We had an interesting discussion about Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century in our book club today. This book was definitely eye-opening as it illustrated how our interconnected world is broadening and what that means for our future. It seemed some of my fellow educators were searching for ways to “stop” the impact of how technology is changing the way we do things. There was a lengthy conversation about how students don’t use proper grammar and punctuation when they text and the impact that will have on the formalities of communication and our expectations. I think the bigger picture is what does it mean when our current English speaking students are faced with the need to communicate with their Chinese speaking co-workers in their future careers through something like Skype. Do we as educators even know or understand how to prepare students to effectively communicate with someone from another culture without offending them? This again seems so small in the grand scheme of things, but what are all of the other little things that we are not even thinking about or know to think about? We don’t know, what we don’t know, yet we as educators are leading the future.
I appreciate how approachable Friedman made the complexity that he calls the flattening of the world. His insights about how we as a society need to adapt to this new world we live in. I do wonder however what that really means twenty years down the road. What else is there to come beyond the changes he has talked about!?
