by EdConteXts Facilitators*

Emerging academic technologies and how they allow learning and teaching across borders are all the rage. Strangely, discourses about such phenomena as open online learning/teaching usually ignore the fundamental fact that those phenomena are cross-border, cross-context, cross-cultural. It is not just the hype in the media and the grand and often false promises in the marketing of emerging modes of cross-border education that disregard the complexity of cross-border education. Even the most informed educators (in their own contexts) seem to often forget that the many different contexts from which participants and stakeholders come are not just different from each other but also diverse from within, that contextual differences and complexities need to temper our ambitions, that effective teaching and learning cannot be defined in universal terms.

In response, an increasing number of educators, scholars/writers, and other stakeholders of emerging academic technologies and pedagogies around the world are contributing their experiences, ideas, and perspectives from the ground up. Within a short period of time, the conversation that was once dominated by one-way traffic of ideas–as by the idea of education as a supply of “content”–from the few global centers to the rest of the world is quickly becoming multilateral, diverse, and rich as it spreads across the social media. The network of scholars that we are looking to create will hopefully bring together the voices of scholars, practitioners, and other stakeholders of emerging academic technologies and pedagogies from across the world. Our objective is to make visible to broader audiences what we have been writing, researching, and working on–and what we will continue to do. Continue reading Bring Your Own Context: Where We Are Matters →