I’ve been given the opportunity at our district’s administrator’s meeting to take 20 minutes and provide some type of Professional Development. That’s not a lot of time but understandable given their agendas.
I decided this week to present some ideas from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat . I used these key sections from his MIT lecture:
- 11:10-12:10 Comparison with Columbus
- 15:30-18:25 Globalization 3.0
- 35:34-42:00 Vertical to Horizontal
- 46:00-47:39 The World our Kids will Grow up in
This isn’t as powerful as the whole lecture or obviously the book but I hope it begins to challenge our thinking around an education system that is largely based on old world standards and hierarchy.
Those days are done. We do have a good number of teachers that realize this and have begun to change. But we need more. I hope that as leaders, we can provide the constant push to see change happen.
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November 14th, 2005 at 1:54 am
What does Thomas Friedman mean by The World is Flat? What is causing this according to Friedman? What has all of this got to do with the digital revolution? What are the important economic, geo-political or other implications of a “flat world” for the United States and the world? What are the positive and negative effects of this transformation of the global economy?
November 14th, 2005 at 9:17 am
In a nutshell, the flattening of the world is the convergence of many technologies and world events that have shrunk the world from small to tiny. Flattening has created a more equal playing field for competition.
For a more complete understanding of Friedman’s idea, here’s a transcript from an interview where he deals with the 11 “flatteners”.