lai.pdf


Australasian Journal of
Educational Technology

2011, 27(Special issue, 8), 1263-1275

Digital technology and the culture of teaching
and learning in higher education

Kwok-Wing Lai
University of Otago

This paper discusses how the use of digital technologies may support a shift of
cultural practices in teaching and learning, to better meet the needs of 21st century
higher education learners. A brief discussion of the changing needs of the learners is
provided, followed by a review of the overall impact of digital technologies on
teaching and learning. In the final section we suggest how digital technologies may
provide a more active and flexible learning experience by adopting a participatory
pedagogical approach and by blending formal learning with informal learning.

Introduction

In the last three decades there have been great changes in the higher education
landscape in the economically advanced countries. For example, increasing access to
higher education has resulted in a diversification of student populations that comes
with a wide range of learning styles and learning needs which are rather different
from the traditional, elitist student populations. At the same time, higher education
institutions are asked to respond to the demands of globalisation and the knowledge
economy, to prepare students with 21st century skills and competencies for the labour
markets, which require changes in the curriculum and teaching practices. There are
demands for increased efficiency, more transparent accountability and better
performance in both research and teaching. Some policy makers see digital technology
as a tool to help manage some of these changes, and in particular, to use it as a
transformative tool in teaching and learning (Crook & Light, 1999).

The changing needs of higher education learners

The changing learners

We have witnessed a global massification of higher education since the late 20th
century. For example, in 2000, the total enrolment of higher education institutions
worldwide was about 100 million, 200 times more than the global enrolment as
recorded at the beginning of the 20th century (Guri-Rosenblit, Sebkova & Teichler,
2007). As estimated by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education (OBHE), the
global enrolment of higher education will increase to 125 million by 2020 (Laurilland,
2008). This huge increase in enrolments has resulted in a diversification of student
populations, with the vast majority of the students now coming from lower socio-
economic backgrounds, and many of them are mature and part time students. For
example, in England, 60% of higher education students in 2002-2003 were over 21, and
in 1972-73, it was only 21%. This increase was largely due to the growth of part time



1264 Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2011, 27(Special issue, 8)

student numbers (Ashwin, 2006). There has also been a huge increase in the enrolment
of international students in the economically advanced countries, particularly in the
USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. For example, in Australia,
international students constituted 21% of its total higher education enrolments in 2002
(Harman, 2004). The OBHE estimates that there will be 5.8 million international
students globally in 2020. These mature, part time, and international learners have
different expectations from the traditional elitist school leavers about what facilities
and services are needed to support their learning. They also demand more flexibility in
the teaching and learning process, as many of them would only be able to take courses
in distance education mode.

Traditional school leavers also now expect more flexibility in their formal education.
Many of these students have been characterised as ‘digital natives’  (Prensky, 2001),
who have grown up with digital technologies, and are surrounded by and immersed
in technologies in their daily activities. Some commentators maintain that there is a
fundamental difference between the current and previous generations of young
people, in terms of learning styles and how they access information (Prensky, 2001), as
recent advances in neuroscience research suggest that technology may affect
developments of the brain during adolescent years (Ali & Kor, 2007; Carr, 2010). These
students expect that technologies should be widely used in teaching and learning. It is
thus argued that teaching in higher education institutions should respond to these
learning differences to accommodate the “more technology-driven, spontaneous, and
multi-sensory” learning styles (Prensky, 2001).

How do students learn?

In the last few decades we have seen a gradual shift of understanding about how
learning should be facilitated in higher education, towards an emphasis on student-
centred learning, rather than teacher-centred teaching (Ashwin, 2006; Schneckenberg,
2009). Conventionally learning has been conceptualised as a passive activity, with
knowledge being transmitted from someone who knows it, to someone who does not.
In this view learning is understood primarily as reproducing knowledge, and as a
‘thing’ that can be delivered to the learner and put into his or her head. The knowledge
acquisition metaphor is used to describe the learning process in which learning is seen
as individuals acquiring knowledge that is a concrete, transferable entity and the mind
as a storage vessel (Sfard, 1998). In the last few decades, learning has been increasingly
understood as a constructive process, where the learner actively participates in the
construction of knowledge through situated and authentic tasks, either as an
individual or collaboratively to support deep, rather than surface, learning (Lai, 2008).
The knowledge building or knowledge creation metaphor has also been used to
describe the inquiry process supported by the use of technologies in advancing
personal and communal knowledge (Scardamailia & Bereiter, 2006).

