The Final Submission

The Flat Classroom Project (FCP) was a very unique project whose main emphasis was collaborative learning with its content based on Thomas Friedman's Book and Video, whose theme was based on his talk titled, “The World is Flat”. The whole experience was on the emphasis of how technology has changed the way people communicate, socialize, and do business and ultimately how it is going to affect education in the near future. In a nutshell, everything has become very fast, very easy, very accurate and more often than ever very enjoyable to do.
It was the first time in my life to hear about the FCP at the beginning of this semester in Emerging Instructional Technology (EIT) class. However, I had known a little about Thomas Friedman and the lecture he gave about, "The World is Flat" , had watched the video based on it and read the book before from another class I took at UNI as an undergraduate student. I had some ideas of all the flatteners revolving around the subject. Watching the video again helped me recall them vividly therefore giving me confidence about what I was going to deal with the whole semester.

Organization

During the FCP, I got involved with a couple of roles that I played. I signed up on the FCP as a member on their web site and the ning. Once I became a member, I signed up for a group that included students that I was to give advice as well as collaborate with. The group was assigned a topic of study to research and learn from each other about aspects related to that topic. The topic that my group was assigned was globalization and outsourcing, which the students appeared to get into deeper as they became interested to know more about the topic. The whole reason for FCP was mainly to collaborate with other student from different social, economic, cultural, educational backgrounds and geographic regions. By doing so, students learned that the world is hypothetically very small and is moving very fast and. Consequently, whoever can be able to learn fast will equal to the demands and opportunities that come along as a result of globalization. It is a very effective way of learning as it turned out to be. Though I was inconvenienced by demands of my schedule, I enjoyed the FCP every minute of it.
The expert adviser’s job was to help direct the students, answer their questions and give them focus so they do not derail into other topic areas. I finally signed up to become a judge for the group that I was assigned to evaluate. The videos were part of the project intended to express their thoughts about what they had learned throughout the semester.
Overall the projects went fine and actually, we achieved the over all objective of collaborating. The organization was okay, except that as a class and I, personally did not know what was ahead of me in advance so I could prepare for it. I would suggest that for tasks that the student (us) are going to be involved in the FCP, should be in a central location (site). They can be serialized in a manner so the students know the flow of event, deadlines and what is expected of them all along the way through the semester. For the purpose of reinforcing this point, the reason for collaboration is to create a common understanding or awareness so everybody gets even. Sometime during the semester, there was some kind of confusion, miscommunication or misunderstanding as to wear to go for instruction or sign up for a task.

Communication

 In terms of communication during the group project, it was very difficult to get the kids to express themselves or even ask a question on the discussion board. I posted my introduction, gave them compliments for what they had already done so far and welcomed them to ask any questions several times, but no one did. At the same time, many of the students shied away from befriending me so I never got to know how many students I had all together. That is something that I would particularly like changed because without people to talk to in the first place, there can never be collaboration. I had the feeling that the kids were also not prepared to interact with the advisors over the internet and so they went on with their work, on their own.  It looks like they were warned to be worry about strangers over the internet, whereas this was a class project! They all never activated their discussion boards as reflected on their blogs! My suggestion is that a way be devised were the students and the advisors can be formally introduced to each other.
I faced a number of challenges. Though I knew I had to have a computer, I did not know it specifically had to be a laptop computer plus other accessories that I had not budgeted for.  At one point I considered dropping the class but my inner voice told me to stay put and keep doing what I can. The lack of all the computer requirements forced me to accept a job offer off campus in order to be able to acquire whatever I needed for the class. Also the FCP came to me as a surprise since I was not expecting a class oriented in that manner.
The project that amazed me the most was the video production done by the kids. Although some of the videos had glitches here and there, it was fulfilling in on itself. Watching the videos, it looked like a lot of the students had a very enjoyable time putting their work together. Most of the students did a very good job of incorporating all the required elements into their work. The most important thing that the students were supposed to take out of this great project was to acquire collaborative skills, learn about different issues affecting everyone mentally, psychologically, socially and economically.

Pedagogy

The one thing that was obviously different in this approach of teaching was the way we and any other individuals or group of individuals were incorporated in the project. Each individual came along with different ideas, values, and culture, status, family and educational background, social, geographic and economic differences to work towards a common goal. This was accomplished very successfully. I learned a lot of things, for example I had not blogged before, but now I have a blog and I am still enjoying it. I actually will still keep the blog. If it is rendered irrelevant, I will definitely set up another blog. Another thing that I never wanted to consider was twitting. In fact, I never even knew how to spell the word tweet, but now, I not only know how to set a tweeter a count up, but also how to use it. Other things that I felt were relevant to this class but did not get as much attention as the ones mentioned above were SL, texting, email, Skype, VoiceThread and organization gadgets such as igoogle and tweeter deck. I came to learn that second life is actually going to be the way of the future 3D interactive internet. The High school kids must have experienced an overload of information. If I wanted to introduce such a class to my students, I will start very slow, then gradually build from what they know.