Emerging pedagogies in the networked knowledge communities, Marohang Limbu

Emerging Pedagogies in the Networked Knowledge Society: Practices Integrating Social Media and Globalization Marohang Limbu Michigan State University, USA Binod Gurung New Mexico State University, USA

A volume in the Advances in Knowledge Acquisition, Transfer, and Management (AKATM) Book Series

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Published in the United States of America by Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global) 701 E. Chocolate Avenue Hershey PA 17033 Tel: 717-533-8845 Fax: 717-533-8661 E-mail: cust@igi-global.com Web site: http://www.igi-global.com Copyright Š 2014 by IGI Global. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without written permission from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emerging pedagogies in the networked knowledge society : practices integrating social media and globalization / Marohang Limbu and Binod Gurung, editors. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4666-4757-2 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4666-4758-9 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-4666-4759-6 (print & perpetual access) 1. Knowledge management. 2. Social networks. 3. Web 2.0. I. Limbu, Marohang, 1965- II. Gurung, Binod, 1976HD30.2.E473 2014 303.48’33--dc23 2013040264 This book is published in the IGI Global book series Advances in Knowledge Acquisition, Transfer, and Management (AKATM) (ISSN: 2326-7607; eISSN: 2326-7615) British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Chapter 3

Emerging Pedagogies in the Networked Knowledge Communities: Interweaving and Intersecting Global Communities in the 21st Century Global Village Marohang Limbu Michigan State University, USA

ABSTRACT The chapter discusses networked knowledge societies, networked knowledge communities, digital technologies, and emerging pedagogies. Then, it examines the breadth and depth of Web 2.0 tools, social networking sites, and interactive cloud spaces in relation to a digitally globalized world. It further stresses how networked communities and networked societies tend to blur the traditional concept of social, cultural, linguistic, and political dichotomies. After these discussions, it explores some sites of emerging pedagogies in networked communities, especially in academic institutions, social institutions, and networked global communities. Finally, by showing some problems and concerns of digital technologies and networked knowledge communities in the context of twenty-first century cloud era, it concludes by oering some potential future directions. Overall, this chapter accentuates the process of digital collaboration, content creation, dissemination and consumption of knowledge in the networked communities, and how networked knowledge communities and technologies are impacting global epistemic shifts in the twenty-first century digital village.

INTRODUCTION Ever since the Greeks, the world has changed very little until the twentieth century from the digital high-tech point of view. Digital technologies

in the late twentieth century, and mainly in the twenty-first century, changed the global cultures in the way that people never imagined. So, digital technologies not only became a game changer, but played a significant role for global cultural,

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-4757-2.ch003

Copyright Š 2014, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Emerging Pedagogies in the Networked Knowledge Communities

political, and academic epistemic shifts. Nonetheless, it is apparent that as technology is only a tool, it does not guarantee the cultural, political, and academic epistemic shifts spontaneously, but there should be a combination of cultures, people, and technologies to bring the changes; or we must bring technologies into an action for the global cultural and academic epistemic shifts and for global cultural transformations. So, the driving force of global cultural transformations is globalization, information communications and technology, and new media technologies. These forces inspire how we should prepare our students as well as global citizens for their future; how we should share and co/create information; and how we should circulate them across the networked communities in the context of twenty-first century networked world. This situation demonstrates that networked knowledge communities (NKCs) are changing research methodologies while inventing newer research inquiries to better address the needs and expectations of the twenty-first century global cultures and networked community members.

We currently live in the era facilitated by technologies in which new media technologies have become impetuses to transforming the traditionally considered giant world into a tiny-networked digital village. In the past, processes of information creation and dissemination was not only difficult, but it used to be much more hierarchical, i.e., people could not comment and contribute to other people’s websites and web spaces. Currently, the process of information sharing is on user’s fingertips in this digitally globalized village. For instance, when people create content and hit the button on their computing devices (smartphones, computers, and tablets), information disseminates within, as well as beyond, their networked communities in a wink across the world. Because of the potential of new media technologies, local cultures and institutions are shifting toward global cultures and global institutions by connecting to the crowd

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of global fellow citizens, global institutions, and networked cultures. So, the emergence of computers, digital writing, and digital communication have practically revealed how cloud computing not only changed the modes of information sharing, writing from a linear, print-based model to a dynamic, public, and interactive one, but also shifted the (traditional) ways of understanding cultures, people, and geopolitical locations. Conclusively, the advent of new media technologies and NKCs considerably transformed the modes and mediums of communication patterns in unpredictable ways.

This chapter discusses NKCs, digital technologies, and emerging pedagogies. Then, it examines the breath and depth of Web 2.0 tools, social networking sites, and interactive cloud spaces in relation to digitally globalized world. It further stresses how network communities and networked societies tend to blur the traditional concept of social, cultural, linguistic, and political dichotomies.

After these discussions, it explores some sites of emerging pedagogies in network communities, especially in academic institutions, social institutions, and networked global communities.

Finally, by showing some problems and concerns of digital technologies and networked knowledge communities in the context of twenty-first century cloud era, it concludes by offering some potential future directions. Overall, this chapter accentuates the process of networked collaboration, content creation, dissemination and consumption of knowledge in the network communities and facilitates how NKCs are impacting epistemic shifts. It reveals how Web 2.0 and social media, and global networked interaction are impacting the cultures across the world in the construction of emerging pedagogies and knowledge and the process of knowledge dissemination in NKCs. As my intended audiences are from across the world, I attempt to address basic concepts of digital technologies, digital theories, and practices in this chapter.

Emerging Pedagogies in the Networked Knowledge Communities

BACKGROUND We live in the twenty-first century’s interconnected world due to the advancement of science and technologies in which cultural patterns are constantly shifting, academic paradigms are becoming unpredictable, and newer pedagogies are emerging. In other words, the world is transforming into a tiny global village where we meet people from diverse cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical backgrounds in virtual as well as physical spaces. Likewise, we meet students from diverse cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds in our writing classes. So, regarding the academic network communities, newer pedagogical theories, teaching approaches, and learning processes are emerging across the world. Besides traditional physical classrooms, we now teach students in online classes, flipped classrooms, hybrid classes, and massive open online courses (MOOCs). In the newer academic spaces (both in physical and online and hybrid classes), we meet students from different cultural backgrounds, political conditions, and economic situations from all around the world. Even in our traditional physical classes, we meet students that we never have imagined earlier. Here, I would like to bring my own writing classes as examples. In my writing classes, I generally have a diverse student body from at least six to eight different countries at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan (USA). The diverse student bodies bring their cultural assets, such as complex cultural narratives, multiple literacies, and unpredictable individual experiences. This classroom setting more often than not challenges my pedagogical approaches by making my writing class look a different class every single day from pedagogical point of view. This setting constantly urges me to seek alternative teaching approaches, methods, and techniques so that I can better address students’ and digital world’s needs and expectations. This is also one of the epistemic shifts of the twenty-first century NKCs that spark series of inquiry questions, such as what cultural literacy backgrounds

my students have; what they know that I do not know and how I can make them share with me and with their colleagues; what resources I need to make them share their cultural assets; and why they come to my classes, or what their needs and expectations are. More importantly, how I can engage students with other students from different cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds; and what pedagogies and rhetorical strategies I should embrace to address the emerging students’ and digital village’s needs and expectations.

As I mentioned before, due to the advent of digital technologies and rapid globalization as well as global immigration patterns, diverse student populations from around the world are attending academic institutions, not only here in the US, but also in different corners of the world. In this crowd of the students, many of them were born and were brought up in different cultural backgrounds. Some of them grew up with advanced technologies, such as smartphones, computers, iPads, tablets, and other interactive technologies.

Some of them grew up in oral-dominant cultures and in indigenous cultures and were predominantly exposed to their oral cultural narratives, historical events, and other complex oral texts before they joined colleges/universities. So, the important point is how we, including the academic institutions and administrators, are prepared to address such emerging sites; what pedagogical strategies we should choose to facilitate student learning processes; how we can make them better express their cultural assets. More importantly, how academic institutions are prepared to amend their local administrative policies to address the emerging pedagogies from global perspectives to meet the needs and expectations of a newer student body in the twenty-first century’s globalized world.

