I just listened to a talk by Thomas L. Friedman who wrote ‘The world is flat: A brief history of the 21st century’ given at MIT in Mai of this year. Friedman is a very entertaining speaker, master manipulator of compelling images that speak to your imagination. During the 1H15min. talk he presents his thesis exposed in the first 3 chapters of his book. The world is flat is a metaphor for connectivity across continents, people and business; a work environment where geography no longer matters.
On the evolutionary time line of globalization he sees 3 eras:
- 1.0 Countries went global (think of Christopher Columbus exploring new worlds)
- 2.0 Companies distributed their teams and services (1950(?) to 2000)
- 3.0 The (connected) individual and small group era (2000+)
He speaks of 10 historical “flattener’s”
He also speaks of a triple convergence as enablers to these massive changes. Friedman believes these are transforming and tweaking every aspect of our lives as we speak. We are on the verge (the real one) of the information revolution. What we’ve seen in the past was just exploratory. We ‘ain’t’ seen nothin yet baby!!!
Friedman comes to us from a business view of the world and a US one for that matter (even if his interviews took him around the world). I wonder how this translates to Education. He briefly acknowledged MIT’s opencourseware efforts with a comment that this was a revolutionary way to education delivery. We all know that it isn’t, transposing an individual driven learning curriculum to the web that gives access to documents, and final exams with a sprinkling of interaction in between. The education world knows that, Friedman was in a tight spot to comment and uneasy in his response. I wonder what he really thinks?
A couple of comments from participants asked ‘what about the ‘non-connected’ world, Africa and other countries. He didn’t have as compelling an answer to speak of this ‘un-flat’ part of the world as he called it.
He acknowledged the flatter the world becomes, the more commodified it also gets. His antidote: imagination. As tools are made available to more people, how they get used becomes the means to reinvent the world of work and play. What about education I ask? Can I finally tweak the curriculum to fit my needs? It ain’t happening in my department even if I’ve tried and believe me I’ve tried.
If everything is out there for the taking, why should we go to school? is the model outdated? (many say yes, but a business model I don’t think cuts it either). There are a couple of huge assumptions I keep coming up against in these information-connect-change-the-world discourses:
1) the ability to find, locate and evaluate materials.
A huge issue at a number of levels: a) what IS really being accessed (who controls what comes up in these search and locate info tools?) there are important power and control issues here… I don’t want to read what marketers have savvily packaged (read disguised) instead of more valuable information (perhaps less compelling to market).
b) history is being lost. (digital efforts of past writing will never make it all available). You say they will still be available in libraries. But who will go there in our digital times? the kids no longer do. This is an older generation view of the world of knowledge. Listen to the K-12 tech discourse….on many blogs today. Mix and match = creativity.
c) the offerings: what am I really getting access to? information put out by a small minority, lost in a mass market of cloned copies.
d) the need for new literacies: no one talks about this, or at least they are not very vocal about it. The increased need to become highly critical in a world where you are flooded with information requires a high degree of sophistication to wade through it for value. This is significant and hugely important. Lemke speaks of multi media literacies as urgent needs. The socio-political dimensions will also need to be taught early on. Who will do this if there are no more teachers or librarians?
2) that is my second point. Where are the people in this connected world? Those who help make sense of information??
Since when is information transparent for anyone to understand. Aside from competent teachers who will never go out of style–though the way education is delivered may change radically, we need new ‘translators’, new types of occupations where sifting and sense making help others sort through the enormous pile of garbage we get served in multiple copies these days. Knowledge managers, brokers were a buzz word in the last decade. PM or personal knowledge management is a big thing, but I won’t accept to shoulder the entire sense-making responsibility (recall Friedman’s airline ticket story). The social software/Web 2.0 crowd would say the crowd rates, tags and comments and as such are performing evaluation services. Have you ever taken an informal census of the participants in these forums? Most are from the tech fields, not very diversified evaluators for what I am interested in.
Because it is now so cheap and easy to do so, more is far from being better. I’ve commented on that in an earlier post. I’m ranting! I know but someone has to wake up.
I didn’t see how a wall long alley of Cheese-wiz (I don’t even know how to spell it) at Costco improved my life; I don’t see how 300 examples of the same information posted in different locations will do anymore. Are we flattening information and knowledge??? Presented in small fragments, shot through with hyperlinked holes, our sense making attention is being bent out of shape. Now that is a frightening idea.
3) the ability to make sense at fundamental levels is being severely challenged.
Information, let alone knowledge is deeply embedded in a cultural context and is not easily uprooted and recombined without sometimes losing its essence. Does it matter in our creative patch-working? I think so… I hope so. This is not code you can patch, plug in and play at will– and even then I’m sure developers would have something to say about the cultural context of code. We are not all students in a creative writing class?
I sound as though I am against these changes. I’m not. I love technology, but I am also coming to see more of the insidious side of technology. Lets say I am careful, and worried that we are not seeing what is happening. Not seeing how some of our ‘grounded’ ways are being eroded and ‘outsourced’ somewhere we are clueless about; while our freedom severely shrinks through the coded illusion of expanded connectivity to people (see Mejias on the subject of coded sociality). I don’t want my thinking outsourced, in-sourced or through-sourced by anyone other than myself. I don’t want the power grid of my connectivity to go down one day and not know how to write a memo, talk face to face, make changes without technology! I don’t want my world to expand in multiple copies of garbage, at the same time it shrinks my capacity to locate what is important.
And I sincerely hope that we can equip the upcoming generations, not with a commodified outlook on information and knowledge, but instead with skills that are informed by profound social values and strong technological, social and polical critical skills. Changes needed early on in the curriculum. Flat education is already in the works, please don’t give up on fundamentals!
PS: I do believe Friedman is a visionary. What he brings to the table is most important. I–like him, believe the world is sleeping, too busy keeping up with these tech changes or oblivious to them. These changes will need more pondering as they unfold… Intellectuals are needed not technicians to make some sense of these changes. I’m also not sure the business frame of reference is the best frame to view these changes in as it obscures other more fundamental social aspects to these fundamental transformations. Predictions can always be disproved with time. I hope we have the right interpretors out there to keep us informed.