When The World Is Flat Analysis

“When the Web first emerged I used to joke that if I had one fervent wish it would be that every modem sold would come with a warning label from the surgeon general that would say: ‘Judgment not included”, joked Thomas Friedman author of the World is Flat. Despite the original World is Flat being written about a decade ago its point is still true, judgment is still not included. E-learning, the webs version of the classroom, is an exploding industry, with online universities such as the University of Phoenix, and brick and mortar colleges like Yakima Valley Community College offering hundreds of classes to thousands of students locally and worldwide. With the boom of online courses and degrees, many people in the Yakima valley must consider …show more content…
From kindergarten to graduate school to YVCC, learning how to learn is a key component for all students to get the maximum they can out of school. The importance of learning how to learn is highlighted by Friedman when he states, “The first, and most important ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to “learn how to learn” –to constantly absorb, and teach yourself, new ways of doing old things or new ways of doing new things”(281). In essence Friedman is saying that in our modern world of globalization the key to success is learning how to learn. In E-learning this ability is even more vital because you nearly have to teach yourself the material. As Smith Jaggars mentions in Kathrine Long’s article, “Students said to us that they often felt like they were teaching themselves.”(Kathrine Long). So do at risk students know how to teach themselves? A study mentioned in Jenkins paper had this to say, “[The study], followed the enrollment history of 51,000 community-college students in Washington state between 2004 and 2009 [and] found an eight percentage-point gap in completion rates between traditional and online courses.” The study basically found that in community colleges very similar to YVCC, students did noticeably poorer in E-learning type classes. Long quotes another author musing about why this might be, ““Maybe working …show more content…
Jenkins points out that many of the at risk students taking online classes at community colleges are students that are often likely to drop out. After stating some convincing statistics from a previous study about E-learning’s failures, Jenkins comments, “But if, as the Columbia studies clearly show, the most at-risk students are less likely to finish when they ‘attend’ classes online, then for that group of students this approach may actually do more harm than good.” Basically Jenkins, and the Columbia Report, claim that while these ‘at-risk’ pupils do poorly in regular classes they do even worse in online classes. This is caused by what I will call, the motivation drain. The motivation drain is how/when some aspects of E-learning desiccated students’ passions and curiosity. A list of what motivates people include, parents, teachers, and nagging. A list of hindrances, or blocks to motivation are, the internet, phones, pc games, and social media. E-learning is a dangerous thing for students who aren’t intrinsically motivated by passion and curiosity, because it expels most of the external motivators and invites in all of the distractions mentioned above directly into your study space, the computer, which blocks motivation. Jenkins practically lays forth the foundation/ mentions something very similar to my theory, of this theory with these questions, “Maybe they need