Additionally, twenty-first century cultures facilitated by digital technologies are transforming local community into global communities.

People regardless of their geographical locations are constantly interacting with their global colleagues and are bringing significant changes in

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their local communities. For instance, when I went to Sungnam and Solma, remote villages in Limbuwan, Nepal last summer (2013), I met with teachers, students, political leaders, and media personnel. In most of the meetings, I saw people using their computing devices (mostly smartphones) to take pictures and videos. No sooner did they post pictures and videos on their Facebook profiles, they got responses from their networked members from the across the world.

One of my remarkable visits was to Ratna High School, Solma, and I find it an appropriate story to share. On a beautiful summer day, I met with teachers, villagers, and school management community members at Ratna High School (RHS), and after the meeting, we, especially alumna and alumni of RHS, proposed to initiate a “computer project,” and they posted the proposal on the RHS’s Facebook page. Surprisingly, in a couple of weeks, people from around the world, such as the USA, UK, Korea, Brunei, Nepal, Australia, and Qatar started donating to the project. By the midst of August 2013, we were able to buy computers and set up a computer lab for RHS students, teachers, and staff. Currently, they can communicate, share, and collaborate with other NKC members. If such digital technologies did not exist, this project would not be possible. These sites are some distinct sites of cultural shifts because this type of communication was not possible just a decade ago (2004) when I left for the US to pursue my higher education. Overall, today’s NKCs are complicated, discursive, and expansive in nature, which raise critical questions, such as how we should better understand and embrace digital technologies and NKCs in the twenty-first century’s digital village; how we can use such emerging sites to facilitate cross-cultural communications in the globalized academia. Regarding academic cultures, how these sites are different from the way we understood teaching, learning, and communication in the past, and how we should use these sites in order to ad-

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dress the global cultural, political, and academic shifts to create representational global institutions and global networked cultures.

NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE SOCIETIES AND NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE Although different people characterize society differently, it more or less refers to patterns of social relations among its constituent members, such as pre-industrial society, industrial society, information society, and knowledge economybased society. So, a society consists of mostly like-mined members who belong to certain communities and social institutions and also share some common social norms, values, and practices.

This suggests that society is generated based on people’s cultural, social, religious, and political structures that have certain historical, geopolitical, and economic conditions. The socio-economic and political conditions constantly facilitate societies for the benefits of its constituent members. This setting always makes a society look like a living organ often changing its norms, values, and structures. Likewise, the twenty-first century’s digital networked society, as implied earlier, is also transforming cultures from pre-industrial society and industrial society to networked information society and networked knowledge society. This section briefly discusses the sites of networked knowledge societies and networked knowledge communities in the digitally globalized world.

The term “networked society” implies cultural, academic, and economic changes affected by the community networks as well as by the application of digital technologies. Historically, I would like to begin with Barry Wellman who coined the term “network society” in 1973; thereafter, the concept of network society was further developed. For

Emerging Pedagogies in the Networked Knowledge Communities

instance, James Martin (1978) propounded the theory of “wired society” to refer to societies that were connected by mass-communication networks as well telecommunication networks; Jan van Dijk (1991) further extended the concept as “networked individuals” and “network society;” van Dijk’s “network society” is a form of communication that is replacing face-to-face communication. van Dijk (2006) states: The network society concept emphasizes the form and organization of information processing and exchange. An infrastructure of social and media networks takes care of this. So the network society can be defined as a social formation with an infrastructure of social and media networks enabling its prime mode of organization at all levels (individual, group/organizational and societal). Increasingly, these networks link all units or parts of this formation (individuals, groups and organizations). (p. 20) van Dijk’s “network society” is a combination of social and media network that is shaped by community members, organizations, and other masses.

For van Dijk, information forms the substance of contemporary society, while networks shape the organizational forms and (infra)structures of the society. Manuel Castells (1996, 2005) further expanded the theory and practice of the network society in his “The Rise of Network Society.”

For Castells, network is a basic unit of modern society that is comprised of cultural, economic, and political elements. He further contends that it is not purely the technology that defines modern societies, but also cultural, economic, and political factors that make up the network society. This concept demonstrates how societal, individual, and communal levels of communication shape society and human beings and vice versa.

Although we understand that the concept of NKS is not a radically new one, today the concept is different from when it was theorized, understood, and practiced in the past. One important

point we have to consider is that the traditional “networked society” and “wired society” were mostly based on point-to-point communication in which people would communicate only with another person; this communication pattern, more often than not, limited communications.

The point-to-point communication also minimized the information sharing processes, and networked (digital) collaborative works were not even in the practice. Despite the fact that people constantly networked in the past, the traditional modes and medium of communication used to be face-to-face, one-to-one, and also hierarchical, i.e., communication patterns used to be one way. In other words, traditional communication pattern was not audience-centered, i.e., communication modes used to be much more ethnocentric and hegemonic. So, traditional networked societies did not democratically engage people in the networking spaces, and audiences were not able to share, comment, connect, co/create, and question on other people’s web spaces. Such communication patterns created dichotomies between writers and readers and producers and consumers, and those who had privilege had control over state’s resources and could create “Truth” in the traditional network society. As everyone in the society did not have equal access to the Internet and other technologies, such as radio, television, and texts, traditional ethnocentric network society (communication pattern) ingrained people’s understanding of social conditions, economic situations, and political setting as absolute truth. Although we accepted “networked society” (Wellman, 1973) or “wired city” (Martin, 1978) or “network society” (van Dijk, 1991) or “rise of the network society” (Castells, 2005) as networked society, they did not address how traditional network societies ignored peripheral cultures, minority identities, and indigenous voices.

The NKS produces newer knowledge, which is one of the reasons why knowledge is invariably created and recreated in NKSs; they are disseminated and are consumed and re-consumed in the digital

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network communities in multiple ways. Therefore, knowledge is community generated and community maintained, and knowledge is the product of the NKCs made up of digitally networked members.

This means knowledge originates in the network community to which networked members belong in the twenty-first century’s digital context. This theoretical conception demonstrates that NKC is economy, or networked knowledge pedagogy is social capital. My argument here is that network knowledge pedagogy is a social product in which knowledge is a tool (knowledge-based economy); therefore, knowledge is also social capital. And overall, knowledge is epistemic—local, cultural, and situated. So, the NKC is not only an extension of “information society,” but it is an invention of twenty-first century global citizens and global cultures.

NKSs AND NKCs IN THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY DIGITAL AGE The NKS facilitated by Web 2.0 tools and cloud tools has potential to dialogically engage people and to create their agencies and identities. In the digital engagement, people from any corner of the world can make their identities visible, and they can make their voices heard. Similarly, NKC is both local and global in which people from any corner of the world can participate in the digital networked discussions, webinars, online conferences, and virtual protests. In this digital participation, people can share, collaborate, co/create, and disseminate any contents across the culture.

Because of the digital networking potentials, the twenty-first century’s networked communication is transforming the traditional concept of culture, writing, and communication. The change demonstrates that NKC is largely shaped by the messages exchanged in the cloud in which people from anywhere, any time, and any device can access the shared information and use them for their benefits (Limbu, 2012; also see Pandian & Karisiddappa,

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2007). Since the shared information is disseminated in a wink, collaborating and creating content by any person has become easier than ever in this digital village. Due to such new media potential and global networked communication, not only daily knowledge is getting wider and the world is getting tinier, but also the concept of global culture is becoming heterogeneous. For instance, before the emergence of new media technology (e.g. Web 2.0), community was considered as local entity, i.e., it had only localized identity, such as Limbu community within limited Yakthung community and Gurung Community within limited Tamu community (in Nepal). Now, the Internet (Web 2.0/cloud computing) shifted our concept of cultural conditions, such as local communities facilitated by digital technologies are exposing themselves into global network communities by making their cultural, linguistic, and religious identities more visible across the globe. Limbus, through their Facebook page “Limbus Around the World” and Gurungs via their micro web page “Tamu Samaj,” to provide some examples, make themselves visible across the world. These web spaces connect not only the specific members of the communities (Limbus and Gurungs), but they also interact with other global fellow beings in the digital spaces. Thus, NKC and NKS are not limited within a specific culture and geographical locations, but because of digital technologies, they have become much more global.

