Some ideas on culture

At the end of this fascinating semester, there are a lot of things that come to my mind: some of them are the output of learning and reflecting upon meeting, dialogue, interaction and research but the majority of them have been acquired through direct experience. As you know, the focus of our course was culture and above all the meeting between different cultures, which is summarized in the adjective “intercultural”.

To sum up, I would like to give you a list of short sentences representing my idea of culture and intercultural competence developed through the whole semester.

1. culture is a complex and multi-layered concept;
2. the idea of culture is quite flexible and subjective;
3. there’s no objectivity in culture;
4. culture is continuously changing broadening and narrowing its scope;
5. culture belongs to us and lives through us;
6. knowing a culture is a never-ending process;
7. culture is something that you don’t know, but you experience;
8. culture speaks through us;
9. we’re made up of culture, or maybe different cultures... Why not?;
10. being intercultural competent is a great challenge;
11. There’s no right or wrong in culture;
12. There’s no positive or negative in culture;
13. To know my culture is the starting point to know other cultures;
14. To know other cultures doesn't mean to reject you personal identity;
15. Beign intercultural means to accept the challenge carried out by the contemporary world;

These are just some points but the list can be daily updated because culture and cultural clash are not only subjects we discuss at university but also realities we have to come to terms with every day of our life. As I said before, direct experience is the best teacher in this field.

I hope this post will give you some suggestion for further reflections but be careful or you'll run the risk of getting crazy dealing with such a complex and multifarious topic! ;-)

The final outcome

Hi everybody!
First thing, have a look at the final version of our wiki page entitled "American University vs Italian University" and if you want to smile, scroll down the text and look at the photos of our degree day. They are so funny!
Thanks a lot to Marta, Marigny, Nina and Sara for their active taking part in the creation of the wiki page... we did a really good job, girls!

Latest from the wiki page

Hi guys!

Have a look at our final project wiki page on American and Italian university systems! It’s getting nicer and nicer! Don’t you think? Up to now, we have collected all the information we need and we have tried to organize them in a clear way because one of the main objectives of a wiki page is to enable the reader to retrieve the information he/she needs as quickly as possible.

Working on such a project with a group of other students is a very stimulating experience because it implies the active taking part of all the members of the group. And there are also some basic principles to take into account in order to behave in the correct way (in Wikipedia there is the so-called “wikiquette”): respect for other people’s ideas and opinion, good sense, openness to the proposals of the other members of the group and maintenance of a neutral point of view.. In my opinion, up to now we’re getting on quite well and we’re doing a good work because each of us knows what she has to do in the wiki page and we are free to edit and review the final outcome of the others.

I’m so interested in this project for another reason as well. I’m a volunteer in the Italian and English Wikipedia half because of a personal interest for wikis in general and half because of my job in which I contribute to the creation of wikipages in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). So, I know how to use Wikipedia, which is supported by the MediaWiki software, quite well, but I’m curious to learn how to use PBwiki as well. It would be nice to compare the functionalities and to point out the most important differences in tools and possibilities given by the two software.

Soon, I’ll let you know how is going on with our wiki page!

Towards our final project

Hi guys!

It’s time to start working on our final project. We’re supposed to develop a topic together with a student from America and to create a wiki page about it. The project aims to be the final outcome of one-year course because, in order to work, on it we’re supposed to use some of the tools we discovered and learnt during this year.

Last Wednesday we used Skype to communicate with our American friend, Martigny, and we agreed on the topic of our final project and the way to plan, organize and work on it. The topic for our project is a comparison between the Italian University system and the American one. We pointed out some interesting points to develop and we decided that the first step will be to do some kind of brainstorming collecting as many materials on the topic as possible. This weekend we exchanged e-mails with the lists of websites that we found and we started organizing the relevant information for the wiki page. Personally, I tried to focus on a specific aspect of our project: cost, tuition and fees in the American university system and I collected some materials about it. The next step will be the one of organizing information in the wiki page. As one of the core principle of the wiki is collaboration, each member of our group (be he /she from Italy or from America) can edit the wiki page adding his/her pieces of information and giving his/her contribution to the final project. In this way, Skype, the wiki page, the social bookmarking in del.icio.us and our mailbox (just to mention a few) are the tools to manage a cultural exchange with our American friends with the objective of planning a final project regarding a specific topic in the two different cultures half in Italian and half in English.

