Microcultures, local communities, and virtual networks

Through a case study, we will exemplify how information communication technology (ICT) can be used in a collaborative way to constitute the foundations of intercultural projects in local and global communities. First, we present a local learning community based on the fifth dimension model where, adopting a collaborative model, each of its activities departed from the traditional teaching-learning form based on transmission. Collaboration mediated by ICT in local computer-supported learning communities, understood to be borderer zones that are not the exclusive property of any one specific cultural group, has the potential to generate genuine neocultures in which participants can share meanings and appropriate artefacts. Second, the same approach is adopted to analyse the dialogue established between educational researchers and technologists. Setting out with different goals, both groups engaged in a borderer activity involving the development of educational artefacts that could be accessed via the Internet. Common participation in those activities gave rise to a set of shared beliefs, knowledge, behaviours, and customs, that is, a network of meanings that crystallised into a common microculture. © 2008, IGI Global.