In the twenty-first century’s NKCs, cloud tools (social media and technologies) as leading communication tools connect global citizens culturally, linguistically, and geopolitically. Barbara Hanna and Juliana Nooy (2009) state, “Internet discussion forums … remain sites of vibrant and lively practice which appear to offer limitless opportunities for communication across linguistic, geographical and cultural borders” (p. 12). As people profoundly use social media (Facebook, blogs, Wikis, YouTube, Google Sites, Google Hangout, Twitter, podcasting, and Skype) across cultures, cloud-based communication consider-

Emerging Pedagogies in the Networked Knowledge Communities

ably changed people’s personal and professional life styles. The cloud-based communication has not only changed the way people network—communicate, collaborate, share, and co/create contents—in this digital age, but it has also changed the way people circulate information across global cultures. So, it is obvious that “the emergence of new technologies, such as Web 2.0 technologies, offers individuals opportunities for new ways of interacting, playing, working, and earning” (Panteli, 2009, p.1). The advent of cloud computing confers many user-friendly affordances that serve as technical and psychological tools (Werstch, 1998) for sharing and learning within an identified web-based environment.

The NKC is not only radically different from its predecessors because of cloud-centered communications, but it is also unpredictable, slippery, and discursive. It constructs an unprecedented rupture between the expectations to which it gives birth to different knowledge by constructing diverse realities (Cohen, 2006). The NKC creates glocal (global and local) responsiveness by significantly impacting traditional social, political, and academic communities in the digital village.

Currently, NKCs are effectively transforming the traditional socio-cultural and academic institutions from local to global, such as universities are transforming traditional pedagogical strategies by introducing interactive cloud-based classes and online degrees. Most of the twenty-first century physical classrooms are also equipped with modern technologies (Smart Boards, projectors, screen, wired or wireless Internet, and multimodal technologies) through which students are instantly connected to other NKCs locally and globally. In this process, there is not any demarcation between physical classroom and virtual networked spaces because the teaching and learning activities are not restricted within the four walls of the classrooms, but students can communicate, collaborate with other students/audience from other classes, other institutions, and other cultures in synchronous and asynchronous settings (see Sorenson & Mara’s

“Booktuber;” Vu, Vu, Cao, & Fadde’s “MOOCs” in this collection). Likewise, in the NKCs, (cyber) farmers are connected to other farmers globally who can discuss their modern farming strategies and issues they encounter, and they can seek ways of solving them and can share them over the cloud.

The important part of the farmers’ NKC interaction is that the cloud interaction does not require thousands and millions of dollars: their smartphones and computers are plentiful to connect them globally. Similarly, hospitals and healthcare networks are connected to global NKCs, and people even in remote places get better medical support, such as “care any where” and “care networking” via digital technologies (see Dishman, 2013). Political activists are connected with other activists; they campaign and revolt together to establish democratic government for themselves, for communities, and for community members.

WEB 2.O AND SOCIAL MEDIA AS NETWORKING SPACES IN THE DIGITALLY GLOBALIZED WORLD In the NKCs, network community members communicate, collaborate, and co/create contents from around the world via digital technologies (Internet, computers, tablets, smartphones, and software), and the digital technologies thrust the twenty-first century’s networked knowledge communities a step beyond the traditional communication arrays not only because of their interactive, collaborative, and user-centered features, but also because of their aptitudes to merge the role of audience and writers both in virtual and physical spaces (Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 1996; Lundin 2008; McLoughlin & Lee, 2008). The features and potentials of cloud computing establish what global collaboration and communication in digital environment are, how both human and technologies co-exist in symbolic relationships, and how communication skills can be facilitated via Web 2.0 tools (Porter, 2007; Graupner, Nickoson-Massey, & Blair, 2009). In

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this section, I briefly discuss some cloud spaces (Web 2.0 tools) and their applications, such as how global networked citizens seek to engage with other NKC members, and how human-computer-human (computer as means to communicate) are engaged with the world to create newer epistemologies.

Web 2.0 and the cloud have become major impulses that brought significant cultural and academic epistemic shifts across the global cultures. They not only changed the way people communicate, collaborate, share, and co/create contents in this digitally webbed world, but also altered the way people disseminate and consume knowledge across the world. It is obvious that “the emergence of new technologies, such as Web 2.0 technologies, offers individuals opportunities for new ways of interacting, playing, working, and earning” (Panteli, 2009, p.1). Web 2.0, like “YouTube,” is a web space where people upload, share, and watch videos, comment, question, and respond to the materials they create. As YouTube is a video-sharing web-space people also upload movie clips, TV clips, instructional manuals, and graphic music videos. Because of YouTube’s prevalent features and potentials to address and connect audiences globally, many media corporations, such as CBS, BBC, and MSNBC also upload their news materials in this webbed space to get to the audience and to get their responses across.

Facebook—a social networking site—is a driving force for social and cultural changes. In this web space, people create information, advertisements, digital multicultural materials, and diverse cultural narratives, and they publish their content and share it with their network communities (Limbu, 2012).

Facebook’s aptitude to dialogically and critically engage writers and readers in digital spaces makes it stand as a unique networked cloud space in the twenty-first century’s globalized world (Kellner & Share, 2007; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008; Lopez, 2008; Luke, 2000). Such dialogical engagement facilitates intercultural, cross-cultural, and multicultural communication by fusing these elements

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both by disrupting monolithic, ethnocentric nature of knowledge and by denouncing the status quo of cultural reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 2000). Facebook, as an interactive tool, also mediates the immediate producers and consumers’ worlds and structural social worlds of an individual being, and it establishes a user-friendly environment where the roles of the authors and readers and consumers and producers merge together (Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 1996, 2004; Lundin, 2008; McLoughlin & Lee, 2008; DePew, 2011).

Twitter is a micro-blog in which people can interact via posts or tweets. It is a free application to send and receive short information (limited to 140 characters), weblinks, and video links. It can also be widely used to create, disseminate, and promote social, political beliefs as well. Twitter also has a potential as a new pedagogical tool for social and academic communications as it provides spaces and opportunities for students and faculty to engage in social and academic activities (also see Bista’s chapter on Twitter). Likewise, “LinkedIn” is a social networking space for people especially for professional occupations. The users of LinkedIn use this site to introduce themselves—their positions, skills, and experiences—and they also use this site to communicate with other LinkedIn users. It is also used to maintain contact information of people with whom they have connection. “Google +” or “Google Plus” is one of the largest social networking sites in the world. It is also called a multilingual social networking and service, which has several features among them are stream, circles, Hangouts, messenger, Google events, and Google communities.

Similarly, among many, Google Drive (Google Docs), Dropbox, Prezi, and box.com, for example, are some file hosting spaces that offer cloud storage in which digital files can be stored, shared, and edited with other collaborators from anywhere, any time, and any computing devices. Specifically, in these cloud spaces (Dropbox, Google Drive, and Prezi), people, regardless of their geographical

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locations, can share their viewpoints, collaborate, cooperate, and co/create contents. For instance, people can simultaneously share, collaborate, cooperate, and create in these cloud spaces regardless of physical distances and geographical locations.

While collaborating and creating content, the participants can also chat and talk, whereas on Dropbox and Prezi, collaborators create documents and save them, which is automatically synced to other collaborators’ computing devices, and they can collaborate, edit, comment, and create content synchronously and asynchronously (also see Hart-Davidson, Zachry, & Spunizi, 2012). In these spaces, collaborators/users can also present their projects to their networked global audience from different geographical locations in a synchronous setting. Because of the collaborative and interactive characteristics of cloud computing, digital technologies connect people from diverse cultural and geographical locations and engage them in a digital environment. By engaging people in digital spaces, these spaces re/shape people’s voices, agencies, and identities as networked global community members.

