Sunday, January 15, 2012

What does it mean that the world is flat according to Thomas Friedman? What are some of those flatteners? What kinds of implications does this idea have for teaching and learning?


According to Thomas Friedman world is flat because technologies, habits and people converge. Besides, people work together and can collaborate.  He also mentions that the flattening of world has already happened in Russia, India and China. He says that there are three globalizations: globalization 1.0, that is, globalization through countries, globalization 2.0, that is, globalization through companies and globalization 3.0, that is, globalization through individuals.
Thomas Friedman talks about 10 flatteners and all these flatteners work together and that is why world is flat:
  • the fall of Berlin wall which opened many windows
  • Netscape went public-it gave internet to the world- people easily connect to other people
  • Work flow (software)- people connect through applications
  • Outsourcing
  • Off shoring
  • Open sourcing
  • Supply chaining
  • UPS
  • Informing-collaborating with data
  • Steroids-wi-fi
He also mentions things that converge. For instance, we should horizontalize ourselves, that is, change our habits in order to collaborate differently with others and to successfully interact with each other. His ideas can refer to teaching and learning in a way that teaching is also collaboration: with materials, students, other teachers, parents and the whole system under the term “teaching”.

Sugatra Mitra’s talk was rather interesting as he talked about primary education in remote areas. His findings showed that the remoter area was the worse the results were. His experiment proved that primary education could happen on its own. Besides, if they had access to the Internet, they could learn anything. It was pretty interesting that children were rather self-organized and worked well in groups. The most surprising fact was that they did not need a single teacher or instructor. They needed only a good computer and access to the Internet.


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