Flat World Thoughts

I had mixed feelings about The World is Flat. On the one hand, I found all the history and explanation of the digital revolution interesting (somehow I wasn’t getting it all first hand when it was happening), and I liked the forward-looking nature of the book because I’ve always been a science fiction fan. At other times I got a little tired of the repetitive nature of Friedman’s examples – here comes yet another story of how someone makes a lot of money, followed by another example of how the Chinese are preparing to conquer the world.

There were a few things that struck me as important to education. The section on Wikipedia, and in particular the experience of John Seigenthaler, Sr., brought to mind one of the big shifts that’s taken place in research and the very nature of fact and fiction. I remember when we spent several days showing students how to access information. Now they can find more information than they’d ever need in a few seconds on the Web. But as the finding of information got easier, we didn’t think about the quality of the information. We still need to make a shift over to teaching kids how to judge what they find on line and differentiate what’s fact and what’s hooey. To me this is an important component of modern education because these days we get our information “through a fire hose” (as Friedman says) and much of that water is polluted. We need to give students the means to filter what they see in the media.

The horizontal interconnectivity of information is also something we as educators could use to better advantage. We see any given student for 56 minutes per day, and some students who struggle could benefit from all their teachers comparing notes from time to time. We might be able to alter some behaviors if the math, English, science and history teachers all focused on the same thing for the student.