Is It Adequate to Model the Socio-cultural Dimension of E-learners by Informing a Fixed Set of Personal Criteria?

Over the past few years, interest has increased in proposing efficient techniques to capture and model cognitive and affective characteristics of e-learners. More recently, research has started investigating the development of culturally-aware educational technology. Indeed, cultures are known to strongly impact how people interpret their surrounding environment, hence generating cognitive and affective biases that could impact computer-supported educational activities. Consequently, educational technologies trying to become culturally-aware need to develop a socio-cultural model of their learner. In this regard, many previous projects have used a fixed set of socio-cultural criteria. It is the purpose of this paper to show that this approach is not necessarily good since the acceptability and relevance of many criteria may vary from one cultural context to another.