In the NKCs, collaborators and NKC members bring their complex social, cultural, and political narratives, they share their thoughts, viewpoints, and other rhetorical strategies, and they question and contest on differences and also learn to negotiate their places as members of the networked world (Limbu, 2012). Here, the NKCs tend to be more interactive and democratic sphere, for network community members, such as participants, senders, and receivers occupy horizontal spaces.

Through such horizontal networking spaces, rational democratic discourse prevails unlike the traditional Web 1.0 realm. In other words, NKCs invariably tend to bestow inclusive, representational places where people as Connor (2004) and Sleeter and Tettegah (2002) contend, invent their own-networked paths as global digital authors and contributors to their local and global audience.

CLOUD COMPUTING AND GLOBALIZATION IN THE DIGITAL VILLAGE Digital technologies of the twenty-first century expose the world in a much more different form than the previous technologies. For instance, culture, intercultural communication, and even globalization in the past were understood in relation to telephone communications, narratives, books, and travelogues, and these mediums used to be ethnocentric and political. In other words, based on the library books, travels, and travellers’ narratives, people narrowly perceived and interpreted cultures and people. These narratives and stories were written mostly for the purpose of certain groups of people. Therefore, knowledge was disseminated and consumed from one perspective by ignoring authenticity of diverse cultures, people, and geographical locations. As the narratives were unidirectional, people whoever created the narrative, more often than not, distorted the realities as much as they could. Now, after the inception of social media and cloud spaces, concept of culture, even interculture, and globalization is gradually shifting. In the similar fashion, NKC currently is also shifting the traditional theoretical and practical notion of academia, communication, and writing in the way people never imagined a few decades ago. Today, for those who are connected via Internet, the process of information sharing locally and globally became easier as information dissemination is right on user’s fingertips. In most instances, though many people may disagree this concept that the Internet users are obviously more social and have more friends and contacts than non-Internet users. For instance, when I sit with my son and try to play his online games, he always seems to be far more concerned if I might offend his online friends (not only on social networking sites, but also mainly on online games), as his online friends are from different parts of the world.

The Internet users are also more socio-politically

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active than non-Internet users as I mentioned in this chapter. So, the culture of the NKCs is largely shaped by the messages exchanged in in the digital context, which makes NKC one of the cultural and academic foundations through which new epistemologies and pedagogies are persistently created.

Similarly, cross-cultural communication saturated by technologies changed the traditional notions of monoculture and monolanguage into heterogeneous ones. The intersectionality of human-computer-human transformed the monocultures, such as the western mono-model concept of culture, language, communication, and writing into multimodal ones. Digital technologies or global communication facilitated by cloud technologies also blurred the cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical boundaries and binaries. Networked knowledge communities facilitate global empowerment by creating democratic spaces for all cultures and communities. Now, whoever is linked to networked digital communities possesses his/ her cultural, geopolitical, and linguistic (World Englishes) identities. In so doing, people from any culture, any geopolitical locations, and any race have power to express themselves in the global communities. Hence, global citizens via network communities can make their local identities visible to the global level, which not only challenges the old conservative cultures and ideologies by exposing local voices to the global level, but since it deconstructs the traditional hegemonic assumptions and reconstructs the concept of global village, it also redesigns more democratic global cultures, including global academic institutions.

Due to the advent of new media technologies, traditional hegemonic ideologies are constantly under threat because emerging social networking spaces (Facebook, Facebook video chat, Twitter, Google+, Google Hangouts, and YouTube) tremendously shift knowledge and social practices. In so doing, they challenge as well as alter our traditional assumptions and practices. Today, creation and distribution of digital content and multimodal

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content change the way people thought/think and acted/act across cultures. For instance, knowledge creation and dissemination over Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Google Hangouts, YouTube, and other websites change people’s perception on cultures, languages, and people. However, it does not mean that only digital technologies change local cultures and people, but based on the people as well as cultures’ needs and purposes, they also create technologies to meet their expectations. Hence, there is always a symbiotic relationship among technologies, humans, and cultures.

With the advent of social networking spaces, people who are digitally literate (or even digitally semiliterate) now have major voices and identities across the cultures. In the NKCs, people do not necessarily have to be well literate to create digital contents and to disseminate them; people can capture images and videos, and they can post them on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and any other web spaces via their mobile devices (smartphones, tablets/iPads). And the network community members in most cases discourse over the shared contents. Therefore, NKC facilitates to disseminate global citizens’ information and co/create newer accounts in this digital village.

Democratic digital engagement allows people to create newer accounts based on the needs and purpose of society and people. In other words, society shapes people, people shape society, and technologies also shape both people and society in the NKCs. Therefore, this symbiotic relationship (technology-culture-humans) invariably forces people to globalize their local understanding of cultures, politics, narratives, and other material conditions. This is one of the reasons why social networking sites, in the context of the twentyfirst century global network communities, have become symbolic voices of the twenty-first century networked citizens.

As implied earlier, social networking sites— YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Hangouts—have enabled a new type of networked journalism that is always subjective, personal,

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and culturally situated. This networked journalism represents a global conversation that is connected through its network community readers, writers, and other contributors. These network community members promote group interaction and also help global citizens establish digital identities. In other words, digital technologies facilitate people’s symbolic digital representation by creating, recreating digital identities; digital networked spaces create multiple representational identities that have multiple dynamics where people are invariably engaged with other network communities by exchanging their cross-cultural knowledge and experiences. Additionally, in this networked world, being connected to global communities in one form or the other is not a problem, for technologies do not have any physical and political borders and for technologies themselves do not tend to be ideological (technologies do not favor one group of people over the others). Due to technology’s physical and political borderlessness, global citizens are connected to other communities as long as they have computing devices and Internet access. We know that one cannot possess a personal digital identity and digital voice unless the user is connected to the Internet and NKCs, but once people are connected to the cloud whether they come from the East, West, North, and South, or even from the space, they have glocal (global + local) identities and voices across the cultures.

The twenty-first century NKS is both local and global where people from any corner of the world can participate in the online discussions, webinars, and protests.

Furthermore, NKC is changing the twenty-first century’s global networked communication; it is transforming the traditional concept of academia, communication, writing, and globalization. For instance, Dobrin, Rice, and Vastola (2011), concerning technology and writing, state:

Like their predecessors, new media technologies certainly change how writing happens and how we might theorize those happenings. From RSS feeds and aggregate search engines to desktop publishing and social-networking sites, new-media technologies create spaces for writing practices that, in their very inscriptive moment, interrogate and equalize the ideas of space, politics, knowledge, and language, to name a few. (p. 8) Similarly, in the twenty-first century’s NKCs, not only daily knowledge of composing and communication is getting wider (as well as smaller), but also the notion of networking, cultures, and linguistic concepts is also becoming heterogeneous. Jack Lule (2012) furthermore states, “Globalization is not one process but multiple processes—economics, politics, and culture. And these processes are not new. They have deep historical roots. And they overlap and influence one another through time” (p. 31). However, what we should understand from the twenty-first century’s NKCs is globalization is not overlapping cultures; cultures are not becoming homogenous, but heterogeneous.

Lule’s phenomenal argument is that globalization process is multiple ones, which also have deep historical roots, and the notion of globalization process often time informs one another over the period of time (also see Cohen, 2006). In short, in the twenty-first century networked era, we reside in heterogeneities, meaning, people do not have universal language, universal cultural conditions, and universal communication patterns. Moreover, although global citizens have heterogeneous cultures and languages, due to their constant digital interactions on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, and Tagged, they are attaining diverse global literacies without significant barriers posed by the geopolitical locations, languages, cultures, and everyday social practices.

