Culturally-specific Aspects of ICT Application in Educational Practices

In the last few years researchers’ interest in the latest tendencies and developments in creating information and communication technologies (ICT) for educational needs has increased noticeably. Nevertheless, today there are not so many researches dealing with the educational trends and ICTs in a cross-cultural context. Because of the globalization and mass informatization of society most of the countries are being involved into the global electronic educational environment. In spite of that, some of them face certain difficulties implementing ICT in education. These problems can be caused by poorly developed IT-infrastructure or cultural peculiarities of the educational system. It is claimed in this research that the extrapolation of western experience in non-western societies is irrelevant because western modernization strategies were developed for the Western countries and can be not suitable for non-western societies because do not consider their national characteristics. This study is an attempt to determine and analyze the influence of socio-cultural features on the effectiveness of the ICTs application in educational systems of different countries. The hypothesis of this study is the assumption that the modernization of educational institutes can be successful if it is implemented according to national socio-cultural peculiarities. Also I claim that differences in the level of ICTs’ development and differentiation of national educational systems are caused by the socio-cultural peculiarities, the level of globalization and innovative development of the country. I use the statistical analysis of empirical data and define the specifics of the Eastern and Western models of education in order to consider the problem of ICTs’ application in educational institutes in a cross-cultural context. The results of the research have shown that socio-cultural peculiarities do have a great impact on the IETs’ implementation in different cultures.