just got a mail from the National Institute of Education's Graduate Programs and Research Office.
these are the kind people who are facilitating the arrangement of my oral defence, which will be at 9 am on the 21st of September!
they've asked me to prepare three unbound copies of the thesis, which will be given to the panel members in advance.
God had an extra surprise in store today: my latest book - co-authored with my colleagues Assoc Profs Ooi Giok-Ling and Kalyani Chatterjea, and Asst Prof Chang Chew-Hung, entitled 'Geographies of a Changing World: Global Issues in the Early 21st Century' - is hot off the presses from Pearson Prentice Hall :-)
this book is significant because it marks the debut - in Chapter Nine ('Thinking Global, Acting Local: Stakeholders, Issues and Perspectives in Globalization') - of my emerging thoughts on the quantum classroom®, and of what i term 'Globalization 4.0'.
Globalization 4.0 builds on Friedman's three phases of globalization in his 'flat earth' thesis. As i express it on page 223,
"This phase, while similar to the preceding three in that it follows the logic of the shrinking world, is distinct from the others in that its defining characteristic is not so much size, but ubiquity.
"It is my contention that so-called Globalization 4.0 will be characterized by the ability of its participants to collapse time and space to the extent that they can be virtually anywhere, and at any time.
"To elaborate, I see four levelers which are setting Globalization 4.0 in motion. They are:
- mapping technologies as typified by Google Earth
- the provision and access to virtually unlimited amounts of storage space by services such as Gmail and Odeo
- the provision and access to increasingly higher bandwidth (both wired and wireless), and finally
- the development of what has been variously termed ubiquitous, pervasive and wearable computing.
Taken together, these technologies might be projected to converge, in the not too distant future, in several ways.
"An early example is the use of so-called life-blogs. In their current form, life-blogs are an extension of text-based blogs to incorporate multimedia recorded spontaneously. As storage and bandwidth fade from consideration, and as positioning, recording and playback devices shrink to the point that one forgets that one is wearing them, the time is not too far away when a person’s entire life experience – what he sees, hears, feels, smells; what his physiological reactions were; where and when he went – can potentially be digitally captured for posterity, for any participant to re-live."
Regular readers of voyeurism will recognise that i was first introduced to these ideas at the Human-Computer Interaction conference last year, specifically in the session described in this post.
now, mustn't forget about printing the thesis! off to the printers i go :-)
Technorati Tags: geography, globalization, Globalization 4.0, quantum classroom®, viva
