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As Digitally Mediated Communication increasingly becomes a dimension of everyday life across the globe, a greater number of individuals have access to newer ways of engaging in learning practices on-the-go. Learning here, i.e. in institutionalized educational settings like the videoconferencing program Adobe Connect explicitly can be conceptualized in terms of participation in distributed networks of relationships across both physical geopolitical as well as virtual spaces.

The study presented here is interested in (i) examining the nature of languaging ‘in situ’ in digital institutional learning settings like virtual classroom, including the types of practices that unfold at the boundaries of different glocal communities, and (ii) throwing light upon the relationship(s) between the openness and parallel closure of online glocal spaces. We draw upon ethnographic data from a project at the CCD[1] research group in Sweden. Our anthropologically framed study takes sociocultural and postcolonial perspectives as points of departure and focuses upon screen recordings of online sessions of an Italian for Beginners course (80 hours) offered by a Swedish university.

Sociocultural and postcolonial perspectives on culture, language and identity allow us to empirically investigate how students in cyber communities negotiate and co-construct SpaceTime as a single dimension during the institutionally framed agenda of an online language course focused in this study. We argue that in order to understand and empirically study such encounters (or sites of engagement) it is fruitful to use the epistemological lenses of TimeSpace as well as the postcolonial concepts of Third Space and Hybridity. This allows us an analytical shift in focus, from what happens inside a space or a community, to what occurs at the boundaries, in-between (virtual) spaces.

Our results highlight the need to focus the distributed-discursive and the discursive-technological constitution of participants’ worlds i.e. humans-in-concert-with-artifacts in the shared space(s) of the virtual classroom, where the boundaries of what is real-tangible and what is curtailed-obscure become both fluid-diffuse and concrete-tangible. Dismantling notions of one nation-one language, facilitated by emerging media practices, it is suggested, also challenges dominant language ideologies based on monolingual-monomodal communication.

[1]www.oru.se/humus/ccd/