Reflection on Thomas Friedman talk about his book "The World is Flat"

As far as I understood, Thomas Friedman claims that the world is flat. It is the notion which he describes in his book “The World is Flat”. According to Thomas Friedman, there are no boundaries any longer among countries because of the Internet which made it ‘flat’. It means that people can be in touch, work together on the same project being far away in the different corners of the planet just sitting in their rooms or just from everywhere, only having an access to the internet.

In his book he names ten flatteners which lead us to the world we have today.

The first three, as he said, "created the platform". The first flattener mentioned by Thomas Friedman is ‘The New Age of Creativity:’ When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up. The second one is ‘The New Age of Connectivity:’ When the Web Went Around and Netscape Went Public. This flattener is a combination of technologies that gave us access to World Wide Web (www) and then the fiber optic cable came to light making different countries, cities and people like "next door neighbors". The next six flatteners he called the new forms of collaboration the examples of which are outsourcing,which is the process of taking work that used to be done in-house and paying another company to do it, and offshoring , which is when a company moves its production from its home country to another country where it can be done with cheaper labor and low taxes. He also mentioned about opensourcing, which he named as a "new model of production", insourcing and informing. Finally the tenth fllatener is, as he called, the steroids due the which all above mentioned fllateners started to work together and created the global flatform where there is no any borders for anything and anyone.In this moment the world became flat.

The implication this idea has, is that online teaching and learning have become possible via

the Internet. There are a huge number of online courses using which people can get a diploma just sitting in their apartments without leaving it. Also teachers can use online sources, a huge amount of data, and implement the existing information in their classrooms. This will help them to make their lessons more successful and real-life.