What is to be learned?

With the emergence of globalisation and the knowledge economy, it has become a
priority for the economically advanced countries to increase and democratise their
innovative capacity in order to gain competitiveness in the global market. There is a
high demand for “ingenuity”, for good and powerful ideas that can help address the
many social, economic, and environmental challenges that we face in the 21st century
(Homer-Dixon, 2006; Feinstein, Vorhaus & Sabates, 2008). As economically advanced
nations are shifting from an industrial to a knowledge society, there is an urgent need



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to develop young people’s competency to work creatively and innovatively with
knowledge. There are metacognitive, problem solving, collaborative, and learning how
to learn skills that citizens are required to work with and create knowledge in the
knowledge society. This presents higher education institutions with a great challenge
in how to prepare their students to meet the demands of the knowledge society (Lai,
Khaddage & Knezek, 2011).

In a knowledge society, as changes occur rapidly at the societal and economic levels,
citizens have to be able to adapt and be re-trained in order to keep up with these
changes. With the growth of the so called symbolic-analytic jobs, the “mind workers”,
or “professional, managerial and technical” occupations (Levy & Murnane, 2007), and
the disappearing of many “blue collar” occupations, there is a need to raise the literacy
level, and information management and problem-solving skills of graduates in order
to improve employability. Indeed, in rapidly changing job markets, what students
have learned in higher education may not equip them well in the labour markets, as
they may have to change jobs frequently, and many of the skills learned in schools and
universities now have a much shorter shelf life. According to a U.S. report (U.S.
Department of Labour, 2003), a worker on average will change jobs nine times or more
before he/she reaches the age of 32. Higher education institutions thus have the
responsibility to develop the lifelong learning competencies of their students required
by the knowledge society. Since people have to upgrade their knowledge and skills
throughout their working life, the demand for postgraduate studies will be increased
and higher education institutions will see a new student clientele with different needs
from traditional postgraduate students.

There has been a lot of discussion in the lifelong learning literature as to what
constitutes the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that an effective lifelong learner should
have. For example, the European Commission has published a series of documents on
lifelong learning since the turn of the century and one of them is the Key Competences
for Lifelong Learning: A European Framework (European Communities, 2007) which
includes eight competencies (defined as knowledge, skills, and attitudes) that lifelong
learners should be proficient. They are:

• Communication in the mother tongue
• Communication in foreign languages
• Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology
• Digital competency
• Learning to learn
• Social and civic competencies
• Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship
• Cultural awareness and expression (European Communities, 2007)

In this and other similar documents (e.g., UK Department for Education and Skills,
2006), lifelong learning is seen primarily as an informed response to the rapidly
changing economy and technology that people are encountering at present, and more
so in the future.

Digital technology is seen as a driver of growth of the knowledge economy. As
pointed out by Castells (1998), “information technology, and the ability to use it and
adapt it, is the critical factor in generating and accessing wealth, power, and
knowledge in our time” (cited in Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010, p.179). It also



1266 Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2011, 27(Special issue, 8)

supports lifelong learning as it can be used to overcome the barriers of time and place
to learn, and to provide new opportunities to learn, and is effective in enhancing
metacognitive, problem solving, and collaborative learning skills (Lai, 2008).

Online learning, in particular, has long been touted as a way to support lifelong
learning (Flores, 2010) and some commentators such as Clarke (2002) consider it as “a
core skill in the twenty-first century” (p. 12).

Traditionally, teaching and learning in higher education institutions take place within
the four classroom walls. To support the life-wide (i.e., different modes of learning)
and life-deep (i.e., values, attitudes and commitment) dimensions of lifelong learning
means that some of the learning should happen outside the higher education
institutions, i.e., in informal learning settings. Thus, to provide students with the skills
to pursue lifelong learning, the class community should be extended beyond its four
walls with the support of communication and Web 2.0 technologies, to encourage
students to engage in collaborative learning (Lai, 2010a). Students can be supported by
mobile technologies and digital content, and learning environments would include
both physical space and virtual spaces. This also requires a re-thinking of how the
higher education curriculum should be structured to allow students the opportunity to
undertake cross-curriculum or inter-disciplinary projects, in flexible ways.

