January 2006 — Policy/Advocacy
Print this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Addressing ‘Globalization 3.0’
As a trenchant best-seller explains, the US is losing its edge in innovation. So how do we ensure that our students have the technology tools and training to compete in tomorrow's global workforce?
THE WORLD IS FLAT: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) has quickly become one of the most frequently cited books at education meetings of all kinds in the last nine months. It has gotten to the point that speakers no longer need to say more than “The World is Flat,” and heads in the audience nod knowingly. Education technology visionary Alan November used the book as the core of his presentation at the National Education Summit on Leadership, Learning, and Technology held Oct. 6-8 in Cape Cod (see “Connecting for Change” in the December 2005 issue of T.H.E. Journal). He linked Friedman’s ideas to the nature of today’s youth—how different they are from preceding generations, especially regarding their facility with a variety of technologies they use in their everyday lives (if not in school). Former Maine Gov. Angus King used the book as a caveat during a speech he gave via videoconference to a symposium on 1-to-1 computing in Irving, TX, in November. King said that if we do not think we should use technology to change education, all we have to do is read The World is Flat.
In the book, Friedman characterizes what he calls the third stage of globalization. He lists 10 occurrences in the 1990s that combined to create “Globalization 3.0.” Some of them, including the huge growth of bandwidth and the use of the Internet around the world, created a global platform for innovation and collaboration. Other forces created new forms of collaboration. The convergence of these forces and events coincided with the opening up of economies and political systems of the non-Western world—three billion people. Friedman is forecasting that some of these people (and it doesn’t take a huge percentage of three billion to form a critical mass) will use technologies developed in the West to step directly from the Agrarian Age to the Information Age, leapfrogging right over the Industrial Age phase that Western countries had to wade through. Rather than having to wait for an entire economy to develop, individuals and small groups can use the new technologies to make the leap on their own.
If Friedman is right, the US is in significant danger of being bypassed creatively and intellectually, and losing our standing as leaders of the world in innovation—the driving force of our economy and a key element of our national character. Part of the answer to this threat is for Westerners to overcome an innate lack of ambition among our youth to become scientists and engineers, and to immediately improve our education system, especially in the fields of math, science, technology, and engineering.
