Week 1: Intro to Open World and Neo Millennial/Web 2.0 Learners

Monday, August 30, 2010

Week 1: The first day of IU classes

We started this class off with a brief introduction into the syllabus. I use the term brief very lightly as the syllabus for this class is not a sheet of paper, nor a simple pamphlet, nor a short story but it is a book in itself for this class. I thought to myself "Oh boy...What did I get myself into?!" After this task was completed, we did simple introduction of ourselves in the class. Here I found out that there were well over 10 different countries represented in a less than 20 person class. Wow! Dr. Bonk did not waste anytime after the introduction, and went straight into the lecture. I was in for a big surprise!

What does the phrase "Open World" mean? Let's start out with the idea that the world is flat broke according to Thomas Friedman. The world became flatten through 10 forces from the collapse of the Berlin Wall (11/9/89) to the launching of Netscape (8/9/95), as well as both Outsourcing and Insourcing. The idea of triple convergence: new economic players, playing field, and processes, acted on the flatteners which created a flatter global playing field. David Smick completely disagreed with this idea and decided that the world is curved. Richard Florida disagreed with both of these ideas and stated that the world is spiky. 

This led to another disagreement and the development of the idea that the world is open. This idea leads us to Dr. Bonk and his "The World is Open with Web Technology" class. Honestly, by the end of these ideas, I did not know what to think or believe. There was so many ideas an thoughts thrown my way that I felt completely overwhelmed. Within 10minutes, I had been given four very different opinions about one idea and I knew right there that this class would be quite interesting. I did not get a direct answer to the phrase "open world" but I was hoping that I would via the articles I had to read for the class in the next coming week.