The use of digital technologies in higher education

While it is difficult to gauge the exact level of investment in higher education in ICT
and e-learning in the last three decades, there is no doubt that it has been very large.
For example, an OECD document published in 2001 reported an investment of $16
billion by OECD countries in e-learning (Balasubramanian et al., 2009). With this level
of investment, one would expect that digital technologies should have a major impact
on teaching and learning. Indeed, ICT has been used effectively in supporting
traditional forms of teaching and administration in higher education institutions
(Laurillard, 2006). We see lecture theatres and seminar rooms fitted with data
projectors and computers linked to the Internet. It is almost a norm that lectures are
now supported by some kind of presentational technology, and lecture notes and
reading materials are archived electronically for flexible access. But these are surface
uses of digital technologies, with pedagogical practices seldom affected deeply, and
there is little shift of the locus of control of learning from the teacher to the learner
(e.g., Rossiter, 2007).

From the research that has been undertaken to evaluate the overall impact of ICT on
teaching and learning in higher education in the last two decades, one can conclude
that higher education institutions have been slow in taking the fullest advantage of the
potential benefits that can be afforded by the use of ICT. It seems that ICT was used
primarily to support existing teaching practices, “being add on to the traditional
classroom experience” (Bates, 2010, p.23), but has not fundamentally transformed it.
One large scale study confirmed this observation. Collis and van der Wende (2002)
surveyed 174 higher education institutions in five European countries, the USA and
Australia and reported that while “institution-wide use of ICT is being encouraged”
and “the establishment of institution-wide ICT is now in place”, the “strategic use of
ICT with a view to the different target groups of higher education, has in most cases
not been considered explicitly yet” (p.8). This report was published almost 10 years
ago, but it seems that little has been changed in the last decade, even with the



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exponential growth of the use of Web 2.0 technologies by young people. For example,
a recent report published by the Commonwealth of Learning for the UNESCO World
Conference on Higher Education (Balasubramanian, et al., 2009) maintains that while
“there is a trend to introduce eLearning or online learning both in courses taught on
campus and in distance learning… it is too early to say whether the role of ICTs in the
teaching function of higher education is truly transformative, or whether it is simply a
repackaging of previous pedagogy” (pp. 19-20).

As pointed out by Yelland, Tsembas and Hall (2008), “much of the education sector
often seems to be in denial about the relevance of ICT and its implementation in
educational contexts is tokenistic and introduced to appease stakeholders who
demand access and innovation as their educational right” (p.95). Similarly, Ehlers and
Schneckenberg (2010) comment that the integration of e-learning in higher education
has been disappointing, as the use of technology has not come with any significant
pedagogical changes. According to them:

…the promises of ICT and e-learning have not effectively innovated universities. Little
progress has been made, and resources invested into ICT adoption are frequently
spent without a clear definition of objectives and change strategies. The future of
learning is taking place now – and yet courses in universities are stalled in a
pedagogical model of transmitting knowledge rather than constructing solutions,
following educational approaches that have been put into place centuries ago and still
largely dominate teaching and learning in academia (pp. 6-7).

Indeed, as pointed out by Schaffert (2010):

Despite considerable investment in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, there
is little evidence of profound changes in educational practice. In particular, the idea
that the use of ICT would promote student-centred and collaborative approaches to
teaching and learning has not been fulfilled (p.130).

It seems that there is a wide gap between what is said and what is done in the use of
digital technologies in higher education (Guri-Rosenblit, 2005).

It is rather difficult to have a good understanding of how digital technologies are
actually used in teaching and learning and what are their effects on higher education,
as there are simply too many new developments in digital tools and researchers cannot
catch up with all of these. It seems that the use of ICT in higher education has fallen
into what Cuban (1986) has described as the expectations, rhetoric, policies and limited
use cycle. This cycle begins with great expectations of positive cognitive or attitudinal
outcomes. The promotion of the use of new technology is supported by some
preliminary research to establish its scientific credibility, which becomes policy. But
very soon, when the initial enthusiasm subsided and limited use is observed, teachers
are blamed for failing to use the technology to improve teaching and learning (Lai,
1996). There is a need to undertake systematic and longitudinal studies to provide a
better understanding of the impact of individual technologies on higher education
teaching and learning.

