Serendipity35

Now that Serendipity35 has passed the decade milestone, I'm finding two things happening as I write here.

First, I sometimes write a post and then realize that I have already written about that topic in much the same manner. This is both a factor my own aging, and because Serendipity35 now is approaching 2000 posts.

Second, I come across an old post that has not aged well. Most bloggers do not update old posts. If you read something I wrote here in 2008 about AI, you should expect that the information is more historical than currently useful. The technology changes rapidly. But the education parts change much slower.

Like many of the blog posts on Serendipity35 that were written years ago, one that I wrote about some people working towards global education seems dated. And yet rereading it, it also still seems relevant. Aren't we even more about global education today, or are we less interested? 

Ten years ago I wrote this:

Word comes from Julie Lindsay (China) and Vicki Davis (USA) that their group, DigiTeen, has put out a call for digital collaboration stories for a book they will be doing with Pearson Publishing.

DigiTeen is Digital Citizenship for Teenagers and I have written about them here before. It's a great K-12 project that has won numerous awards.

They are looking to create a book that teaches how to connect classrooms on a global basis.

Has global collaboration changed your view of the world?
Has it improved some area of your life?
Established friendships that you still maintain?
Was it a positive experience? Negative?
What lesson did you learn from the project?

Well, they did publish their book in 2012. Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration One Step at a Time is based on their projects.

Their Flat Classroom project was well suited for the time. K-20 schools were, and still are, moving to online education and blended learning.

They were two K-12 classroom teachers deep into the "Web2.0" of that time. Their project received a lot of good buzz and publicity. They were featured in Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, which was getting a lot of attention. Don Tapscott's Grown Up Digital, talked about them. They were featured on Edutopia, and in Curt Bonk's The World is Open. They won reflect 2007 Online Learning Award, and the Taking IT Global Outstanding Online Project, and they were shortlisted in the International WISE awards in 2009.

The end of 2018 is a good time to reflect on the 6 years since the book and the 10+ years since the project. Is "the new school of education" still global collaboration?

Back then, the authors said "High speed Internet, social media, and mobile devices have opened up a remarkable world of connection and collaboration. Global economies are now increasingly intertwined. Multinational teams are becoming the norm in the workplace. Yet most schools are unchanged."

How have schools changed since that time?  They have changed in many ways, but becoming global is not the area of the greatest change. They were correct that global, multinational teams were and are the norm in companies, but schools are much the same in that area. That is probably more true in K-12. Colleges have done a bit better about becoming more global in their collaborations.

I'm not personally involved in K-12 classrooms, but from my limited survey of friends who are in those classroom, the idea of global education does not seem to be in the priorities list as high as it was a decade ago.

Vicki Adams Davis is still blogging and still tweeting (with 159K followers currently) and teaching in Georgia. She teaches technology and business courses for grades 8-12 and serves as IT Director for the school.

Julie Lindsay is still thinking about this topic and published in 2016 The Global Educator: Leveraging Technology for Collaborative Learning and Teaching.