Cultures Across Borders

Bridging Cultures Across Borders

04/28 & 30/2009—

The World Is Flat and The World is Hot Flat and Crowded

Cisco wanted to show how technology has made the world a more collaborative place. The Human Network is transforming the way we live, work, learn and play. These interactions aim to bring awareness of humanity from different parts of the world.

 

·         How did this idea come about?

            This idea came about initially through Sam Lim, a VP of the Video Technology unit of Cisco. We got our inspiration from the Cisco advertisement for TelePresence ‘called stare  down’, where school kids from two countries stare each other down to see who blinks first at  the end of the TP, the audience only realize it is a TP when the cameras pull back.  He set an initial collaboration with a school in India (Frank Anthony School, Chennai, India) and the (Gwinnett School of Mathematics Science and Technology, Duluth, GA) US.  The success of the pilot encouraged him to seek out others like myself who could take this concept further.

 

·         Was this the first-of-its-kind in India or globally?

       This would be the 3^rd and 4^th TP event held by GSMST. However these would be the first three country TP events attempted by the participating schools. It could surely be the first of its kind that brings students (the younger generation 14   through 17) to collaborate together at such a global scale and at that grade level.

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·         What is Cisco’s vision with respect to education considering you have organized the TP session?

            Education is increasingly needing to adapt to the changing needs of the students in a world in which technological change is impacting the students daily lives on a global basis. Students today have access to resources on the internet whoch make the learning and dissemination of knowledge on the ‘Net’ happen at light speed.  TP is a medium to enable that at a significant lesser cost, the collaborative learning that will soon replace more traditional methods of getting a global perspective  while taking into consideration gobal impediments to collaboration like Time Zones, Languages etc.

 

·         Thomas Friedman’s books are an interesting choice for the interaction. Who thought of this idea?

             The genesis of this idea came from Ms Brandy Walker, the Honors Language Art    Teacher at GSMST who is spearheading this program from the US school.

 

·         Are you going to conduct such sessions more often? How do you plan to take this forward?

 As mentioned earlier the events on the April 28^th and April 30^th are the 3^rd and 4^th events in this series. In the 2007-2008 school year GSMST had one TP event. This year (2008-2009) there are 3 events planned for TP. Most events have been based upon Tom Friedman’s books the ‘The World is Flat’ and more recently ‘Hot Flat and Crowded’.

We would like to learn from this event to see how we can enhance this experience or learn from this to produce an event with an even richer experience.

 

Past Events