The World Is Flat--Now What?

Having recently read Tom Friedman’s latest book, I’ve been wrestling with the potential implications for workplace learning from a “flattened world.” Still wrestling, no overarching theory in response yet. But the book does kind of take the wind out of your sails when confronted by the full magnitude of the global shift that is taking place much more quickly than most of us would like to acknowledge. Reading the book, while intermittently reflecting on the enterprise learning profession, brought to mind the analogy of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. While we debate the merits of instructional design methodology and the demerits of hyper-PowerPoint, we risk becoming irrelevant and unemployed in a flattened world. I have been absent from the blogisphere recently contemplating the implications—it’s going to be a longer-term process…

But, a couple of quotes from Friedman and others he quotes seem apt in support of the basic philosophy of Rapid eLearning I have been laboring to develop lo these last few months:

• “Informing is the ability to build and deploy your own personal supply chain—a supply chain of information, knowledge, and entertainment. Informing is about self-collaboration—becoming your own self-directed and self-empowered researcher, editor, and selector of entertainment, without having to go to the library or the movie theater or through network television. Informing is searching for knowledge. It is seeking like-minded people and communities.” Thomas Friedman
• “The democratization of information is having a profound impact on society… And people have the ability to be better connected to things that interest them, to quickly and easily become experts in given subjects and to connect with others who share their interests.” Jerry Yang, Yahoo! cofounder.
• “Search is so highly personal that searching is empowering for humans like nothing else. It is the antithesis of being told or taught. It is about self-empowerment; it is empowering individuals to do what they think best with the information they want… Search is the ultimate expression of the power of the individual, using a computer, looking at the world, and finding exactly what they want—and everyone is different when it comes to that.” Eric Schmidt, Google CEO.

More from Friedman and workplace learning implications coming--this is going to take a while, so please join the conversation…