Serendipity35

It has been two years since Thomas Friedman published The World is Flat and people are still reading it, disagreeing with it, and making connections to education.

Friedman is not looking at what will happen, but at what has happened. As trade and political barriers drop & technology advances, the world gets flatter.

Sounds very business-oriented and I'm not a fan of business creeping into education. Don't tell me about how to get a better ROI (return on investment) from our clients/students. Nevertheless, events that he talks about - 9/11, Iraq - and bigger movements like globalization, certainly affect our students and classes.

There are a number of flat world and flat classroom projects that I've come across. Here are two that I only discovered recently for your consideration.

Survive or Thrive: Education in a Flat World is a much shorter book than Friedman's (not that you choose your reading based on pages!) that is designed to help educators deal with what it means to live in a flat world and why our current approach to education must change. They also offer a card game called "Survive or Thrive: Education in a Flat World" with questions, facts and perspectives about our economy.

A word I seem to think about more and more and use in my discussions lately is convergence. The merging of technological, political, social and business changes is what creates this global marketplace. Our students will have little choice but to interact with people from all corners of the planet and be able to C³ - communicate, collaborate and compete.

I don't think we are as clear about how this is/will/should impact our approach to education.

It's interesting that the Flat Pack production and distribution were initially sponsored by the Ohio Department of Education and they went to every public school in Ohio in fall 2006. (Any Ohio educators reading this should post a comment about the results - I found no follow up online.)

Another interesting application is the Flat Classroom Project. It's a two-week project where students are grouped with one student from another high school classroom somewhere else in the world. What they start out doing is explaining, exploring and discussing topics from the Friedman book. The wiki Flat Classroom project is an authentic assessment project between a class at International School Dhaka(ISD) in Bangladesh and a class at Westwood Schools in Georgia.