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BLURRING SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES IN THE NKCs Since people are constantly engaged in crosscultural conversation via social networking spaces—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, and Google Hangouts, the networked engagement not only lessens cultural, political, and linguistic gaps, but also illuminates cultural blind spots and blurs the traditional cultural, political, and linguistic dichotomies. The blurring of cultures is chiefly triggered by the advent of Web 2.0, cloud, and social networking sites, and this transformation occurs through web collaboration, document sharing, content creation, web publication, and day-to-day digital interaction (in the virtual spaces). These networked spaces also tend to lessen hierarchies, political borders, social and cultural boundaries, political conditions; and these digital interactions tend to reduce cultural and linguistic distances, and they tend to illuminate cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical blind spots. This section focuses on how people use technologies to blur cultural and linguistic and political conditions (gaps), such as the traditional concept of East and West and “Us” and “them.” It also focuses on how NKC reduces cultural gaps and illuminates geopolitical blind spots. The notion of blurring the cultural and geopolitical boundaries does not mean that the cultural characteristics are universal, but they are heterogeneous. In other words, the blurring of cultural and geopolitical boundaries via digital technologies lessens the hierarchical distances between communities, people, and cultures. In so doing, digital technologies both expose local cultures and communities to the global level and show linguistic and geo-political conditions.

In the NKCs, people use a complex set of digital communication tools that allow them to share their cultural and political experiences. In this setting, people also tend to create digital theoretical and practical models to address cultural and geo-political issues, which include sharing stories,

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connecting narratives, commenting, and critiquing on the shared content. The NKC facilitated by social networking spaces makes cross-cultural conversation move a step beyond the traditional ethnocentric communities. In this process, “Social media can become a participatory forum where people with common interests can come together, become empowered, and ultimately join efforts to improve their communities” (Harp, Bachmann, & Guo, 2012, p. 298). In such digital networked conversations, people construct their digital contents from their cultural narratives, practices, and values.

In so doing, people exchange their knowledge, such as their cultural conditions, social values, and beliefs. From this perspective, new media, in contemporary NKCs, are the primary human social field and agency that reduce the cultural and geopolitical gaps.

The cross-cultural engagement also exposes the fact that, within NKCs, interactions, such as sharing, interacting, or discoursing, serve as democratic digital discourse because “[c]omputer interfaces … are sites within which the ideological and material legacies of racism, sexism, and colonialism are continuously written and rewritten along with more positive cultural legacies” (Selfe & Selfe, 2004, p. 431). Cross-cultural networked engagement is a new digital pedagogical tool that channels people’s digital engagement processes, lifestyles, and sense of agencies; cross-cultural engagement energizes people’s sense of imagination by producing multiple meanings via global NKCs. In this regard, networked spaces inspire people to constantly interact and share their life styles, social problems, and political issues; they constantly inform their audience about the local cultural and political issues. Harp, Bachmann, and Guo (2012) contend, “[s]ocial media help people to be active in political and civic arenas and help promote dialogue” (p. 313), and cross-cultural engagement aids people to participate in dialogues to invent and promote their political movement to reform cultural and political conditions in their communities. For instance, activists in China,

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including various parts of the world, use social media and other cloud tools to promote political debates by sending message, organizing protests, and sharing information in local and global communities (Harp, Bachmann, & Guo, 2012). And indigenous and minority people across the world are connecting to other indigenous and minority groups and are discoursing (sharing, interacting, and constructing pedagogies) to empower their communities and themselves. Likewise, because of the constant interaction in the NKCs, many autocratic rulers have been already dethroned, and many dictators will be disempowered across the globe. The recent cultural and political transformations in Nepal (see Edingo’s chapter in this collection), disempowerment of the Libyan president, and the digital war in Egypt, Yemen, and Syria are some realistic instances to exhibit how NKCs challenge atrocities and create democratic and inclusive spaces, or NKCs reveal how people via digital communication can subvert power and politics according to the needs and expectations of twenty-first century digitized world.

The NKCs also invariably seem to globalize the local socio-political issues and localize the democratic global practices via cross-cultural interaction because through cross-cultural networked communication, people are able to transform their sense of agencies, such as who they are, what they are, and what identities they have in the local as well as global network communities. In so doing, people via NKCs will transform their cultural and political life styles and communities in meaningful ways despite the cultural and political obstacles. For example, in Libya, people via social media challenged the Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year’s autocratic reign and compelled him to give up his presidential power. So, transnational social media engagement is a digital revolution that is resulting in social and political shifts not only in Libya, but also across the globe. The NKC provides people with a sense of entitlement that they are not only important members in their communities, but they are also leading global citizens in this NKCs, and

they can play a fundamental role to blur a cultural and political gaps in any corner of the world.

Similarly, Lule (2012) believes, “In the context of political globalization, many people hope that new media and digital technology can improve politics in the global village” for which Lule draws example from Tunisia and Egypt to demonstrate how “new media can allow alternative voices within and across borders;” how “new media will enlarge the public sphere;” and how “new media can offer the opportunity for more people to be involved with political action and civil society” (p. 114). He further argues that new media do indeed have dramatic political implication due to their mobile, interactive, and participatory features. Unlike the past, mobile devices as well as data services are less expensive and people can afford them. In these smartphones, literally everything converges, i.e., they are equipped with advanced computing potentials through which people text and post photos, video, and music online to mention a few. This advanced computing capability and Internet connectivity from anywhere, any time, and by any person enables people as powerful journalists, for they can stream and share their current news and views with other NKC members. This setting more often than not challenges and questions traditional binaries of majority vs. minority, ruler vs. ruled, and West vs.

East. Moreover, NKC blurs cultural and political boundaries and creates a democratic spaces for those who participate in the NKCs. Via such global networked journalism, “[a]ctivists from around the globe can network and coordinate plans on their demonstrations and protests. Bloggers and online newspapers can find new outlets and audience to challenge government and authority” (Lule, 2012, p. 114). The NKC brings global citizens together regardless of the cultural and geopolitical conditions, and they together revolt against atrocities to attain democratic government for themselves.

The networked cross-cultural engagements reveal how global citizens blur physical, cultural, political, and linguistic boundaries, and how they

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assist each other as global citizens. In the NKCs, people do not work as fragmented and isolated beings, but as collective powers of the networked global village. Networked global citizens raise higher level of critical and analytical questions, such as how they can use such cloud potentials to enrich cross-cultural rhetorics; how they can use these global rhetorics to educate and restructure their traditional cultural institutions (racism, sexism, and oppression), and what roles rhetoric scholars, institutions, and administrators have to play. Overall, we, in the twenty-first century’s networked world, understand that this is the era of global NKCs, and we should bring global peace, progress, and prosperity in the global village through global intercultural engagement.

EMERGING PEDAGOGIES IN THE NKSs/NKCs WITHIN WEB 2.0 AND CLOUD ERA The meaning of pedagogy in the twenty-first century networked world is different from the traditional one. In the past, the concept of pedagogy was limited within classroom teaching and learning activities. Now the concept of pedagogy is not unified; it is not mechanical, but discursive and slippery (also see Gurung, 2013). Pedagogy is a process of creating knowledge, disseminating knowledge, and consuming knowledge. From this perspective, as Hooks (2005) contends, pedagogy is where knowledge is, and knowledge is where pedagogy is. Traditionally, people who had power and privilege more often than not created knowledge in order to distinguish differences based on the cultures, races, color, languages, gender, sexual orientations, and geopolitical locations.

In the past, a group of people who had political power, economic power, and military power created knowledge based on the interest of certain groups of people and institutions. However, after the inception of Web 2.0, we can observe distinct cultural epistemic shifts in terms of creating

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knowledges and disseminating them (which are some sites of emerging pedagogies). And emerging pedagogies by nature are more inclusive, global, and representational, and in emerging pedagogies, people can network together regardless of their socio-economic, cultural, and political conditions.

They can equally create their newer realities and can disseminate them around the world. In other words, emerging pedagogies do not favor one group of people over another. This section focuses on some sites of emerging pedagogies and their global impacts in the twenty-first century’s networked global village.

As stated prior, different people and cultures interpret “pedagogy” in different ways. However, I believe that pedagogy is where knowledge is, knowledge is where pedagogy is (see Hooks, 2005), and people create knowledge through various social institutions among them, schools, religious places, and film industries. The crucial point about these institutions is that they have power to construct knowledge, disseminate knowledge, and shape knowledge to fulfill their needs and expectations. Moreover, pedagogy not only invents classroom teaching and learning strategies, but also seeks ways of creating knowledge and exchanging knowledge across NKCs, such as within and beyond classrooms and communities.

