Culture and Technology

“How does variation in culture effect technological adoption?”   The wikipedia definition of culture is :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. I really am having a hard time figuring out how exactly culture effects technology adoption.  I’ve been reading the blogs and text, but have drawn no conclusion to what the effects are.  It seems that the technology is embraced by people that understand what to do and how to use it and the others that are scared of change and don’t understand it are not adopting the technology.  This is evident in schools by teachers that are set in their ways, have been teaching forever and don’t feel it is necessary to change their teaching habits.  I read in the Solomon text that, minorities are not adopting technology as well as “whites” are and that the African American population isn’t interested in what the internet has to offer.   I don’t understand what makes one person want to embrace new technologies and another loath it.  Maybe it is the fear of change or loosing a piece of what you grew up doing that some cultures don’t like.  I guess if we really knew the answer to that question posed by Nate, than we could begin to work on solving the problem.  Let me know if I am really off track.  I just voicing my thoughts on it, right or wrong.   

Barbaranantz’s Weblog › Create New Post — WordPress

Barbaranantz’s Weblog › Create New Post — WordPressPressOk, I am trying to get my blog to recognize this.  I clicked it and this is what happened.  Any suggestions? 

Thinning walls

I read several blogs from our classmates and disagree a little with some of them and totally agree with others.  That shows me that this in another topic that has different meanings depending on the Point Of View of the students/person it is coming from.   When I first heard thin walls, I immediately though of the flat classroom and I still feel that this is a version of that concept.  I read the blog, A Difference: Thin Walled World.  This blog was the ideal blog about thin walls in my POV.  I feel that linking classrooms together while still in yours is what a thin wall classroom is. This article talks about online mentoring through blogs.  I myself have never head of it, but this blog has several examples of links to show what they have done.  I really like this and feel that it could be a job or career in the future for people that are confined to their homes or just like to use the internet to help other people.  From what I can tell from this sites is that the students do assignments and blog about them.  They blog about likes and dislikes.  They also have an assignment posted from flickr.  It is a picture that has all the mathematical functions labeled on it from the picture.  It is a great example of math on the internet.  They are trying to get the  internet mentoring to be a good reference for scholarships applications as he states in: “their learning has been enriched via these online mentorships and they have started to think of ways they can pay it forward and maybe get a good reference for scholarship applications they will be making in the near future.”The students are benefitting from the online mentoring then they want to pay it forward as seniors and become the mentor.   I only found one blog that was from the mentor and it was a really great slideshare of geese and why and how they fly.  The blog states that at least one question a day is answered between the two classroom that are working together online.  Since it isn’t clear to me exactly how it is done, I assume that the students blog about a question and the other class will blog back.  Not for sure, but you can read about it yourself:“(another teacher and ) I are collaborating with his two classes of student teachers mentoring my classes via their blogs this year as well. “This person is also mentioning some names of well known bloggers (I assume since they only use the first names) like Clarence (Fisher) and Barbara(can’t remember her last name).  If I’m not mistaken, we had some assignments last semester using these blogs.  They are working on an “Advice Through Ethereal walls” blog.  This one I haven’t really investigated, but I think these people are some people to watch in the field of technology and education.

Solomon’s chapter 6

I find that this book is very informative even if some of the statistics are a little dated.  I really think that what the native americans are doing with the recording technologically, their heritage is a great idea for all ethnic groups.  I know that most have a written record, but I wouldn’t mind having a heritage record of my family background.  Both my grandfathers fought in wars.  Since I am also taking a multimedia Design class also, I think making a documentary would be helpful not only to me to learn my heritage, but to my children and their children to learn who their great grandparents were and where they cam from.  My great grandparents on my fathers side were born and live in Italy before moving to America before they married.  I would love to of had technology to learn of their trip over to America.  So, the Native Americans using technology to keep their language and heritage going is a great idea.  I have a question about the chapter one and chapter six conflicts.  Maybe I read it wrong, but I thought chapter one said that Native Americans didn’t have telephones or even the infrastructure for telephone lines or Internet communication, but chapter six talks about their using technology to keep their heritage going and making go world wide.  I may have misunderstood.  Did I?  Any comments to clear that up would be helpful.Well, they other things that were an eye opener to me was that the large number of people that are still not in the loop of using technology like “white anglo” people are.  I am kind of curious to why this great “digital divide” exist in a world with internet cafe’s and free access to the internet at libraries and free computer courses offered at different locations to the public.  Could it be that the minorities are not as interested in technology or using the technology as others are?  I am a little spoiled also because I think that everyone still have means to want to improve their current situations if they are wiling to.  I know that that just isn’t the case in most places, but because I don’t see it, I am blind  to it.Now onto the Spanish/Mexican population. The way I read the chapter, there are not as many Spanish sites out there as their are English.  So that means to me, when they go onto the internet they can’t just google whatever they want like we  can because most of the sites are not published in Spanish.  I found that to be a very scary thought since there is so much information out there for us in English, I assumed that the rest of the counties that spoke different languages had the same amount of stuff, just in a different language.  I guess that just isn’t the case.  I wonder how you could go about changing that?  Have spanish classes take news site or different sites and translate them for the spanish speaking public?  I don’t know what the answer is to that and I still find it hard to believe that the WWW doesn’t have as many spanish language site as it does English. Well, I hope that everything I said came out the way I was trying to say it because of the content, I wouldn’t want to offend anyones heritage or ethnicity.