Global education, diversity and multi-cultural appreciation are ideas that I believe are essential for our student's success. I also believe as educators we need to model this for them. So when I used this tool to see where the folks that I follow reside, it was a little embarrassing.
A little North American centric ya think? While this tool only allows a sampling of 100 of your followers, (I currently follow about 700) it's likely a pretty reasonable indicator of who's got my attention. Ewan's concerned about this as well. He blames time zones and short attention spans and he's got a point. Christian Long argues:
And perhaps -- no matter how much Friedman and well-intentioned educators may want -- the world defaults to hyper-local (scaled accordingly) rather than global when it comes to conversation over time.
While that offers some explanation I can't quite take myself off the hook. Add to the fact that a number of those outside North American are ex-pats I have to hang my head in shame. Clarence Fisher is doing wonderful things to help his students experience a global education all the way from northern Manitoba. He requires them to have a global and diverse network.
So to appease my guilt and practice what I preach, I need to do some different things. By the end of the year, I'm going to find 50 new followers from outside North America. I may even look for random people as it could improve my creativity. I'm going to find 10 new bloggers from overseas and 5 new flickr contacts. Okay, maybe there's more to do but that's a start. What about you? Happy with who you're learning with? Feel a need to expand? Have any tips or suggestions? Speak now.
