At the beginning of any collaborative endeavor, it’s important to begin to understand what we mean by the terminology. It’s relatively common for specific terms to carry a multitude of meanings and so it behooves us to agree on what we mean when we use them in the context of our discussions.
Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning “to cultivate,”) generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance. Different definitions of “culture” reflect different theoretical bases for understanding, or criteria for evaluating, human activity.
Ya, ya, fine … now stop and look at what’s up there. Look at it from the context of your own “culture” … What patterns of human activity and symbolic structures can we find in just the first few lines of this ridiculously small snippet of culture.
- The educational convention of establishing an agreed upon meaning of terminology: Why do we do this? Since terms are placeholders for ideas, symbolic generalizations of larger constructs, are we not actually doing a disservice in educational exploration by establishing the meanings before we have the discussions? Shouldn’t our discussions actually *be* the definitions? Educators seem to want to decide what the outcome will be before the discussion begins. Is that a cultural issue? Philosphers seem to have a looser context. Technologists might just want to agree on a standardization that permits exchange to occur.
- The technological ability to retrieve information on demand as represented by the reference to a definition that’s already written out for me at Wikipedia: What was your reaction to the definition? Did you see “wikipedia” and dismiss it as “unreliable”? Is your cultural bias (either way) toward the source coloring your perception of the value of the information? How can you tell?
- Meaning is dependant on context and context is defined by culture: Some of you are reading this from the context of “students in my class.” Others are reading it from the context of “twitterpeeps who followed a tweet.” At least some of the people in the first context don’t even know what the second context is. Does what I’ve written, as an attempt at “agreement” actually engender different meanings based on those two contexts? If not — are the cultures too similar? Are there contexts that are sufficiently different that we might actually have created an apparent agreement that is actually an unnoticed difference?
Given all this, and the post from yesterday, how do we approach a “simple” directive like “Describe the effect on culture of the printing press/movies/air conditioning/automobile”? How do we get at even the simple things, like — what does “effect on culture of the printing press” mean? Which culture are we talking about? Which printing press? Which effect? Is it even possible to discuss it comprehensively? As in “all effects” or “all cultures” or “all printing presses”? Can one person — even a specialized scholar in the field of “effect on culture of the printing press” — actually learn this? How would you know if you had it all? What if there’s a piece you missed? Could you tell? Would you know?
Does it matter?
January 15th, 2008 at 10:30 am
On the subject of “our discussions [being] the definitions” — it’s impossible to have a discussion without common vocabulary. In order to have a conversation about the influence of culture on [insert topic here], we have to define what we mean by culture. This definition need not persist beyond the bounds of the conversation, if it is a matter of disagreement, but we must have at least a provisional definition in order to proceed. I must know what you mean when you say “culture” in order to reason with you, and even if my own definition may be somewhat different, I can still accept your definition for the purpose of discussing the influence of what you call culture. This is a process familiar to philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and theologians alike; no matter how logical or intellectually rigorous you may seek to be, you have to start from a set of common axioms.
The trick in all this is to make sure that your definitions are carefully phrased so that you don’t fall into tautology. This problem pops up often in popular discussions of biology: If natural selection is erroneously defined by the speaker as “survival of the fittest”, and “fitness” is defined as “those who survive,” then you haven’t explained anything. If, on the other hand, we define natural selection as “those genes that help confer reproductive success on an individual will be more widely represented in the population in subsequent generations,” then we have a useful definition that we can have a conversation about, regardless of whether it encompasses all of the nuances that people usually associate with the concept.
January 15th, 2008 at 11:36 am
“…it’s impossible to have a discussion without common vocabulary…”
That’s my question, alright. I maintain that this is an assumption based on a cultural context. The assumption is based on the idea that ‘common vocabulary’ is an illusion fostered by everbody reading a definition, nodding in agreement, but holding different interpertations of the definition.
More to the point in relation to the intersection of technology, education, and culture … do we *need* definitions of these terms? Or are we trying to agree on what the intersections might mean in our own individual contexts?
January 15th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I would argue that they aren’t actually “definitions” but mere opinions, or one’s viewpoint on an idea. We must change our way of thinking to believe that every “definition” is an opinion or a viewpoint. That is why I don’t have any problem with wikipedia, I know what it is, I know that it can’t be the lone source of facts. I must look to other sources to create an opinion of what something is or isn’t. We must look at everything with basically one eye. That is why we must provide our students with different opinions and facts and then let them form a definition or opinion.
January 15th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Does it matter? After reading the introduction in the Solomon book, I don’t think that a deep discussion on the definition of culture really matters. What we need to try to understand is what the accessibility of and mindset toward information technology is among the different socio-economic groups (such as upper and lower middle class, poverty.) This will show us what we are up against as we try to incorporate technology into education. In my case, the mindset of my “culture” is very resistant to the idea that the exchanging of information over the internet can be a way doing school. But maybe it can be.