Many reasons, the so called ‘barriers’, have been suggested as to why there is so little
impact on the use of teaching and learning in higher education institutions. The lack of
understanding of why and how technology should be embedded in pedagogy by
university teachers has been suggested as a primary reason, and the lack of
professional development opportunities is usually cited as the reason for this lack of



1268 Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2011, 27(Special issue, 8)

understanding. It has been pointed out that many tertiary teachers still subscribe to the
top-down knowledge transmission model and they believe that technology should be
used to increase teaching efficiency, without any need for fundamental changes in
pedagogy. This is also seen as an institutional cultural clash between conventional
pedagogies and the participatory pedagogies facilitated by new digital technologies
(Lim, So & Tan, 2010). This view leads to technology being domesticated, thus losing it
transformative power (Salomon, 2002). Selwyn (2007) call these “barriers” operational
deficits, with the lack of use of technology “attributed to deficits of skills, motivation,
and know-how on the part of students, faculty, and the educational institutions
themselves” (p. 84).

There are deeper structural factors that affect the use of technologies in higher
education. According to Schneckenberg (2009), there are two major reasons for the lack
of use of ICT by the majority of higher education teachers. The central administration
of higher education institutions often has only limited control over the academic life of
their staff, as there is a high level of autonomy of academic staff in both research and
teaching. Higher education policies are sometimes difficult to disseminate and
implement at the grass root level. The second reason is that higher education
institutions are seen primarily as knowledge creation, rather than knowledge
reproduction, organisations. Career advancement is dependent primarily on research
outputs, which provides little incentive for academic staff to invest their time and
energy on new pedagogic practices, and little attention will be put on research on
teaching pedagogies, and in particular, pedagogies of using technologies in teaching
and learning, as learning how to use new technologies embedded them in course
design is time consuming.

The increasing emphasis on performance-based outputs in research by policy makers
in recent years has exacerbated this lack of attention to teaching. Many higher
education teachers see it as a waste of time to invest in technology-enhanced teaching,
as there is little benefit for career advancement. What and how technology is being
used in higher education institutions is also influenced by the commercial interests of
hardware and software developers, as they try to shape technology use for their best
interests, which may not align with pedagogical principles. These social, political, and
economic contexts have to be explored if we try to understand why and how
technology is used and not used for teaching and learning in higher education, as
pointed out by Selwyn (2007).

Changing the culture of teaching and learning

Digital technologies have the potential to support and shape a pedagogy which is
more active, participatory, personalised, flexible, and inclusive (Laurilland, 2008).
While it is acknowledged that the socio-political factors discussed in the previous
section may discourage institution-wide use of technologies in teaching and learning,
and it is likely that these macro factors would not disappear in the short term, it is
believed that at the micro or grass root level technology use can have an impact on
student learning if there is a better understanding of the pedagogic potentials and a
wider dissemination of exemplary and creative use of these technologies to show how
they can be embedded in teaching to improve quality. In this section we would like to
explore briefly how digital technologies may encourage more active and flexible
learning that can better meet the needs of the 21st century learners.



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Online learning

With the advent of the Internet and other communication technologies, we have seen a
phenomenal growth of e-learning or online courses in the last ten years, partly as a
result of increasing demand for access to education, and partly as a means for cost
cutting. For example, in the U.S., according to a recent Pew Internet survey (2011),
more than three-quarters (77%) of the colleges and universities offered online classes in
2011, and close to half (46%) of the students graduated in the last ten years had taken a
course online. This growth is significant, as compared to the overall higher education
enrolment, as a survey conducted by the Sloan Foundation (Allen & Seaman, 2010)
shows that there was an increase of 21% in online course enrolments between 2008 and
2009 in U.S. higher education institutions, but the increase in the overall enrolment in
the same period in higher education was only 1.2%. Online education has now become
an important component of higher education, with online courses designed for both
distance and on campus students. Indeed, close to three quarters of the chief academic
officers of the public higher education institutions in the U.S. surveyed in 2009
considered that online education was a critical part of their long-term strategy (Allen &
Seaman, 2010). It is reported by the Sloan Foundation that in 2008, more than one in
four higher education students took at least one online course and just a few years
earlier, in 2002, it was only about 10%. The vast majority (82%) of these online students
were undergraduate students.

It should be noted that depending on how technologies are embedded in the design of
online courses, they may not support an active or participatory teaching and learning
process. In many online courses, for example, technology is used to enhance the
delivery of online lectures, as a representational medium (Hamilton & Feenberg, 2005).
The potential of digital technology lies in its capability for supporting a more
interactive and communicative process, and facilitates a participatory pedagogy by
supporting one-to-many and many-to-many communications, and also the
development of online learning communities. In these technology-supported learning
communities, students can share ideas and co-construct knowledge with their peers.
The following example illustrates how digital technologies can increase access to
education and improve students’ learning experience.

