Prof. Golan is a faculty member in the Department of Learning and Teaching Sciences and the Department of Leadership and Policy in Education. He graduated with a PhD from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he specialized in researching youth activity on the Internet. Golan taught and was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University and Northwestern University in the USA . At the University of Haifa, he worked to create a body that studies the relationship between communities, the study of new media and education, and we are an active member of international associations in Internet Research (AoIR), Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and Media and Religion Research (ISMRC).

Interests

Golan investigates the ways in which the foundations of modernity, primarily the Internet and the new media, influence the formation of informal behavior patterns, including playfulness and resistance to authority and hierarchical control.

Golan investigates social, cultural and educational transformations that are growing in the new media era, while focusing on informal education. In his research work, he seeks to observe random and spontaneous learning processes in which social agents seek to learn about the other, without reference to an organized body of knowledge. In his work, Golan emphasizes how communities with a distinct color (Orthodox, religious-nationalists, Filipino workers, Franciscan-Catholic monks, Palestinians) use new media to spread community knowledge, religious and otherwise, in an effort to strengthen their borders internally and externally.

Accordingly, he developed two main research axes: (1) the study of youth and informal education on the Internet; (2) self-learning communities in technology-enabled environments.