“New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman” spoke to community leaders in New Haven, Connecticut on Friday, according to this article. I found the article because I have a Google alert set up for the following search query, linux +education, and that caused the New Haven article to trigger the alert.
The article is an interesting read, and I want to highlight this portion.
Local communities will need to position themselves globally, as soon as possible, Friedman advised.
Are we as educators positioning our students globally? Is it enough to help them learn skills of educational technology? I suppose I have an advantage in that I teach foreign language, so exploring other cultures and languages is a natural part of my curriculum, is it yours?
Are we focusing too much on the technological aspects and not enough on the culture? As the world flattens, and our students become employees of companies that heavily rely on outsourcing/homesourcing/crowdsourcing, etc and end up in regular conversations with workers/managers from other countries, are our students going to be sufficiently respectful of the cultural differences?
Will one of my students commit a major cultural faux paus that gets him fired?
Technology is giving us a new medium of communication with the rest of the world, I just hope we are not neglecting to teach the fundamentals of communicating with other cultures and respecting their differences.
Ojala que nosotros pasamos tiempo pensando en la tema, para mejorar el futuro de nuestros alumnos!
More flat world comments by Thomas Friedman
The author presents an education view of Thomas Friedman’s comments to community leaders in New Haven, CT.