Intercultural Educational Association Keynote 11.15.03

By James Burke

There’s a joke about how well prepared we are these days for the extremely high rates of innovation we experience. The joke is about the depressive who gets a few days off from the clinic. Goes to the beach to get himself a tan. Next day his psychiatrist back at the hospital gets a postcard from this holidaying depressive. The message on the card reads much like the average person’s reaction to the way high rates of innovation are changing life almost on a daily basis. Because the message on the card reads: “Having a wonderful time. Why?”


There are a number of reasons why I feel that (at least where I come from) the educational world is stuck with the same problem. Not least because, as a community, we’re still approaching things in the old, reductionist way. Let me say what I mean by that.

Columbus is on what he thinks is a straight shot for Japan when he bumps into America, which doesn’t figure in Aristotle, so it shouldn’t be there. Over the following century, flooding into Europe from America (and then other newly-explored parts of the world) come plants and animals and people nobody’s ever seen before. And they’re not in Aristotle, either!

This failure by the accepted classical authority to properly account for the world generates intellectual panic. That is, until a solution is found by a French engineer who comes up with a way to generate data you can trust:

Reduce everything to its simplest component parts (that way, you’ll understand how something works, and, if it fails, how to fix it). And, he adds, doubt everything, unless it’s self-evident.


Descartes’ reductionism and methodical doubt generate the attitude that has given us all the wonders of science and technology, and many of the present modern-world problems. Because thanks to Descartes, the thinker’s mission-statement now becomes: “Learn more and wore about less and less.”

Specialists become the new source of reliable data. And as their fields fragment and proliferate into ever-more narrow subject areas (where the trick is to develop a niche so small, there’s only room in there for you), education (and every other profession) does the same.

We work and teach and learn in linear, water-tight, isolated fields of study. Thanks to Descartes, for centuries "inter-disciplinarity" becomes a dirty word.

Over time, what this approach does is to foster a silo-thinking mentality in which people protect their turf by retreating into gobbledygook. Because of this it is increasingly difficult for the average learner to see the wider relevance of what it is they’re studying. And above all it's hard to be aware of the context of the materials they have access to, and how those materials (and indeed the learners themselves) also relate to a wider world, to which they themselves will eventually bring their accumulated knowledge, and affect others, in turn.


One of the reasons given, for teaching and learning inside this reductionist straitjacket with which we’ve lived since the first seventeenth-century grammar schools is that there was no other way to do it. We lived in a culture of scarcity. There just wasn’t the technology available to share the intellectual wealth with more than a few, or to cross discipline boundaries without risk.

Besides which, in the classroom, the theme-and subject-oriented approach, using agreed standard textbooks, was easier to work with. There were right and wrong answers. So people passed or failed. This was an approach which tended to fit the student to the system, rather than the system to the student.

This view was fine. Until such a time as the world (that is, technology) might pass it by. As it is now doing. For at least the past two decades, thanks initially to the public media, students have become increasingly aware of the world outside the narrow confines of their curriculum, but have had no easily-accessible means to satisfy their curiosity, itself generated (in the first place) by TV, and then by the fast-advancing technologies of communication and information processing. And virtual reality. And computer games.

As a believer in the view that technology shapes society, I see the dramatically-increasing availability of tools and resources other than that of the school-room (or even of the established information media), generating more questions among learners than either teachers or TV programmers can answer satisfactorily, at the level of each individual.

However, the extraordinary speed with which technology costs have been falling and information-processing capability has been rising, now offer the possibility of additional approaches to the old, top-down, one-size-fits-all, ethnocentric classroom product.

Moreover, in the wake of 9/11, and in the way information and communications technology is enhancing the abilities of even small communities to survive without having to submerge themselves in larger, more powerful cultures, it has also become urgent that we find ways to inform students about modes of thought other than that of their own locality. The world is already too interconnected for us to continue in the old isolationist paradigm. Nowhere is now too ‘far away’ to matter.

It is no longer acceptable, in a world of electronic proximity, to ignore the views of other cultures.
Fortunately, the same technology that has given rise to this complication, also provides means to deal with it.
In a very minor way, I have spent the last few years of my spare time putting together a tool with which to encourage students to think in a more contextual way about the materials they are studying.

