Decolonising Digital Language Learning in Palestine

Document Type : Research Article

Author

UNESCO Chair; Institute of Education, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK

Abstract

There is currently considerable interest in every aspect of decolonisation in education. There is for example much interest in the curriculum and some interest in educational technology but little interest as yet in these in their role in language learning. The paper grows out of projects and friendships in Palestine and looks at the very special case of Palestinians using digital technologies to learn English. This paper makes the case that colonialization is present in most aspects of using digital technology to learn language, but especially so for the Palestinian learners of English. Decolonisation can grow out of scrutiny, awareness and criticality but must recognise the influence of culture and in the case of Palestine, of the impact of trauma, occupation and displacement. The need of Palestinians, politically, economically and educationally, to engage globally does however make decolonisation problematic.

Keywords


Adam, T. (2019). Digital neocolonialism and massive open online courses (MOOCs): colonial pasts and neoliberal futures, Learning, Media and Technology, 44(3), 365-380.
Al-Amleh, M. (2014). Identifying the Palestinian culture According to Hofstede's theory. [Master’s thesis, Al-Quds University].
Al Mahasees, Z. (2020). Diachronic evaluation of Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Sakhr in English-Arabic translation. [Master’s thesis, the University of Western Australia].
Alkailani, M., Azzam, I. A., & Athamneh, A. B. (2012). Replicating Hofstede in Jordan: Ungeneralized, reevaluating the Jordanian culture. International Business Research, 5(4), 71-80.
Alkishawi, Y. (2021). On Google Maps, Palestine Is Nowhere To Be Found. Michigan Quarterly Review60(2), 502-VII.
Al Hajjaj, M. (2021, February). The creation of Arabish: How young people are adapting technology to communicate in the Arab world. In IASL Annual Conference Proceedings: The Shifting Sands of School Librarianship (pp. 1-5). Doha, Qatar.
Al-Zouʹbi, D. M., & Al-Rousan, N. M. (2017). E-learning in Jordanian institutions-the latest experience (Edraak platform-the MOOC). In Proceedings of International Academic Conference on Teaching, Learning and E-learning (pp. 21-38). Vienna, Austria.
Aslam, M. M. (2006). Are you selling the right colour? A cross‐cultural review of colour as a marketing cue. Journal of Marketing Communications, 12(1), 15-30.
Atallah, D. G. (2017). A community-based qualitative study of intergenerational resilience with Palestinian refugee families facing structural violence and historical trauma. Transcultural Psychiatry54(3), 357-383.
Atkins, D. E., Brown, J. S., & Hammond, A. L. (2007). A review of the open educational resources (OER) movement: Achievements, challenges, and new opportunities. Report for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation). Retrieved from http://www.hewlett.org/uploads/files/ReviewoftheOERMovement.pdf
Baker, A., & Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (1999). Effects of political and military traumas on children: the Palestinian case. Clinical Psychology Review19(8), 935-950.
Barakat, R. A. (1973). Arabic gestures. The Journal of Popular Culture6(4), 749-793.
Bianchi, R. M. (2012). 3arabizi-When local Arabic meets global English. Acta Linguistica Asiatica, 2(1), 89-100.
Billé, F. (2018). Skinworlds: Borders, haptics, topologies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(1), 60-77.
Butcher, N. (2015) A basic guide to open educational resources (OER). Commonwealth of Learning.
Carraro, V. (2021). A glitch in Google Maps, Jerusalem Online (pp. 65-85). Palgrave Macmillan.
Chib, A., Bentley, C. M., & Smith, M. L. (Eds.). (2021). Critical perspectives on open development: Empirical interrogation of theory construction. MIT Press.
Cronin, C. (2017). Openness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices in higher education. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning: IRRODL18(5), 15-34.
Cronin, C., & MacLaren, I. (2018). Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in Open Educational Practices. Open Praxis10(2), 127-143.
Datta, R. (2018). Decolonizing both researcher and research and its effectiveness in Indigenous research. Research Ethics, 14(2), 1-24.
De Bortoli, M., & Maroto, J. (2001). Colours across cultures: Translating colours in interactive marketing communications. In R. Russow & D. Barbereau (Eds.), Proceedings of the European Languages and the Implementation of Communication and Information Technologies (ELICIT) conference (pp. 1-27). University of Paisley, Scotland.  
Elliott, J., & Grigorenko, E. L. (2007). Are western educational theories and practices truly universal? Comparative Education, 43(1), 1-4.
Flavin, M., & Bhandari, A. (2021). What we talk about when we talk about virtual learning environments, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 22(4), 164-193.
Ferreira, G. M. D. S., Rosado, L. A. D. S., Lemgruber, M. S., & Carvalho, J. D. S. (2020). Metaphors we’re colonised by? The case of data-driven educational technologies in Brazil. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 46-60. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1666872
Gassmann, O., Enkel, E., & Chesbrough, H. (2010). The future of open innovation. R&d Management40(3), 213-221.
Gawne, L., & McCulloch, G. (2019). Emoji as digital gestures. Language@ Internet, 17, article 2. Retrieved from https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2019/gawne
Hamdoun Al-Soufi, A. (2005). Cultural differences between Arabs and Danes, Masters thesis in EU Business and Law. Aarhus University
Heffan, I. V. (1997). Copyleft: Licensing collaborative works in the digital age. Stanford Law Review, 49, 1487-1521.
