholly transferable to another individual.
Dewey might have said that "knowledge requires
meaning and meaning requires relations between
experiences." (Shook 2000: 66) These relations are
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impossible, of course, to merely transfer intact from
one individual to another.
Hung and Chen's emphasis on the importance of
commonality is supported by the observations of
Rogoff (1990) and Lave and Wenger (1991) that
people construct meaning together, based on and
adhering to appropriate cultural norms. Through the
process of working together in common areas and
interests the participants bond or identify with one
another, forming what Lave and Wenger called
communities of practice (CoPs). In an educational
setting, CoPs are created by groups of people who
participate in joint activities in order to create and
share knowledge, and are more commonly called
"knowledge networks," or "learning networks." CoPs
are characterized 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)
Interdependency, the third of Hung and Chen's four
dimensions of learning, is important to the learning
process because it "connects participants to each other
in ways that are diverse and complex," (Wenger 1999:
77) allowing those participants to "interact based on
the varying needs, expertise (knowledge and skills),
perspectives and opinions" that are to be found within
any diverse group. (Hung and Chen 2001: 7)
Interdependency within learning communities thus
allows each participant to make use of anothers
abilities. As Hung and Chen note, by utilizing diverse
expertise the learning community "can deal with
problems and issues that are too difficult for any one
individual to handle. An individual learns not just from
the activities that they carry out themselves but from
different members of the community." (Ibid)
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Hung and Chen's ideas about infrastructure, the fourth
dimension of their learning framework, imply there
must be a means for the environment to engage
participants in activities that will facilitate learning, but
it is equally important that this learning be driven by
appropriate accountability structures. Since it is the
participants themselves who create these
accountability structures, the instructor must stand
ready as a guide to assist in the creation of rules and
norms that allow participants to depend upon each
other. Bielaczyc and Collins (1999) specifically
mention such norms as "sharing principle,"
"negotiation principle," "respect-for-others principle,"
and "multiple-ways-to-participate principle," among
others, that must operate within the teacher-student
environments created in the classrooms of the future.
2. The New Role of the Teacher, and an
Experiment with a Social Network
Clearly, the evolving concept of the teacher as guide
will move pedagogical theory in new directions, and
demand a new set of skills from teachers. In the
words of Brown and Duguid, "practice is an effective
teacher and community of practice an ideal learning
environment." (2000: 127) The future classroom will
therefore be a networked, peer-guided learning
environment that operates on the principle of what I
call distributed learning. Distributed learning is in
essence a type of self-directed learning, with the
results of the learning to be shared by the community.
The teacher, as just another information processor, no
longer determines what is appropriate to study, or
how information should be processed. Rather, the
community, with its shared domain of interest and
needs, will determine the course of study, and the
teacher will work in parallel with the students to
produce a truly collaborative learning experience.
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This model, of course, threatens the privileged
position of the teacher in the present educational
system. It requires us to acknowledge something our
present educational system and society has lost sight
of; that is, a group and 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 re-
discovered. The teacher will still be expected to be a
strong leader/contributor within the classroom, but all
community members have a responsibility to advance
the learning process, and to actively work to make it a
success. The teacher serves as a guide in moving the
learning process in a certain direction, but students
must become active learners and take responsibility
for their own education.
In an effort to promote this new, self-directed form of
learning, I set up a social learning network in the
spring of 2006 for my students at a Japanese
university in Kobe, Japan. This decision was an organic
development from my past work with learning
management (LM) and learning content management
(LCM) software. After four years of working in a
Moodle learning content management environment I
had decided to move on to a more collaborative
software platform, to Lave and Wenger's (1991)
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 LM
systems such as Moodle amounted to little more than
pouring old wine into new bottles. As Herrington,
Oliver, Herrington and Sparrow noted in a conference
paper presented to the Australian Society for
Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (2000),
traditional top-down education is still alive and well on
the Internet, thriving in LM and LCM environments. I
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was worried the content-driven, teacher-centered
approach to education Cuban (1993) criticized was not
providing my students with the learning culture or
skills they would need to take with them into the 21st
century.
My students were initially impressed with the concept
of learning networks, but the excitement rapidly faded
when it became apparent they would require a lot of
hard work to maintain. After three years of
disappointing results in promoting active student
participation within the network I began to understand
it was not an easy task to grow a vibrant educational
community, or change a learning culture. Japan's most
successful social network, Mixi, had made growing a
network seem so easy, but the more I learned about
the secret for Mixi's success, the more I came to
understand the limitations of social networking for
promoting my original pedagogical goals within the
broader Japanese culture.
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, characterized 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
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. I was, unfortunately, extremely
disappointed by the failure of my Japanese students to
embrace the network as a vehicle for the posting and
exchange of information.
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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 on the weak
nature of self-directed learning among Asian-American
students in research performed by Iyenga and Lepper.
(1999)
3. Learning Cultures
The paucity of information generated by the students
on their own volition was the major reason I judged
my experiment with distributed learning a failure, and
the reason for the failure led me to a deeper
investigation of the importance of the "learning
culture" (or actually its lack) created by the Japanese
educational system. The American educational system,
although plagued with numerous weaknesses, exhibits
great strength 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 and Jeffrey 2005) These factors all work
against the sharing of information and knowledge.
The virtual environment of the online social network
can help to ease the inhibitions of the Japanese
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student, but it cannot erase them entirely. 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. My research has
shown that identities are not so much re-defined 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.
Conclusions and Implications of the Study
for Curriculum, Pedagogy and Attainment in
Japan
One of the great lessons to be learned from
globalization is that cultures that readily embrace
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change and emphasize 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 emphasize 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. (Nakai 2002)
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 internationalization, 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 regard to education, it is clear that cultures and
teachers that promote active participation in the
learning process best serve the interests of their
students. Teachers need to abandon their role as
expert, and embrace their role as appointed
moderator of the educational process. There is certain
to be a great deal of reluctance to abandon a
privileged position, but the disruptive technologies
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shaking the educational establishment make the
outcome a forgone conclusion.
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