To work more collaboratively. To reach out, thanks to the Internet, to communities other than their own as far away as they chose, now that "far" has little meaning any more. This tool is, at the moment, in an early stage of development, and the group of volunteers I have recently been working with and I have produced a video that explains some of our aims. It’s already a little out of date, but what else, where technology is concerned? here it is.

VIDEO: rtsp://www2.humlab.umu.se:7070/kweb/kweb.rm  ( Requires Realplayer)

It should be said immediately that, as a first-stage effort, this iteration of the Knowledge Web is not very "intercultural." More than ninety-eight percent of the content is Western and the rest is medieval Islam, as it happens. But I hope you see the K-Web’s potential for intercultural bridge-building and collaboration, since one of the aims, as I said, is to get kids to build their own webs, reaching out as far as the Internet will take them.


The other thing to be said about this K-Web is of course that, anyhow, there was no way it could be anything but ethnocentric. I’ve spent the last forty years of my life living between Italy, France and the UK. I collaborated on an Italian-English dictionary and I’m fluent those languages, and as aware as one can be, spending nine months of every year in those countries, of what’s what for the French and the Italians.

I even sometimes dream in the languages when I’m there. But there is no way I’ll ever be French or Italian. My center is, and always will be British, however much I might want it to be otherwise. This is nothing to do with any sense of patriotism or nationality in the ordinary sense. Those of you who are multilingual will know what pleasure it is to be different, in different languages. Which is why I am uncomfortable with the present PC-driven fads for so-called "multiculturalism."

Of course I recognize the need to break down the barriers, to make up for decades (sometimes centuries) of neglect and ignorance and prejudice, even perhaps to take some affirmative measures to try to redress the balance of opportunity for minority groups within a culture.

But at a time when information technology and telecommunications are about to enhance and empower the viability of even small communities (with luck, even to save many cultures around the world from being wiped out, as so many have been during the last two centuries of colonialism and top-down centralist power-bloc expansion), we are at last going to have the tools to think about diversity in a different way.

Not in the old, cookie-cutter, paternalist way that sought to bring the benefits of so-called "Western civilization" to what were deemed to be under-privileged groups and communities and cultures, but, instead, to watch in appreciation as they use the technology to benefit themselves in ways they choose, based on their own heritage, and in ways that don’t undermine their own cultural identities.

And if they choose ways that seem to go counter to our own values, all we can (and should) do is try to understand those choices, and learn how best to live with them. As for the often expressed fears of some kind of "technological determinism," that the technology brings with it certain technology-oriented way of thinking that put a culture at risk (the old argument that it’s becoming a hamburger world), I have seen proof in my own life that this is not necessarily so.

In the 1960s I was living in an Italian city that viewed the arrival of television as indicative of the imminent loss of their centuries-old local dialect and traditions. Forty years later there are two TV stations there, broadcasting only in the dialect, and any decline there might have been in the local culture has been well and truly reversed.


So the coming technology offers us the chance to celebrate difference, rather than to suppress it as part of some short-term politically-driven egalitarian ideology. We’ve already lost over ten thousand languages, and with them, idiosyncratic assessments of the world--each one, by definition, a rich and comprehensive view of things. Let’s not lose any more.

I hope whatever else knowledge-webs do, they will also use the capability of the next generation of information technology--to make it possible for learners to travel cheaply and seamlessly from a web structured by elements of their own local world, into other-culture webs. These would be built in the same interconnected, easy-to-navigate way, and offer a glimpse of the dynamic that made that culture what it is, and perhaps where it may be going next, and what that ought to mean to us.


Anything of that nature would be an improvement on the present level of mutual misunderstanding and over-simple solutions, offered on all sides, that daily make the world a more dangerous place to be.

I look forward to this exploration we've embarked on of the intersections between culture and technology, between reality and virtuality. If you'd like to know more about the Knowledge Web, please visit our virtual reality headquarters in Showcase world (7S 6E), or k-web.org

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