Nowadays we have a very interesting situation - on one hand the Internet as a new information environment has no boundaries and it presents almost everywhere. On the other hand there are countries where Internet penetration rate is significantly greater than in others (in 2008, 67.0% of the German populations are using the Internet in 2008 and only 27% in Russia). It is important to note two facts: first, that Russia and in Germany today's students have grown since the invention of the Internet and certainly know how to work with it. Second, historically Germany and Russia have similar educational systems. Thus, at this point of time we have an opportunity to compare how the penetration of technology affects the learning culture. Does it provide fundamental changes in education, or other factors (such as learning culture of teachers, area of specialization, etc.) play a big role in the formation of a new learning culture? The main difference between the new and traditional learning culture is the focus on the subject of learning, the learning individual and his or her ability to learn independently and in a self-regulatory way over the lifespan (lifelong learning - M. Weigel, C. James, and H. Gardner 2009). In our study, we would like to answer the main question: How ICT based new media influences a new learning culture of university students? At this moment exist two conflicting approaches and hypothesizes on how ICT based new media affects learning and the learning culture. First - the media theory based approach, which suggests that new media fundamentally changes the way of social communication and leads to global changes in society and this affects all spheres of human activity (McLuhan, 2002; Giesecke, 1998; Rückriem 2008, and others), including the learning process. So we should observe significant differences between the learning culture in German and Russia because of tremendous differences in ICT and new media penetration in universities and societies. Second – approach of media pedagogues (Tergan 2003, Struysen et al. 2007 Vovides et al. 2007, Ludwig 2007, Blömeke / Müller / Eichler 2006, Wegener 2007, Schulz-Zander 2005, Vollbrecht 2002 a.o.) which also shares an activity theory (Leontiev 1975, Galperin 2002) followers (Giest & Lompscher 2006 and others). In the framework of second approach Internet and ICT are not sufficient conditions for the emergence of the new learning culture. So, empirical research will enable us to obtain new data that will allow us to judge the quality of these theories and to face tendencies and possible ways to foster a new learning culture and a respectively learning using new media as powerful learning-means.

To investigate the new learning culture we concentrate on motivation towards learning and use modified Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich, 1991). We add two additional motivational scales: Performance avoidance and Intrinsic motivation towards creative learning. Modify blocks of questions Peer learning, Peer help seeking by adding questions about learning and usage help via Internet. Also we add several questions about frequency of usage different computer features and role of practical and theoretical subjects for participants. We investigate students already studying for 3-4 years because we assumed that they could be bearers of university culture (or a new learning culture), not the school learning culture. To be able to compare data collected in Russia and in Germany we create two equivalent forms in German and Russian languages. We did several blind back translations with corrections of the questions and put our questionnaire on-line by using professional service of Survey Monkey.

Until now, more than thousand students from Russia and more then five hundred students from Germany took part in our research. We plan to finish data collection at January 2010 and start qualitative and quantitative analysis (cluster, neural network analysis and other). After the first review of the data, we found only one question with significant differences in the answers: “I copy and paste to my work a few paragraphs from a Internet uncited” – totally disagree (in Russia -18,5%, in Germany – 60,7 %). For most other questions we receive similar distribution of answers. For example, most of Russian and German students agreed that they could not read all recommended literature before seminars. So now we could admit that we will have rich data that have to be carefully analyzed and we hope that we could present our first findings at ECER 2010 at Helsinki.