Now, pedagogy became a concept that introduces and reintroduces cultural materials that shapes and reshapes individual identities through digital engagement in real as well as virtual spaces. In this digital engagement process, people cultivate cultural and cross-cultural critical and analytical thinking. More importantly, pedagogy facilitates people’s critical thinking, which is important in the twenty-first century’s digital age because critical thinking is the heart of human understanding; it is a powerful force that constructs human agencies and identities. Therefore, pedagogy prepares students, including global citizens, as digitally critical networked community members, and it strongly identifies who they are, what identities

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they have, and what spaces they occupy in this world as glocal network community members.

Cloud-based collaborative and interactive networked pedagogies engage students, including global citizens, in digital spaces in which they learn to question and challenge traditional ideologies to create newer epistemologies. Cloud-based networked pedagogies also invite students and global citizens as cultural ambassadors, historians, and ethnographers in the center where they can bring their academic literacies, cultural literacies, and their rhetorical strategies (Beauvais, 2002; Limbu, 2012). In this networked space, global citizens learn how knowledge, understanding, and writing are situated, and how they can re/design them for their own purposes. Such digital engagement constantly offers people opportunities to share their choices and explore how they should efficiently and effectively collaborate and co/create knowledge for the sake of both their communities and the global village. In this setting, networked knowledge pedagogy both unites people for global peace, progress, and prosperity and prepares them for global collaboration, cooperation, and competition by connecting local cultural narratives and literacies to the global level and vice versa.

This conversation suggests that as global citizens are constantly networking via social media and cloud spaces, NKCs invent newer global pedagogical theories and practices. In this process, networked knowledge pedagogies not only lessen the traditional monocultural, monolingual, and ethnocentric ideologies, but also illuminate the cultural and geopolitical blind spots. Networked knowledge pedagogies reduce the traditional Western and non-Western cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries. In the NKCs, people will be able to minimize cultural communication gaps and will be able to reinforce academic, professional, cultural, and business relations. Via networked knowledge pedagogy, people understand that they are not isolated individual persons, but they live in the global village with their global colleagues.

Via such conversation, people learn that they have

to think globally and act locally. In other words, networked pedagogy prepares people for the next generation of global educators and leaders for academia and global communities.

Similarly, NKCs, saturated by digital and cloud technologies, facilitate transnational knowledge exchange, global literacies, and cross-cultural knowledge exchange. And transnational pedagogical literacies expose newer networked pedagogies (digital, cultural, and multicultural literacies) by sparking newer pedagogical challenges and possibilities. This setting not only further generates global conversation for NKC, but also facilitates cross-cultural conversation to further cultivate the NKCs. The sites of networked conversations are impetuses that ignite higher-degree of questions, such as how global education can be reinvented to meet the needs and expectations of transcultural and transnational students, how cross-cultural and transnational classrooms facilitated by hightech courses should be designed, how academia and societies ought to be reformed, and how we should produce human power, and how we can address burning issues we are encountering in our academic institutions, businesses, and cultures.

SITES OF EMERGING ACADEMIC COMMUNITIES IN THE NKCs Today’s pedagogical shifts inform how rapidly human knowledge is shifting after the emergence of the Internet, Web 2.0, and the cloud. The current history of digital technology demonstrates that “technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate)” (Kurzweil, 2011).

Because of the digital shift, we now also observe that texts are becoming intensely digital and multimodal, that is, image is ever-increasingly appearing with writing, and in many domains of communication, displacing writing where it

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has previously been dominant (Dobrain, Rice, & Vastola, 2011; Kress, 2010). Similarly, we also detect that “[s]creens (of the digital media) are replacing the page and the book as the dominant media,” and “[s]ocial structures and social relations are undergoing fundamental changes, as far as writing is concerned, predominantly in changes of structures of authority, and in the effects of changing gender formations” (Kress, 2010, p. 6).

Now, modes and mediums of writing and other forms of communications are transforming, such as the traditional medium of the book and the mode of writing had formed a centuries-long symbiotic constellation that is rapidly being displaced by the screen. For instance, Dobrain, Rice, and Vastola (2011) also state: … for the past twenty-five years the study of computers and writing have theorized how digital writing technologies have changed the writing situation from a linear, print-based model to a dynamic, interactive, and public enterprise.

Like their predecessors, new media technologies certainly change how writing happens and how we might theorize those happenings … in many ways, new-media technologies writing scenes reconceive composition studies’ traditional images, rhetorics, pedagogies, philosophies, and so on as economically equivalent … These technologies articulate a different informational environment, where knowledge production is not limited to an aggregate collaboration between scribal agents. (pp. 8-9) This suggests that new-media technologies are one of the impetuses that shift pedagogies in academia; they change the writing scenes and communication modes; they reconceive composition studies’ traditional images, rhetorics, pedagogies, and philosophies as economically equivalent elements.

Pedagogically, our major concern is not how we taught in the past and how we teach now, but how we will teach the students who are currently

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preparing themselves for the schools and colleges, and what pedagogical spaces we should create and how we should them in this digital world. In this digital world, before students join colleges/ schools, they are prepared by themselves to create texts on the screens. Similarly, we also meet students in our writing classes who come from oral communities and are predominantly oral. These student populations might be better skilled to create sound bites (multimodal texts) than written texts.

For instance, I, myself, grew up in oral-dominant, indigenous Limbu community and felt comfortable expressing my thoughts, ideas, and other cultural narratives orally. Later, when I joined academic institutions Eastern and Western respectively, my oral literacy was validated by neither of them.

My oral rhetorical strategies were intervened by traditionally established Eastern and especially by Western academia and by my instructors/teachers’ pedagogical strategies. Like me, many students who come from oral-dominant cultures, including indigenous students, get stuck between these two cultures (oral and written). In other words, these emerging student populations find the Western academic institutions, their assessment criteria, and other policies as obstacles to succeed. Similarly, nowadays, we also see young generations self-educating to compose on the screens than on the paper. Thus, we can observe how paper-based writing explicitly or implicitly should shift into multimodal, screen, and digital writing because whether traditional institutions and instructors intervene transnational/transcultural students’ rhetorical strategies and composing skills, they are the future planners and designers of this digital world.

Our conservative ideology cannot stop what they want, and how they want to design this world. So, this emerging student body (indigenous, minority, and technology savvy students) will change our knowledge how writings should happen as they happen. This epistemic shift urges us to raise questions: how we should theorize newer pedagogies that address the emerging pedagogical sites, how we should translate the principles (theories)

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into the practices (multimodal and transcultural classroom practices), how the emerging pedagogy should benefit diverse student body, and how it should benefit the twenty-first century culture, education, and business.

The NKCs not only profoundly impacted social, cultural, and political communities, but also drastically shook the traditional academic institutions. They transformed from paper-based to screen/digital based-academic institutions.

For instance, in most of the twenty-first century classrooms, whether digital technologies are enthusiastically used or not, they are equipped with newer technologies, among them smart boards, projectors, screen, Internet, and multimodal technologies. Likewise, cloud sites are designed to facilitate interaction from multiple and anonymous users—YouTube, blogs, social-networking sites, wikis, and so on—do not relegate knowledge and writing practices to a particular method, group formation, or environment. Rather, these sites reorganize, remix, and mash up information as a temporary instance in an indeterminable context.

These sites allow users to create and upload files and then revise and reject, produce a channel, create multimodal responses to other users’ contents (Dobrin, Rice, & Vastola, 2011).