Held, M. B. (2019). Decolonizing research paradigms in the context of settler colonialism: An unsettling, mutual, and collaborative effort. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1–16.
Huizingh, E. K. (2011). Open innovation: State of the art and future perspectives. Technovation31(1), 2-9.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). From open data to information justice. Ethics and Information Technology16(4), 263-274.
Jung, L. (2020). A study on communication patterns of the non-verbal" hand gestures" of Arab Jordanians and Koreans. British Journal of Science19(2), 24-29.
Laurillard, D. (2008). Open teaching: The key to sustainable and effective open education. In T. Iiyoshi & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Eds.), Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge (pp. 319-336). MIT Press.
Mahamid, F. A. (2020). Collective trauma, quality of life and resilience in narratives of third generation Palestinian refugee children. Child Indicators Research13(6), 2181-2204.
Marandi, S. S. (2023). Virtual supremacy and electronic imperialism: the hegemonies of e-learning and computer assisted language learning (CALL). Learning, Media and Technology, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2023.2207832
Molloy, J. C. (2011). The open knowledge foundation: open data means better science. PLoS biology9(12), e1001195.
Mulder, J. (2008). Knowledge dissemination in Sub-Saharan Africa: What role for open educational resources (OER). University of Amsterdam.
Muhtaseb, R. (2022), Social media use and potential in formal and informal science learning: A multiple case study of three Palestinian educational institutions, Doctoral dissertation, University of Wolverhampton.
‘Mustafa’ (2011), The Arab World's Hofstede's cultural dimensions, http://mustafa- aroundtheworld.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/arab-worlds-hofstedes-cultural.html, retrieved 2 April 2016
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2019). Provisional notes on decolonizing research methodology and undoing its dirty history. Journal of Developing Societies, 35(4), 481-492.
O'Reilly, T. (1999). Lessons from open-source software development. Communications of the ACM42(4), 32-37.
Oswald, D., & Kolb, S. (2014). Flat design vs. skeuomorphism–effects on learnability and image attributions in digital product interfaces. In DS 78: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE14), Design Education and Human Technology Relations (pp. 402-407), University of Twente, The Netherlands.
Page, T. (2014). Skeuomorphism or flat design: Future directions in mobile device User Interface (UI) design education. International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation, 8(2), 130-142.
Pegrum, M. (2019). Mobile lenses on learning. Gateway East: Springer Singapore.
Pitt, R., Farrow, R., Jordan, K., de los Arcos, B., Weller, M., Kernohan, D., & Rolfe, V. (2019). The UK open textbooks report. The Open University.
Sallam, M. H. (2017). A review of MOOCs in the Arab world. Creative Education, 8(4), 564-573.
Smith, M., & Reilly, K. M. A. (2014). Open development. MIT Press.
Roy, D., Bhatia, S., & Jain, P. (2022). Information asymmetry in Wikipedia across different languages: A statistical analysis. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 73(3), 347-361.
Safadi, M., & Valentine, C. A. (1990). Contrastive analyses of American and Arab nonverbal and paralinguistic communication. Semiotica, 82(3/4), 269-292.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Penguin Books.
Segev, E. (2010). Google and the digital divide: The bias of online knowledge. Elsevier.
Selwyn, N. (2013). Distrusting educational technology: Critical questions for changing times. Routledge.
Shih, W. & Rivero, E. Voice Revolution (2020). Library technology reports, May/June 2020. ALA TechSource, American Library Association, September 22, 2016. http://www.ala.org/tools/publications/techsource
Smith, B., & Eng, M. (2013, August). MOOCs: A learning journey. In International Conference on Hybrid Learning and Continuing Education (pp. 244-255). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Smith, M., & Traxler, J. (eds) (2022). Digital learning in higher education: COVID-19 and beyond. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Srinivasan, M. A. (1995). What is haptics? Laboratory for human and machine Haptics: The Touch Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stark, L., & Crawford, K. (2015). The conservatism of emoji: Work, affect, and communication. Social Media and Society, 1(2), 1-11.
Thawabteh, M. (2011). The translatability of gestures: A case study of Arabic-English subtitling. International Journal of Translation23, 147-159.
Traxler, J. (2017) Learning with mobiles in developing countries: Technology, language and literacy. International Journal of Mobile & Blended Learning, 9(2), 1-15.
Traxler, J. (2018) Using OER in Asia: Factors and possibilities, Asian Journal of Distance Education, 13(2), 7-19.
Traxler, J., Khlaif, Z., Nevill, A., Affouneh, S., Salha, S., Zuhd, A., & Trayek, F. (2019). Living under occupation: Palestinian teachers’ experiences and their digital responses. Research in Learning Technology, 27, 1-18.
Traxler, J. (2018), Digital literacy: A Palestinian refugee perspective. Research in Learning Technology, 26, 1-21. https://journal.alt.ac.uk/index.php/rlt/article/view/1983
Von Hippel, E. (2001). Learning from open-source software. MIT Sloan management review42(4), 82-86.
Weishut, D. J. N. (2012) My friend is a Palestinian Bedouin: Challenges and opportunities in intercultural friendship. [Doctoral Thesis, Professional School of Psychology].
Weller, M. (2007). Virtual learning environments: Using, choosing and developing your VLE. Routledge.