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describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of exchange

Connecting Cultures For the same reasons but in a far different environment, social studies teacher Suzie Nestico oversees a project that involves 14 schools and nearly 400 students in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, South Korea, and the United States. She teaches students in grades 10 through 12 at the 900-student Mount Carmel Area High School in Mount Carmel, Pa. See Also On-Demand Webinar: E-Learning Goes Global From professional development for teachers in China to the use of mobile technology to bring new learning opportunities to remote villages in Africa, e-learning is bringing advanced courses, expert teachers, and an awareness of life in other countries to students around the globe. • View this on-demand webinar. “We’re a small, rural town of 6,000 with ultra-conservative family values and viewpoints, and most of our students have never gone anywhere else,” said Ms. Nestico, the project manager for the Flat Classroom Project, an international collaborative effort that links classrooms around the globe. She also built a course called 21st Century Global Studies that started this academic year. The course is for students in grades 10 through 12 who, through project- and inquiry-based assignments such as editing wiki pages, learn that working collaboratively with other cultures—an increasingly marketable skill—can be challenging. “It’s a big shift for them to go from ‘me’ to ‘we,’ ” she said. “I can’t help but think that the more kids we involve in projects like this, the more we start to break down some of this sense of entitlement” that exists among students in the United States. “Just imagine if you wrote 200 words on your wiki page, and when you went back the next day, you saw that students in Korea had changed a couple of your sentences because they thought it sounded better another way,” Ms. Nestico said. “There are a lot of sighs at first, and it’s a messy process, but it’s very much worth doing. This is where we truly push learning to the highest level.” Some lessons have less to do with a final grade than with understanding that a simple phrase in one culture can easily be misperceived in another. When a student in California posted an online request last summer for information about a “flash mob,” for example, a teacher from Germany immediately jumped in to write that European students couldn’t even talk about such a thing because of the London riots. And two years ago, during an education-related trip to Mumbai, India, Ms. Nestico had to nix any exclamatory T-shirts that might offend the local residents, such as “Holy cow!,” because cows are considered sacred animals in India.

Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world. Globalization is not new, though. For thousands of years, people—and, later, corporations—have been buying from and selling to each other in lands at great distances, such as through the famed Silk Road across Central Asia that connected China and Europe during the Middle Ages. Likewise, for centuries, people and corporations have invested in enterprises in other countries. In fact, many of the features of the current wave of globalization are similar to those prevailing before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

In addition to Pennsylvania, this round of the project includes classrooms from Maryland, Alaska, Kansas, California, Texas, Spain, Germany, India, Qatar and Canada.

The Flat Classroom Project, cofounded by Julie Lindsay, Beijing, China and Vicki Davis, Camilla, Ga., speaks to the very heart of Pennsylvania's Classrooms for the Future initiative and 21st Century learning, Nestico said.

Students are not just doing education, they are living it, creating it, and ultimately, reshaping what it will look like for others in the future, Nestico said.

Education in the general sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another. Education can also be defined as the process of becoming an educated person

d a popular NBC sitcom.

We knew what the charade was—outsourced

workers in India pretending to be American