The Sky is Falling

Freedman's Flat World thesis continues to propogate through the media. See Karl Fisch's "Did You Know?" video. [It's interesting how the music adds emotional impact to the words. Emotional intelligence, or as Dan Pink says, "empathy," is one of six important attributes to possess in order to avoid having your job out-sourced.] All the predictions of global competition for good jobs and the probable surpassing of human intelligence by machine intelligence certainly give one pause, especially as you consider your children's future. Couple this with the growing evidence of global climate change with some scientists even discussing species extinction in terms of homo sapiens, and you really start to wonder, what brave new world are we launching our children into, and what should we be doing now? Gore's Inconvenient Truth points out that we may be at or rapidly approaching a global ecological tipping point (e.g. with the release of trapped methane from the permafrost). I think that suggesting that there is not a scientfic consensus on the importance of these changes, or suggesting that scientists who disagree are being stifled by political correctness is sticking your head in the sand. So, as educators, what should we do? I think schools can open conversations and explore these issues in a number of appropriate ways. Certainly within the social studies and science curriculum students could begin to study and engage with these issues. There are also new online tools that allow us to communicate in new ways, collaborating across the globe. Miguel Guhlin twists a nice phrase as he describes Web 2.0 tools as "disruptive technologies," due to their expanding our communication capabilities.Perhaps these tools will help us move from School 1.0 to School 2.0 to grapple with the issues which face our planet. The NAIS 20/20 challenge project, one of their global education projects stemming from the book High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them creates avenues for school projects. Do you know of innovative schools that are doing great things? Please add links to them to this wiki. If you want to sign Gore's petition which he presents in congress next week, it is here.