Summary Of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat

Brad Henry, a former governor of Oklahoma, strongly stated that, “No other investment yields as great a return as the investment in education. An educated workforce is the foundation of every community and the future of every economy.” In today’s increasingly globalized society, there are more concerns about what jobs will be available for future generations and if economies will remain stable. There is a large consensus by experts and citizens of states that some solution must be made to ensure the stability and prosperity of future generations. In Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, Friedman suggests that for America to compete in a globalized world, there are certain gaps that need to be closed. Two of these gaps are the infrastructure

In the book The World is Flat, Friedman presents the idea that “Broadband and information technologies are important not only because they are big global businesses in and of themselves, but also because they are critical to advancing productivity and innovation in every sector in the economy” (Friedman 364). In other words, Friedman is saying that to have a competitive economy in the globalized world, we need a better broadband infrastructure to connect and communicate properly around the globe. Communication is well developed when it comes to text or sound, but we need an infrastructure that will allow us to communicate through blogs, social media, images, and videos. MOOCs will help provide the incentive to create a reliable internet infrastructure. Anant Agarwal, the head of edX, believes, “Even the infrastructure has to change. ...We need to go from lectures on the blackboard to online exercises, online videos” (Agarwal 1:46). In making this comment, Agarwal is urging us to acquire a better internet infrastructure to provide the resources needed to use these online classes. In addition to Agarwal, Daphne Koller, a professor at Stanford and co-founder of Coursera, asks “Now, how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 TAs? The answer is, you need to use technology to do it for you” (Koller 9:33). The essence of Koller’s argument is that we not only use technology and the internet to learn, but we also use the connection the internet provides to grade and give feedback to students around the globe. Without higher quality broadband technologies, online education and the business world will be unable to compete on a global scale. With MOOCs however, the demand for quality broadband internet will soar, helping to close the infrastructure gap and