Similarly, as I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, academic institutions are meeting multilingual and multicultural student populations from different geopolitical and cultural settings that are also shifting the norms and values of the traditional pedagogies. In other words, technologies, globalization, and migration patterns are transforming ethnocentric institutions into global institutions and monolingual institutions are moving toward multilingual ones. For instance, historically, U.S. colleges and universities used to be ethnocentric and monolingual; later they opened their doors to a wider variety of students by the nineteenth century and late twentieth century, and the demographics in higher education began to reflect the cultural and linguistic diversity of the larger society (Matsuda, 2006). Gradually, the

number of multilingual and multicultural students increased when U.S. universities accepted varied student populations. As a result, U.S. universities by theory no longer remained the monolingual and mono-cultural spaces as they used to be. According to the 2000 U.S. census, there were 3.5 million foreign students born U.S. residents between the ages of 19 to 24 along with 5.5 million English language learners in the U.S. public schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2000). Likewise, the institute of traditional education (2004) shows that there were 572,509 international students representing 4.3 percent of the total U.S. higher education enrollment, studying at colleges and universities during the 2003-2004 academic year.

Frey’s (2010) research also demonstrates that the recession-era boom in the size of freshman classes at four-year colleges and community colleges has been driven by a sharp increase in non-traditional student enrollment. Frey’s research also demonstrates that the Hispanic population grew by 15%, the black student population by 8%, and the Asian student population by 6% in 2007-2008 (p. 1). As I mentioned in the beginning, in my own writing classes, I meet multilingual, multicultural, and multiliterate students from at least six to ten different countries, which are both emerging global classroom sites (physical and virtual sites) as well as emerging challenges (from global pedagogical perspectives) to the instructors who were educated in the traditional ethnocentric academic institutions and still perpetuate traditional pedagogical theories and practices.

To address the previously mentioned diverse student populations, emerging sites, and challenges, institutions should invent newer pedagogies that better meet the needs, expectations, and purpose of the heterogeneous student populations (e.g. transcultural and transnational students); and such pedagogies should change the way people learn, read, perceive, and process information in the globalized world. Likewise, institutions should seek ways of transforming their traditional administrative policies and pedagogical practices

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into global ones by changing their policies, curricula, and employment issues. In other words, it is always easy to address the issues (the presence of transcultural students and transnational institutions), but always difficult to practice them in any institutions if universities do not fundamentally create democratic and inclusive policies from the administrative level. As long as we do not change the institutional policies to address the transcultural student body, the use of cloud computing and Web 2.0 alone cannot create pedagogies that address transcultural and transnational student issues.

As members of digital global village what we should understand is that transformations of traditional institutional practices, policies, and curricula support globalization and global institutions, and when we democratically and inclusively design curricula, courses, course materials, and assessment criteria, diverse student populations will feel safer in any academic institutions here in the U.S. and beyond. Thus, such reformation in academia facilitates students’ learning processes, and it assists students from different cultural and academic background to express their narratives via emerging pedagogical tools, such as blogs, vlogs, YouTube, and audio/video texts. When we practice such pedagogies, students get opportunities to collaborate, create, and share global literacies in the networked classroom settings (see Limbu, 2012). Furthermore, it is obvious that networked knowledge pedagogy (emerging pedagogy) is a both serious challenge and a threat. And, it sparks series of questions, such as how do the academia operate in the context of the twenty-first century globalized digital village?

How do we address the emerging pedagogies, such as transnational classrooms, multilingual and multiliterate students, online classes, flipped classrooms, hybrid classes, and (MOOCs)? How do we discontinue to perpetuate the traditional monolingual, monoculture, and ethnocentric pedagogical ideology? More importantly, how do we stop shutting off the external world by cocoon-

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ing ourselves in our hegemonic, ideological, and ethnocentric institutions?

As I mentioned prior, the twenty-first century’s NKCs show that knowledge dissemination has become easier, faster, and cheaper via digital technologies, and because of these settings, newer pedagogies are emerging across the cultures.

These newer pedagogies demonstrate that we, as twenty-first century voyager are entering into a newer pedagogical journey to which many of us may not be familiar with. However, in the journey, we are being accompanied by diverse groups of people, such as transnational, transcultural, and multilingual (also see Lamsal, 2013). In this journey, winners will be those who accept the sites of emerging pedagogies (technologies, cloud pedagogies, global pedagogies, and transcultural pedagogies) and those who ignore may be potential losers, and might repent when it is already too late. Therefore, this could be the right time to contemplate over the series of questions that I implied earlier: how we create globally recognized pedagogical methodologies to become a globally recognized institutions; how we can initiate global rhetoric, writing, and communication instructions and research methodologies; how we practice the theories of global academia in our rhetoric and writing studies programs; how we can initiate school differently, for instance, credit model to competency model, principle model to practice model, and local model to global model.

More importantly, before we redesign inclusive global curricula/courses and restructure global academy, we may have to research and understand how people are practicing emerging pedagogies to educate students in Asia, Europe, and other parts of the world. What pedagogical approaches are they implementing and how are they connecting to them? Similarly, we also should research to seek how global citizens are addressing the emerging global cultural issues, political issues, and business issues across the cultures, what makes them significantly succeed and fail, and how they maintain failures. As implied earlier,

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in this global village, we will continue to face multicultural and multilingual students since the US is already a multicultural country. So as West (2002) and Valdez (1992) opine, we should create a safe place for students where they should not be chastised for bringing their cultural narratives and individual experiences. We should learn to respect students’ cultural resources they bring in with them; even indigenous students from oral culture should be allowed to create audio/ video texts (that they are comfortable with) and they gradually can transfer multimodal to written text (if they have to); and we should not only romanticize the digital globalization and diverse students’ presence in the class (also see Matsuda & Matsuda, 2012), but we have to invent universities, social institutions, and technologies that are more inclusive and representational and also better address the needs, purposes, and expectations of the twenty-first century audiences.

DIGITAL NETWORKED SOCIETY ON THE BRINK: PROMBLES AND CONCERNS IN THE DIGITAL GLOBAL COMMUNITIES Adam Banks (2006), Moran (1999), Hawisher and Selfe (1999), and Norris (2001) mention that technology literacy or digital divide brought a significant “despair” to the poor people, people of color, and illiterate people, and a “hope” only to the rich people. It is evident that digital technologies and digital literacies have deteriorated the webbed world by bringing a massive digital divide between different race, class, and gender.

In other words, in the world saturated by digital technologies, developed countries and affluent communities continue adopting advanced technologies whereas the developing countries and poor communities will not be able to afford for the digital technologies, which will further create gaps between developed countries and developing countries and rich people and poor people (people

of color, minorities, and indigenous people). The gaps will be inevitable, for those who have access to the Internet and advanced technologies can globally collaborate, share, and create knowledge. The people with such privilege are prepared to enter into twenty-first century’s academic, business, and political world, whereas, the poor people will not be able to afford such digital technologies and will not be able to collaborate with other global network community members. So, when the NKCs come into discussion, we unconditionally cannot discount the “digital divide” between “haves” and “have-nots” (see Barker, 2008). Although many of us romanticize the use of cloud computing tools, digital technologies, and NKCs, there is unequal construction, diffusion, and development of digital technologies, which realistically creates “knowledge gap” between these two groups—haves and have-nots (also see Epstein 2011; van Dijk, 2006).

Furthermore, although knowledge accumulation, consumption, and dissemination has become easier for the rich people in the NKCs, a large group of “have-nots” do not have the access to modern access to information technology. For instance, Epstein (2011) states: … the media, information, and communication technologies have demonstrated an impressive growth in the past two decades, offering new platforms for communication and continuously opening up new questions about their social role. On the other hand, questions of poverty, dispersion, and socioeconomic underdevelopment remain today as relevant as they were two decades ago. The changes and the challenges imposed by the substantive domains are at the basis of the debate surrounding the “digital divide” and are the driving force behind the attempts to conceptualize it. (p. 128) It suggests that advanced technologies are creating “knowledge gaps,” which is resulting in different worlds, different communities, and different academic institutions within a community

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and across the globe as well. The digital divide not only is widening the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots,” but also extending the gap between the developed and developing nations.

To further discuss how the advanced technologies are creating different communities, worlds, and academic institutions, I would like to bring my own experience. For instance, in the summer of 2013, I went to Nepal to visit my family, relatives, and friends (after nine years). During the visit, I had to communicate with my colleagues from around the world, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Iran, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey, Nigeria, and India to name a few.

