Class Roundup: Humanity

Humanity in Globalization ended on a high note in all regards. The final I felt I did quite well on, having used the entire two hours to compose two solid essays. There is one service here at HKU where you can pull up old examinations from previous terms, but being that the first time this class was taught, this particular resource became more approximate than anything else. For part of the course content, our professor said to look up exams from a different class, Human Security, to get a good idea of what that will look like. Some questions were almost exactly, if not entirely, word for word the same.

To study, I went over all the readings (again) as well as my class notes. Being that most of the lectures were guest speakers, my notes were kind of sparse and largely irrelevant. However, for the optional review session, the professor gave us a thorough outline of the class with which we could structure our studying better.

Besides the final examination, there were also the term research paper, which I did on language rights and language evolution in the wake of globalization, as well as participation grades in lectures (based mostly on attendance) and tutorials.

For the last two tutorials, we did a role-playing exercise called Zanda. Zanda is a multinational state with a president who bombs tribal people to get them off their well-endowed mining lands, which the government has leased to a multinational corporation. Yanda is a neighboring country that has national security on its mind with the instability of Zanda yet supplies rebel armies with weapons. Wanda also borders Zanda and has had an influx of tribal people coming in as refugees. Queensland is the ex-colonial government that owned Zanda up until recently.

We got roles from tutor, ranging from nurse with multiplex relationships to heads of state and United Nations officials, along with NGO leaders, journalists, and the head of that multinational mining company. I was given the role of President of Wanda.

The whole exercise was quite amusing, with us debating for our interests and attempting to reach solutions. The problem was that we had no idea if we were allowed to reach solutions, meaning that we had no idea how much action we could take or if we were just talking.

The funny thing is that we were told that we were allowed to bring up Zanda as an example for our final examination. I thought it was funny to use such a frivolous activity as evidence for such an examination. Needless to say, I didn’t use it at all. Instead I referred to readings and guest speakers. Anyways, Zanda was mainly done to show how much work it is to reach consensus and get action done on such levels. I think that most of us already understood this concept though, seeing that not much gets done on the macro level on a day-to-day basis in the world.

The class ended on a positive note in all regards because my little dispute with Globalpost.com has been resolved. To refresh, they republished this blog by automated means consistently and without permission. To make things more irksome, they in no way acknowledged the fact that they did not own my content, claiming copyright over absolutely everything on their site. And on the monetary side of things, they were ostensibly making money off of my original work. After persistently emailing their blog coordinator for about a month, informing them of my position, they finally got back to me.

They apologized profusely, saying that they thought they got permission from all the authors of the blogs they copied onto their website to do so and that mine just fell through the cracks. They also said that if I would like, they would keep my posts on their website, praising my writing, lol. Maybe if they had said it the other way around, that they would like to publish my posts on their website for whatever reason, I would have gotten off my high horse and granted it.

One more final to go now!