Final Exam

Anna Mason

A.

Over the past year, the Americas and Oceania group used edublogs to both share our final project and to keep the community viewing our blog aware of the current events in the region. When our group first put up the blog, Kristen and I designed its format and layout, so that it would be appealing to web surfers and that when they decided to look at our blog, it would be easy to navigate. The reason I initially chose Australia to study this year was because I knew in September that later in the year I would travel to Melbourne, so that I could have a more in depth understanding of the country. So as my Term 2 action plan, I travelled there over Thanksgiving and then posted about my experience in Melbourne HERE. Every week during terms 3 and 4, I brought in an article pertaining to the various topics that were requested about our assigned nation. We all would discuss each of our articles, and explain the environment of the aspect of our country that we brought in articles for that given week. On the week the global class was assigned to find out about the health system in our country, mine being the Commonwealth of Australia, especially pertaining to its health and globalization, I brought in two articles that the group and I chose to post on our blog. THIS POST allowed viewers of the blog to see both the state of Australia’s health care, and how healthy the actual population of Australia is. Overall, the group used our edublog to the minimum extent, by not putting more features of our countries in to it regularly and treating it more as a drop box for assignments, and not a blog to be read weekly. Though the Americas and Oceania group did not use the blog to its full potential, it did allow our year long project to be viewed in one place.

B.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie could arguably be a book that is all about dealing with globalization. In it, the narrator and his friend Luo are part of the Cultural Revolution in China in the mid 20^th century. Because they are youths of prominent urban Chinese families, they are sent in rural China for a “re-education”. There in the mountains of rural China, they experience a huge culture shock, for it was the first time they ever experienced being “global”. At first when they arrive, they view the members of the small community as uneducated and uncultured, and that they would never truly connect with them, because how could they, when they are so above them in every way? But as they spend their next several months and years there, they become to realize that these people have just as important a culture as they do back in the city. Not only do they begin to immerse themselves in the mountain community’s culture, but they discover completely new western culture in smuggled books of great European authors.  By being exposed to a totally different mindset in those books filled with romance and drama, they began to view their own communities as beneath Europe’s, and empty of true culture. Since this book is based on a real period in history, globalization like that has obviously already happened, and we have already advanced far beyond that in just a matter of a couple decades. And like the narrator and his friend Luo, globalization has allowed us to see our cultures in a different perspective, so that we can judge it in either positively or negatively. But the important thing is that when we gain that globalized perspective, we do not dismiss either other cultures or even our own. Because without all of the diverse cultures world wide, globalization could not exist, and we all would be stuck to only whatever views and thoughts our own community can offer us.

C.

For all the final global presentations, the culture aspect, both pro and con, was done relatively thoroughly. Almost all of the other groups when dealing with culture, both on the view point of the corporation and NGO, touched on employment, while Emma and my part of our PRESENTATION did not. Like in the De Beers PRESENTATION, they talked about how child labor has greatly affected the culture of the areas where De Beers mines because those areas then have largely uneducated youth, for they have no time to finish school if they are working. We might not have talked so much about employment in term of culture because of the fact that Wal-Mart is such a varying company, in that it manufactures and sells almost anything that could be sold at a retail store of any kind. Because of this, both Emma and I focused on because Wal-Mart has such a broad range of products, the result is both good and bad. Good, in that everywhere in the world people have access to the same retail, bad, in that private businesses cannot compete with the all-encompassing low priced products of large corporations like Wal-Mart. By seeing the more specific collecting or manufacturing and then selling products of the other groups, I saw that culture can be considered almost anything when dealing with large corporations and their effects. In many of the presentations, including my own, the NGOs mostly just criticized the company, which in some areas they had every right to do, but it created an atmosphere where the only positive aspects of corporations were coming from the company representatives, so that it had the potential to be biased. In Samsung’s PRESENTATION, Jack was assigned culture in the perspective of an NGO, and he gave unbiased reasons why Samsung has truly benefited the culture in all areas where its products are sold.  And because other NGO representatives pointed out the negatives aspects of Samsung, I felt like I received a rounded perspective on the corporation. I felt that these final projects were a good culmination of what we had been working towards all year.

D.

By making our final assignment for global a research and present project on a large corporation, it allowed us to see what recent globalization really means in terms of the entire world and smaller regions. For the whole year, we have been looking at how globalization has been an extreme negative effect in some areas, and made other areas flourish like they never would have without it. In the final project, we not only were able to pick a corporation that originally came from our region we had been studying, but also looked at how the corporation did exactly what we had been looking at all year, the positive and the negative. And by presenting our project to the class, and then being presented to, we got to see how regions all over the world had been globalized by these large corporations. This then meshed all of our regions together, and hence globalized the class.

I have truly felt that global was most defiantly my favorite class this year, if not in several years, and that it taught me the most important things I could ever need out of all my classes this year. Over the past several months in the global group, I have learned the backgrounds and the current states of individual countries and regions all over the world.

Before global I did not feel like I had a good grasp on what citizens of communities all over the world were going through, but global has changed that. And because I travel a good amount, I feel like because of global I will be able to understand the places I go, or just even study, on a deeper level, and become a real global citizen. I cannot wait to further my understanding of being a global citizen next year.