Education, digital inclusion and sustainable online communities

Over the last decade, significant contributions have been made to a better understanding of sustainability and education. However, very little has been researched on sustainable education in the digital society. In new digital environments, collaborative practices, hybrid contexts, distributed knowledge or shared responsibility give rise to new approaches to the relationship between education, participation and digital inclusion - central constructs of sustainable education. In this chapter, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze the relations between online communities, participation and digital inclusion. Sustainable education is interpreted as a shared and interactive process and is associated to community development across collaborative practices. In this framework, sustainable online communities embody the change of educational cultures. The chapter is divided into four main parts. First, it provides a theoretical analysis of a collaborative and networking culture that underlies sustainable online communities. Second, it examines digital participation and literacy with regard to access and use, and as a means of participation equity and empowerment in social and educational practices. Third, the relationship between digital inclusion and gender in social networks is explored, taking into account some results from a research project on this topic. The chapter concludes by connecting digital inclusion and empowering practices with a view to developing sustainable online education