4 Media Sharing (Jan 12-18)

The World is Flat is a best selling book that should be required reading for all educators. What are the skills that students need to thrive in a flat world? What is a flat world and why do we all need to be aware of its implications? I was in Dallas recently and marveled at daily trains going by the hotel composed of hundreds of rail cars carry containers labeled with the 4 feet high word of each container: CHINA.

The World is Flat by Tom Friedman is also a Youtube video of the author talking about the pervasive impact of the Internet and high speed cable connections that have made the world a small place, encouraged world wide collaboration and business, information sharing, and migration of jobs in ways that have dramatically changed the world in a very short span of time.

The video presentation itself is an example of the power of Youtube media sharing to educate and inform. We can do a search and instantly see Tom Friedman talking about the concepts within his best selling book. Youtube was started as a way for friends to share videos they had made. From that small beginning it has grown to a huge enterprise. The original developer sold it for mega millions and there is a huge amount of high quality educational content available instantly for no cost.

Also, MIT decided to make all its courses freely available on the Web in an effort to advance science and technology more rapidly. MIT also makes significant events such as Tom Friedman's presentation at MIT available as streaming video on the Web.

In addition, sites like Facebook enable people to connect easily to friends, family, work associates and people from high school and colleges. It also enables easy sharing of pictures, video, weblinks, instant messages, private messages, public postings and many other technology tools for social networking.

I use the site Flickr for sharing photos. For $25 a year, one can upload an unlimited number of digital photos that can be shared publicly or privately. The interface is user friendly and well designed. This site was created by a husband and wife who wanted to share family pictures. They sold it for mega millions to Yahoo.

The pictures are from the December ice storm that knocked out the electricity for 400,000 PSNH customers. Note the food outside of the supermarket to keep it cold!