For the communication purpose and for my own writing projects, I wanted to get a high-speed Internet service while I was in the Limbuwan, Nepal—mostly in Dhankuta and Tehrathum. As Nepal Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) and Ncell’s fast Internet services were limited only in some part of the country, neither of them could provide me the service. However, these companies have mobile phone services in the Limbuwan region; so, I bought Ncell’s 2g and NTC’s 3g Internet services so that I could use either one or both of them to communicate, but these services were also too slow to check even my regular emails. Some of the local people had landline Internet service, but it was also too slow to check my “Dropbox” documents, Google Drive documents, and images. The reason I am bringing up this account is despite the fact that people want to network with other global partners, they are still left behind from the twenty-first century’s cloud journey. This situation suggests that the issues of the Internet connectivity is not always because of the socio-economic status, class, and color of people, but it is also due to political reasons and geographical locations. In my hometown, there were many people who wanted and could afford the faster Internet service, but they were not provided it due to geographical conditions and political situations. Overall, even though people want to network with global communities, they cannot

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connect with global NKCs because of the type of Internet connection they have, the frequency of Internet access they do have, and state policies.

It is obvious that despite the power and potential of technologies and NKCs, people still get excluded from the twenty-first century NKCs. In other words, although we are entering into digitally networked global village, we are encountering diverse issues across the globe that are much more political and cultural. The digital divide is political because as long as the government does not provide logistic support and infrastructure, people are always disconnected from the NKCs. For instance, there are many nations, such as China, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, UAE, and Indonesia that have state censorship over the social networking sites—Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (“who banned,” 2013). Because of the censorships, people will not be able to network with other global fellow partners; they will not able to collaborate, share, and co/create with global fellow colleagues. It is obvious that Internet has become ubiquitous, but because of poverty, geographical locations, and political situations, people cannot digitally network; they cannot connect themselves to other twenty-first century NKCs, and they cannot participate in the global cultural, academic, and political discussions. My typical circumstance in the Limbuwan region, Nepal is a good instance; and Chinese, Iranian, Pakistani, and Indonesian are some other examples. This situation suggests that despite their interest in participating in cultural, professional, and political discussions with their other global coworkers, people are separated from the NKCs. We, in this context, cannot imagine how people can live in the digital village; how they can communicate with their fellow partners; how students of twenty-first century can take online courses; how they can take MOOCs; and how they can develop individual profiles and professional careers. These scenarios raise questions, such as how can, we, as a part of networked world, bring poor people to join us in the NKC journey? What are some alternatives to engage

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all global citizens to the digital culture (NKCs)?

And how can we eliminate the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots”?

In many developed countries like the US, the concept of Internet has almost become invisible, i.e., when people talk about computer, Internet is already tied to it, and a majority of people also can afford it. However, a digital divide still exists due to people’s “resistance” to digital technologies. For instance, although schools, universities, and other social institutions are equipped with Internet and other advanced digital technologies, some instructors tend to resist to technology use, including social networking sites and other digital technologies. So, resistance to technology may be gradually creating the gaps between the technology users and non-users or digitally untrained and (well) trained people. On the other hand, in many developing countries, people take computer and Internet as two different entities. They might be exposed to computers and digital devices, but as they do not have an access to the Internet, they are not exposed to interactive networking sites, micro-blogging, and digital collaborative environments. This is also one of the circumstances that creates digital divide between developed and developing countries and also technology users and non-users. More importantly, in this digital village, both white color and blue color jobs require a basic working knowledge of computers and the Internet, and since majority of people (minorities, indigenous people, and poor people) from developing countries do not have access to the Internet, they cannot be able to compete with other digitally literate people. In other words, skilled technology users and non-users widen the gaps, for the non-users of technologies can neither compete for high-paying multinational company jobs, nor they can compete for general white and blue color jobs. Those who resist the NKCs and digital technologies should also reckon that NKCs have potential to liberate people from atrocities, discrimination, and racism, sexism, and geopolitical division. They should also understand that

NKCs play a vital role to bring a global change via digital engagement.

Similarly, other digital divide issues we observe are that, “digital natives” (Pensky, 2008; Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), who were born in digital era appear to have graver consequences, as young media users have developed behavioral patterns and habits with implications for reading, writing, and learning.

Among them are the tendency to multitask that reduce learning abilities and increase susceptibility to irrelevant information, such as shorter attention spans and distractibility, preference for immediate experience and gratification, and loss of impulse control fostered by the intense visual environment presented by games; and generalized information overload, with negative consequences for decision making (Harrison, 2011, p. 118).

Although we tend to advocate for the revolutionary use of cloud tools, we can also demonstrate how NKCs and networking tools distract people and students from their work. For instance, I have seen people addicted to social media, spending most of their time doing unproductive work. And students also get distracted while they are in the midst of the class, they frequently glance their social networking spaces rather than focusing on their assignments/lessons (Limbu, 2011).

Furthermore, digital networks lack global governance; we do not have unified digital nations; we have not yet built digital (cultural, linguistic, and political) trusts across the cultures. And neither do we have explicit parameters on intellectual property, nor we have explicitly addressed the issues of ownership of digital media in the twenty-first century’s globalized digital village.

To address these issues and the NKCs, we have to have strict global digital governance—digital global rules and regulations. Likewise, we, digital humanities, rhetoric and NKCs, ought to introduce as a new discipline—rhetoric and global digital Humanities—across the globe; we ought to do more research to demonstrate that rhetoric as emerging pedagogy can create better diverse global institutions in order to liberate people from

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socio-political atrocities, discriminations, racism, and sexism. Most importantly, digital and global literacy is important, for we do not know how education will look like, we do not know how government will look like, and we do not know how cultures will look like in the mid and late twenty-first century’s digital world.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

through NKCs and should extend research to find out how interactive digital tools and collaborative tasks can better facilitate next generation learning approaches (without implanting ethnocentric ideologies). Overall, the NKC inquiries, theories, and practices should guide our students and global citizens to explain how newer NKC theories and pedagogies can be designed for the global peace, progress, and prosperity.

REFERENCES The twenty-first century NKCs accentuate the process of digital collaboration, creation, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge and facilitate how network communities are impacting cultural and academic epistemic shifts. Although this chapter mostly contrives the use of digital technologies and cultural epistemic shifts, the issues of getting connected to global communities still seem to be problematic to many community members across the world. So, although many of us live and breathe in the cloud in the twentyfirst century digital village, the praxis of digital technologies still remains cloudy to many global citizens. Conclusively, as the NKC is one of the most important foundations in the digital age, our research should explore the ways of developing and strengthening newer global NKC theories and translating them into practices. We should also encourage our students and colleagues to examine how they can further develop potential and possibilities of digital technologies and digital global literacies in the NKCs. Moreover, rhetoric and digital humanities should provide a setting in which open dialogue and inquiries should be initiated and welcomed to better address the next generation’s learning approaches, emerging theories, and practices. Our research should justify that NKCs and networked inquiries are powerful approaches to address global socio-political issues and global cultural tensions. Therefore, networked dialogues should open up learning

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Cross-Cultural Communication: it is a form of global communication that seeks to understand how people from different culture, geographical locations, and geopolitical condition communicate.

Epistemic Shifts: It refers to knowledge shift, such how the globalized world is shifting from analog to digital, monomodal to multimodal, monoculture to multiculture, and how it is changing the traditional concept and theory into newer networked knowledge over time.

Global Literacies: it is about understanding, evaluating, and appreciating cultures, people, politics, religions, and education systems from across the globe.

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Knowledge-Based Economy: it refers to computer (technology) and human interaction and how human-computer interaction can produce knowledge as a tool, and how computer and human communication can generate cultural, economic, and political values.

Network Knowledge Societies: It is a combination of society, technology, and human and how they shape knowledge, or how technologies, community members, organizations, and academic institutions shape knowledge. In NKS knowledge

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is a product of human and computer interaction made up of digitally networked members. NKS also is an invention of the twenty-first century globalized citizens and global cultures.

Networked Knowledge Communities: It is a combination of community, technology (media network), and human that is shaped by community networked members. In NKC knowledge is a product of network knowledge community members; it is also an invention of the twenty-first century globalized citizens and global cultures.