An online distance program was designed by the author (for a detailed description,
refer Lai, 2009, 2010b; Lai et al., 2011) to provide access to doctoral studies for New
Zealand students who are not able to attend classes and meet their supervisors
regularly on campus. New Zealand is a sparsely populated country and universities
are located in the main cities. Many rural students would not be able to access part
time postgraduate studies if they were not offered online. However, distance doctoral
students often face the problem of intellectual isolation and this has been cited as one
of the major factors or even the prime contributing factor for high attrition rates
(Hortsmanshof & Conrad, 2003; Lovitts & Nelson, 2000; Manathunga, 2005). It is well
known that the attrition rates of traditional doctoral programs in the economically
advanced countries are very high. For example, in Canada, the completion rate of PhD
programmes is around 50%, and it takes 7-9 years for the successful students to
complete their studies (Elgar, 2003). Lovitts and Nelson (2000) point out that a key to
successfully completing a doctorate is to develop learning communities for doctoral
students. This doctoral program is based on a collaborative peer-support and
supervision model, supported by communication technologies in order to provide
quality learning experiences. In this community-based model, students work as a



1270 Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2011, 27(Special issue, 8)

cohort within a learning community and collaborate intensely during the course work
and thesis proposal preparation stages. They meet regularly in online conferences as a
group during the course work stage and during the development of their thesis
proposals. During the thesis proposal development stage, students meet with their
supervisors as a group in online conferences to support each other. Structured online
meetings are regularly held for students to share ideas, discuss issues, and critique
each other’s work. Students have to present several drafts of their proposals at online
conferences, to be critiqued by their peers and supervisors. Students thus are exposed
to a wider range of expertise and the online community also provides them the
opportunity to learn how to critique scholarly work.

In this model, students are encouraged to co-construct knowledge and are
enculturated to become a member of the academic research community. Moodle is used
as a customised discussion platform to adapt to the needs of the students. Other
communication tools such as Skype are also used to facilitate interaction. This doctoral
program has been evaluated and findings show that there was a very high level of
cognitive presence in the discussions and the online course was effective in supporting
construction of new knowledge (Lai, 2009). It also shows that online discussion can
facilitate research supervision, with students gaining valuable feedback from peers
(Lai et al., 2011). As a learning community, students participated actively to support
each other (Lai, 2010b). It should be emphasised that in this example digital
technologies were used primarily to support participation and communication, not as
a representational medium simply to increase the efficiency of delivery (Hamilton &
Feenberg, 2005). When technology is used as a representational medium to present or
archive lecture materials, it cannot transform the culture of teaching and learning, as
there is no change in the pedagogy and technology is not used to support an active
learning process. Thus whether online learning represents a pedagogical advance
depends on how technologies are being used, and how they are embedded in
pedagogy.

Linking formal and informal learning

Digital technology blurs the boundary between formal and informal learning
experiences. Learning has long been compartmentalised into formal, non-formal, and
informal slots. In higher education, learning is supposed to occur formally through
attending lectures, completing prescribed readings and texts, undertaking lab work or
field work, and subsequently assessed through internal assignments or examinations.
Until recently, there is little recognition that learning can also occur outside public
spaces. As mentioned previously, up till now digital technologies have not been
widely used in teaching and learning. However, outside higher education institutions,
young people are surrounded by and immersed in technologies in informal settings. A
Kaiser Family Foundation report (Rideout, Foehr & Roberts, 2010) shows that in the
U.S., 8-18 year olds in 2009 spent four and a half hours per day using their mobile
phones and computers to do text messaging, talk to peers, listen to music, play games,
and watch other media, and the three most popular activities being visiting social
networking sites (e.g. MySpace and Facebook), playing computer games, and watching
videos on websites (e.g., YouTube). These technology experiences may affect how they
socialise, communicate, and learn. If students are to develop the competencies of being
a self-regulated, independent, lifelong learner, and be able to respond to the demands
of the knowledge economy, they will need to learn how to learn in informal settings, as
there is a semiotic relationship between formal and informal learning.



