On a wider scale than the educational landscape, globalization refers to the processes that promote worldwide participation and relationships between people of different countries, cultures, and languages. Four main processes promote globalization: communication processes, economic processes, political processes, and educational processes.
Global communication processes are how information is delivered. Television, e-mail, the Internet, newspapers, and textbooks are all sources of globalization communication. When the news is reported, technology, such as television and the Internet, allows this information to be widely and rapidly disseminated across the world in a matter of seconds or minutes. Textbooks, on the other hand, by their nature are always dated, although they do provide us with an organization of information that can provide a clearer picture of events, along with the ability to gather and verify various reputable sources on the subject. Natural disasters have a particular ability to spark a sense of globalization, such as when a tsunami in Japan or an earthquake in Haiti spawned calls for aid from other countries.
Global economic processes involve all aspects of buying and selling goods and services across the globe. Some multinational corporations are reducing costs by outsourcing certain roles and responsibilities within the company to employees in another. Many individuals can obtain employment in countries other than their country of residence and may commute physically by flying. Or they may telecommute, using the Internet to hold meetings with offices across the globe.
Global political and educational processes can be viewed as interrelated. Political organizations across the globe are necessarily in contact, making and amending trade and transportation agreements, for example. International policy frequently affects multiple countries, and their leaders are required to open dialogue on several issues that, as recently as ten years ago, would have been considered internal issues.
Education is one such issue, as the demands of a global employee require a certain amount of standardization in the level of skills. An excellent example of this is familiarity with technology. Teachers in developed countries with affordable access to technology are expected to incorporate technology into every aspect of their teaching, but the same would not necessarily be expected of a teacher in a rural school in an underdeveloped country. But regardless of expectations, or where they live, all students will, at some point, come into contact with technology, and dialogue on a global level is therefore important, encouraging teachers from all countries to enable their students to be aware, if not familiar, with advances in technology.