In my opinion, our final project can be a very interesting and exciting experience, especially because sometimes it is very hard to plan something together even with people who live in the same place as you… so I think that developing a project with somebody who lives in another country thousands of miles away from you will be a real challenge. Of course, a high level of organization, a well- planned work and the contribution of each member of the group are the keys in order to do a successful job!

My proposal for the final project

For our final project, I would like to focus on legalization of drugs. I think this is a crucial topic nowadays and it would be very interesting to analyse it in detail making a comparison between the current drug policies of the two countries. In Italy, the debate between people who think that the only solution to fight drugs is to make it legal and those ones who claim that drug use and possession are real crimes is very strong and controversial. Both the parties have a series of reasons to support their thesis. How is the situation in America? What do you think about it? Which is younger people’s approach to such a thorny issue?

Immigration in Italy: a plague?

In Italy, immigration is considered an issue of great interest nowadays and a problem everybody has to cope with in his/her everyday life. People say that is a relatively recent phenomenon in our country. As a matter of fact, until the 1970s Italy was primarily an emigration country that people left to find new jobs and a better life in the Northern European countries or in America. The situation rapidly changed after 1970s when most immigrants from the African and Eastern countries realized that Italy was not only a crossroad to reach other countries and chose Italy as their final destination. Since then, large flows of immigrants and foreigners has come to Italy every year. In my opinion, immigration is absolutely a good thing: it is the product of our current cosmopolitan world where people are free to move and choose the country they want to live in. As Mark Krikorian – executive director of the centre for immigration Studies in Washington – affirmed: “People are not goods” (Illegal immigration and underground economy, 2003), so a strong movement of people means also an exchange and sometimes a clash of cultures, traditions and backgrounds and it is the starting point of a radical change in our traditional society and of integration as well.

Generally speaking, immigration in Italy is regarded as a powerful and essential resource for our country. A massive flow of people supplies the demand of labour force, especially in the low level, poorly paid jobs, and allows Italy to lay off older workers that will be replaced by younger, ingenious and cheaper workers. In addition, immigration to Italy is a solution to cope with the decline of birth rates and to correct the ageing population that is getting higher and higher in our country. (If you want to read an interesting article about birth rates in Europe, go to Italy: immigration or extinction).

Talking about immigration, the greatest plague of Italy is illegal immigration, which is people entering and remaining in Italy without a valid stay permit. It is estimated that for every legal entry in our country, there is an illegal one (Immigration in Italy: an overview, 2003). Almost completely surrounded by the sea, Italy is one of the most exposed country to penetration by illegal immigrant from the South and the East and although controls and on land and sea frontiers were intensified, the extension of he Italian coastline makes it quite impossible to operate a strict control on landings. Then, even though the police manage to arrest illegal immigrants, the proper readmission procedure, established by the “Bossi-Fini Law” of July 2002, is not always followed and immigrants, not repatriated to their countries, slip away and disappear as unrecognized residents.

In Italy, most of the times illegal immigrants are involved in underground economy and criminality. I think that the reason of this is quite easy. Illegal immigrants who come to Italy escape from the terrible situation of their home countries: referring to people from the Northern African countries or the Balkans, they leave places that are breeding grounds of poverty, famine and especially centres of war and never-ending civil unrest. When they arrive in Italy, they need to make money as soon as possible and they choose the fastest way to do it. We all agree that finding a regular job as a recognized workers implies a slow procedure. Now, two paths are open for the majority of them. The first one is underground economy, a huge economic sector, firmly rooted and well-flourishing in Italy so that immigrants are offered a wide range of jobs without being demanded any document. The spread of underground economy has severely damaged the economy of our country. The second solution for immigrants is criminality. A great problem for Italy today is that a large part of illegal immigrants are involved in crime such as organized criminal rings, prostitution, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, sexual commerce, smuggling or child labour and exploitation. Obviously, crimes has a deep impact on Italian people’s sensibility and phenomena like segregation, racism and xenophobia have increased a lot during the last decades. Crime has stigmatized the image of immigrants in Italy staining the image of legal immigrants in the country as well.

In the broader debate concerning with migration from the Third World to the developed countries nowadays, the recurring question is whether borders should be open and legal channels should be created to promote migration or, on the other hand, the entries of migrants should be strictly reduced. In my opinion, one of the major problems in Italy nowadays is illegal immigration, not immigration as a whole. Both Italian citizens and politics are aware of it and although Italian government established measures to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants, the problem has not been solved yet and there is still a long way to go. The only solution to fight illegal immigration is to create a proper migration policy in order to check and to regulate the flow of people with legal channel.