Lai 1271

This learning ecology perspective (Barron, 2006) suggests that while students learn
differently in formal and informal settings, learning can take place across boundaries.
What has been learned informally, for example, by participating in knowledge sharing
in social networking Web sites and interest-focused learning communities using Web
2.0 technology, it can help shape what is learned in higher education. Conversely,
what is learned in higher education institutions can motivate students to learn in
informal settings (Greenhow & Robelia, 2009). In informal learning situations, while
learners will use the forms of learning that they have already learned from formal
settings, they also use strategies which are not normally used in formal settings, as
shown in Sefton-Green’s (2003) study. Adopting the learning ecology approach
requires a cultural shift, as suggested by Sefton-Green (2004):

…that in their leisure, at play and in the home with their friends, young people can
find in ICTs powerful, challenging and different ways of learning. The emphasis is on
sharing, working together, and using a wide range of cultural references and
knowledge… unless education policy makers can find ways to synthesise learning
across formal and informal domains, our education system will become the loser in
the long run” (p.33).

Higher education institutions have the responsibility of preparing their students as
lifelong learners who are able to engage in self-directed learning in informal settings.
They also need to recognise that their students’ formal and informal technology
experiences are drastically different, and that there is a semiotic link between formal
and informal learning. This requires a shift of teaching and learning culture. The
challenge is how to use their technology experiences acquired in informal settings to
enhance formal learning. At present young people are not aware that there is a link
between formal and informal learning and they do not use Web 2.0 for formal
learning. For example, according to a survey conducted in the UK by the Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) in 2007, the majority of the sixth formers who
were users of social networking sites considered these sites primarily social and did
not know how they could or should be used in formal university learning (Minocha,
2009). In using Web 2.0 tools and applications in informal settings, such as blogging
and twitting, students are facilitated in sharing their ideas and working collaboratively
with other users. Learning is occurring in learning networks and learning
communities, which is very different from formal learning in higher education that is
primarily individualistic.  By using these Web 2.0 tools in formal courses, formal and
informal learning technology experiences can be blended, and the culture of teaching
and learning can be shifted towards a more collaborative and engaging environment.
However, it should be noted that in using Web 2.0 technologies to blend formal and
informal learning, we should not intrude too much on students’ personal life as Web
2.0 tools are seen primarily as social, but not academic, tools by young people
(Sharples, 2007).

Web 2.0 tools such as wikis also facilitate an informal knowledge construction process.
If they are to be used in formal learning, there is a need for a shift of the epistemology
of knowledge to acknowledge a more democratic notion of knowledge creation
(Eijkman, 2010). The distributed nature of knowledge creation, for example, by
Wikipedia, relies primarily on “the wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004, cited in
Peters & Slotta, 2010, p.207). It should be noted that the use of Wikipedia as a primary
source of knowledge has now become very popular among students, although it is less
likely that they are contributors of Wikipedia articles (Selwyn, 2007). Instead of denying
the use of knowledge generated informally, higher education institutions should be



1272 Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2011, 27(Special issue, 8)

proactive in preparing their students with skills in assessing the values of user-
generated knowledge in informal learning, and how this knowledge can be used
creatively and productively in their formal learning.

Conclusion

This paper began by highlighting the changing needs of the 21st century learners as a
result of the massification of higher education and the demands of the knowledge
economy. The use of digital technologies has been suggested as a means to respond to
these changes. In terms of improving the learning experiences of the students, the
impact of digital technologies has so far been rather limited. It is suggested that the use
of digital technologies can improve the quality of the learning experiences if they are
used as a participatory communicative tool to support collaboration and co-
construction of knowledge. It is important that learners are aware of their own
learning characteristics in informal settings and adapt them in formal settings (Lai et
al.  2011). It is also important to recognise the blending of formal and informal learning
strategies in higher education to prepare students as lifelong learning learners and
innovative knowledge creators in the knowledge society.

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Author: Dr Kwok-Wing Lai, Professor and Director
Centre for Distance Education and Learning Technologies, College of Education,
University of Otago, New Zealand. Email: wing.lai@otago.ac.nz
Web: http://www.otago.ac.nz/education/staff/profiles/wing_lai.php

Please cite as: Lai, K. W. (2011). Digital technology and the culture of teaching and
learning in higher education. In Hong, K. S. & Lai, K. W. (Eds), ICT for accessible,
effective and efficient higher education: Experiences of Southeast Asia. Australasian
Journal of Educational Technology, 27(Special issue, 8), 1263-1275.
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet27/lai.html