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Author
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Renee Hobbs
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Year
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2015
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Publisher
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British Journal of Educational
Technology 48(1), 7 – 22.
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Abstract
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Although we live in a global society, educators face many challenges in finding meaningful
ways to connect students to people of other cultures. This paper offers a case study of a
collaboration between teachers in the US and Turkey, where 7th grade students interacted
with each other via online social media as a means to promote cultural understanding. In a
close analysis of a single learning activity, we found that children had opportunities to share
ideas informally through social media, using their digital voices to share meaning using
online writing, posting of images and hyperlinks. This study found that students valued the
opportunity to develop relationships with each other and generally engaged in sharing their
common interests in Hollywood movies, actors, celebrities, videogames and television shows.
However, not all teachers valued the use of popular culture as a means to find common
ground. Indeed, teachers had widely differing perspectives of the value of this activity.
Through informal communication about popular culture in a “Getting to Know You” activity,
students themselves discovered that their common ground knowledge tended to be US
centric, as American students lacked access to Turkish popular culture. However, the learning
activity enabled students themselves to recognize asymmetrical power dynamics that exist in
global media culture, where information and entertainment flows are primarily one-way in
nature and perceptions about the value of popular culture are contested.