Educating Students into the Global Village

In the mid-twentieth century, the communications theorist and philosopher Marshall MacLuhan predicted the rise of the Global Village, that moment in human history when a singular, collective human identity will overcome the variety of dispersed nationalistic and ethnic identities that fragment the human race. As people become more inter-connected, the differences between us that cause conflict will--in theory, at least--begin to dissolve, leading to a human race that can accomplish incredible things as a collective. This idea, it seems, lies at the heart of the Connectivist philosophy of education.

That "in theory" part is important, however. The Global Village that MacLuhan envisioned is possible, but as anyone who has spent a little bit of time on the internet has probably learned, global inter-connectivity has its dark side. Internet trolls harass people from behind a veil of anonymity. Political parties (both domestic and abroad) spread misinformation, or at the very least focus discourse to suit their agenda, and their propaganda is reblogged, retweeted, and shared on Facebook into channels of information that we increasingly narrow to suit our biases.

Photo Credit: Bernard Goldback, via Flickr, under Creative Commons

As educators, we need to prepare our students to best utilize the enormous wealth of information available to them online, and also to navigate the minefield of misinformation and trolling that exists on the internet. Digital citizenship is also a key skill. They need to understand that the people they interact with online are real people with real feelings, and that they shouldn't do anything online that they wouldn't do in person, both because they might hurt someone and because their behavior online constitutes a very real and very public permanent record.

The ISTE standards represent a good set of guidelines for teachers and for student learning goals to help us integrate these vital Global Village skills. Ideally, every classroom would have a 1-to-1 connected device to student ratio, and the OSPI would implement standards that more clearly align with the way students best learn in the twenty-first century. Project based learning in a flipped classroom environment in which students pursue independent research using skills taught by a teacher, before coming together for teacher-guided discussion, seems like the most effective way to help students learn how to learn in the 21st century.

I was primarily homeschooled until I entered high school, and I remember the whiplash of going from a largely self-directed learning environment at home to the more rigid, teacher-centered learning environment in the school system. I want to cultivate my students' own curiosity and interests, and help them use the brilliant new tools available to them (like Wikipedia, Google "site: " search, etc.) to learn those things.

Further, I am thrilled by the idea of helping my students to connect directly with other teachers and other classrooms all over the world. My experiences traveling to China and Taiwan during and just after college helped broaden my horizons exponentially. International travel was such a formative experience that I came to believe that it should, ideally, be a requirement for college graduation. Unfortunately, many people do not have the resources to travel--at least not physically. The internet makes international communication cheaper and easier than it has ever been. If your students are learning about another country, why not try to connect in-person to someone from that country?

I am more than ready to embrace connectivism. It might be tricky if I'm not in a school district that has intentionally tried to create space for it, but hopefully all our school districts will be like Enumclaw in the next decade.