It is true that migration is a well-known phenomenon completely integrated in Italian society but the problem is that, if migration as contemporary process is actually accepted, immigrants are still not entirely integrated in our society…

FOR FURTHER READING:

1. Newell, Casey. Illegal immigration in Italy; retrieved on April 12^th, 2008 from http://www-pub.naz.edu:9000/~cmnewell/;
2. Caritas, (2002). Immigration to Italy: an overview;
3. Marchetto, Agostino (2004) Contemporary immigration to Italy; retrieved on April 12^th, 2008 from http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/migrants/pom2004_94/rc_pc_migrants_pom94_Marchetto_immigration.html;
4. BBC News, Italy: immigration or extinction; retrieved on April 12^th, 2008 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/719423.stm;
5. Reyneri, Emilio (2003) Illegal immigration and underground economy; retrieved on April 12^th, 2008 from http://www.anu.edu.au/NEC/Archive/reyneri.pdf;

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is a website that can be edited by anybody. The informative content in a wiki is the outcome of the collaborative process made by a community of authors who publish something, edit it and start discussing about it. A wiki is one of the potentialities of Web 2.0 where the user occupies a strategic position and plays an active role in the production of information: while in the traditional Web the user was only a content consumer, in the Web 2.0 the user has turned into a content creator – think about blogs, wiki, social tagging, bookmarking, etc.

The most famous example of a wiki is Wikipedia, the greatest online free content encyclopaedia in the world with more than 10 million articles in 250 different languages. Wikipedia is supported by a web-based wiki software called MediaWiki. I used Wikipedia for my job and in the last two months I created some wiki pages so I’m quite used to it. In my opinion, the most important feature of Wikipedia is that it can be edited and updated by anybody because it uses an easy markup language, based on a number of tags, which is simpler than the markup of HTML. In Wikipedia, both registered users and unregistered ones can edit the articles but only registered users can create a new article. On the contrary, in Pbwiki, which is the software that supports the wiki of our English course, only registered users can edit the pages. In wikipedia, each article is made up of four different pages: “article” is the structural pages where the user can find the information he needs, “edit this page” is the page where you can view and edit the source of the page, “discussion” is the page where the contributors to the page can discuss about editing, deleting and adding of information and “history” is the page where all the changes to the article are recorded in order to trace back step by step the history of the page’s development. The structure of Pbwiki is quite the same but instead of a discussion page, there is a page called “Comments” where the contributors can express their opinion and comments on the content of the page.

All the Wikipedia materials are released under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) which is a copyleft license for open contents that gives to the reader the right to copy, modify and redistribute the work and requires the all copies and derivative works to be available under the same licence. In addition, the original source of the work must be mentioned.

There has been a lot of debate concerning Wikipedia since its birth at the beginning of 2002. One of the crucial issues if the trustworthiness, authoritativeness and authenticity of the information in Wikipedia. Some people think that information in Wikipedia is not reliable because anybody can write whatever he/she wants. This is not completely true. There are rules that are shared by the whole community of Wikipedia: the wikiquette, for instance, asserts the key principle of collaboration in order to improve the articles and respect of the others’ points of view. Articles affected by vandalism, edit wars or offensive behaviour are reviewed and managed by a group of administrators who can protect some pages from editing, overrule some editing and prevent users from creating articles or just editing the existing ones. Talking about this, Luca De Alfaro and a group of researchers of the University of California at Santa Cruz designed a new software that colour-codes the entries in Wikipedia distinguishing the reliable ones from the entries that have been changed a lot of time. For further information, look at Peter Suber’s Open Access News. As far as the Wikipedia quality control is concerned, recent studies have shown that many corporations edit articles in Wikipedia or overrule others’ editing in order to delete criticism and polish their image. In order to prevent it, WikiScanner is a software wrote by Virgil Griffith which analyses the IP used to modify the entries in Wikipedia and associates the IP with the name of its owner. In this way, it is always possible to identify where the editing comes from.

Well, the world of Wikipedia is really fascinating, especially because Wikipedia is just the most famous project but the Wikimedia Foundation has launched also other interesting wiki- based projects like Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiquote or Wikibooks. I’ve been using Wikipedia for only three months but I’m getting quite fond of it. Why don’t you try as well and have a look at it? I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!