Thomas Schalow Building an Online Learning Community in Japan: The Challenge of Distributed...

8/12/2019 Thomas Schalow Building an Online Learning Community in Japan: The Challenge of Distributed Learning in a Soci

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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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).


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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.


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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


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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


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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.


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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


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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,


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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)


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