Thomas Friedman, ''The world is flat"

"The playground has been levelled" 

 

   In his book, called "The world is flat"  Thomas Friedman discusses the changes that technology has brought into our lives.

  All of the ten flatteners discussed by Thomas Friedman are groundbreaking and amazing in their own way. That’s why it’s hard to single out only some of them. Also, it would take too much time and space to discuss all of the flatteners. Therefore, I would rather discuss the flatteners that have had a very palpable influence on education. In this respect, “8/9/95”, open-sourcing , in-forming and  steroids have a huge influence on learning and teaching.

 

1) “8/9/95” and “In-forming”: Browsing and search engines

 I find browsers and search engines  absolutely amazing. The internet would have a been a messy, extremely non user-friendly  pile of information without search engines. With the availability of so many online language dictionaries, thesauruses, language learning websites and communities, the opportunity to browse and find the required information seems priceless to me. Google’s ability to locate relevant web pages with the help of the user queries is getting more and more advanced. With the addition of supplementary services such as mail, calendar, translation, blogging, etc, search engines like Yahoo, Google, Bing have already become invaluable tools work and study.

2) Open-sourcing

  The internet is full of free, downloadable applications, tools and software that can help any learner to improve his knowledge of virtually any subject. Numerous wikis, blogs and forums are available for free. It is becoming less and less difficult to protect intellectual property since the idea of sharing and open-access resourcing is central in many internet communities.

  

3) Steroids

  It’s not at all uncommon to see a situation like this in today’s classrooms: A teacher explains something and then notices one of the students quickly google-ing and either checking what was said or making additions to it. Cutting edge ipads, iphones and other gadgets make it one click’s work to find virtually any information anywhere, anytime. Taking this into account, it becomes naive to hold the idea that the teacher is still the all-knower. Clearly, a change of perceptions is needed here.