Bob Compton is the director and producer of The Finland Phenomenon. We reviewed that film this month and while the film is definitely worth a watch we wanted to talk to Compton to get a better understanding of why he made the film.

UL: You’ve made other documentaries on K-12 education. Why the focus on this subject in your filmmaking?

BC: I’m retired now but I had been a venture capitalist, investing in high tech companies for the past 25 years. Increasingly my companies were hiring engineers from both India and China. So, I decided to spend some time in both countries to understand what was going on. Was it just a lower cost employee or was it something else? I also wondered what the implications might be for my daughters’ generation.

Starting in the late 90s the economics were no longer as compelling for outsourcing but it’s where the talent was. As I explored what was going on in education in India, China, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong it became clear that they had a significantly better education system and their K-12 students were being educated on a much higher level. You can see that in the international exams. We are being out-educated and are soon to be out-innovated and the result is our kids won’t have the same standard of living that my generation had.

UL: So when did you first become interested in Finland’s education system?

BC: I started showing my film Two Million Minutes and it became clear from the generally angry reaction of most audiences that there wasn’t anyway that American students had the discipline that these children did so I started looking at other models for America to regain its academic strength and the obvious one was Finland. They’ve ranked number one in the world in math, science and reading for the past ten years. They’re a post-industrial society. Thirty-five per cent of their economy is high-tech and I thought they offered a useful model for bringing students up in an economy where it wasn’t dependent on rapid industrialization which is what’s going on in Asia. I went over there and what I discovered was quite surprising. Their students go to school the same number of times in a year. Their students typically start later than American students do. They have much less homework than American students and they do relatively little testing until the very end of their K-12  experience. In doing the opposite of all of the trends in American education they’ve consistently come out number one. I wanted to see why and that’s why I made the documentary.

UL: Where does this film differ from other documentaries focused on education like Waiting for Superman or Race to Nowhere?

BC: They all have pretty specific viewpoints. In Waiting for Superman I see a pretty strong bias as well. My desire is to document the truth of what’s occurring in K-12 education around the world with the hope that parents, educators and students will see the truth of what’s happening and recognize that we need to dramatically and rapidly change our K-12 education system. I don’t come in with a particular bias, I’m a business guy. I look at the facts, I look at the competition and I say these are the facts and we have to face them. We have to stop making excuses or our children will pay a high price in a much lower standard of living.

UL: At the end of your documentary you really hammer home on the importance of transparency and trust, why did you choose to do that?

BC: It was the most surprising thing out of a lot of surprises in Finland. There is no trust in American education, zero. The teachers don’t trust administrators, the parents don’t trust teachers and the administrators don’t trust the government. The level of vitriol in the debate in American education is just extremely high and that’s so the polar opposite of the Finnish education system where trust is the fundamental foundation. However that trust was built up over decades. You don’t fix it in a year and you don’t fix it in a four-year election cycle. Trust is built up over a period of time and no one trusts anyone in the American education system. That to me was the most profound difference between the two systems.

The heavy use of the words tweet, bromance and fist bump earned the terms, along with 147 others, new definitions in the back-to-school update of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. At the same time, Indiana’s Department of Education decided that cursive writing would no longer be a required course in public schools this fall. Instead, students in the Hoosier State will be expected to become proficient with keyboarding skills.

Are these natural steps in the progression of language and an ongoing shift to a more digital culture or is it regressive pandering to technology and encouraging an undereducated future generation?

Let’s not get too worked up about the new words in the dictionary. Dictionary publishers, desperate for press, often gin up some coverage with the questionable addition of new words. No, the much larger question here is cursive writing.

Lee Easton, chair of the Department of English at Mount Royal University in Calgary, is divided on the issue. While he doesn’t think there’s anything in human nature, or the nature of language, that would suggest we should be using digital communication, he doesn’t think removing cursive writing is pandering to the technology crowd. “Digital tools have permeated our culture. Texting, tablets and mobile computers are just the most recent examples of the proliferation of devices that are available,” he says. “It’s recognition of the fact that we have a set of devices we want them to be schooled in using. Whether or not it’s natural, it’s certainly predictable.”

Back in the 1980s, when Easton was teaching at a college in Ontario, there was already the thought that learning keyboarding skills would help students be more successful once they entered the workforce. “Anytime a new medium becomes dominant and there’s a feeling it will be permanent, they bring in an education component to teach children,” he says. “We always forget that until the early 1800s it was unusual for everybody to read and write.”

While you might be itching to fist bump your co-workers in celebration of the adoption of slang terms to official words in the English language and the increased use of digital communication, you might want to think twice before using WTF in the subject line of a memo.

“There aren’t firm boundaries on how we use everyday language and formal expression,” Easton says. “But our sense of what’s appropriate has not changed all that much on a formal level. If someone is saying WTF all the time, I would hope it would still raise an eyebrow or more if used often in the workplace.”

Erica Pyska, a business and training consultant and owner of The Epiphany Group in Lethbridge, suspects the decision in Indiana has more to do with economics than evolution. “I feel like it’s a reaction to the economic downturn, large class sizes and not enough teachers,” she says. “Yes, there’s a component of technology, but there are also economic impacts that affect it. It’s not just that technology is important and cursive isn’t because even for just deciphering documents it’s valuable to know.”

In the last three or four years, Pyska has witnessed more and more phrases from everyday language find their way into corporate settings as businesses try and connect with young professionals. “It’s good to have balance,” she says. “It’s good to have fundamental principles and practices in business, but also the tools to blend humour or casualness into it.”

As new words and new technology find increased popularity in contemporary society, others are shown the door. It wasn’t too long ago that cassette tapes were replaced by compact disks as the main delivery system of music. Now, digital files have replaced those shiny discs. In fact, just last month, the Concise Oxford English removed cassette player from its lexicon. If cursive writing, and possibly by extension, pen and paper become a distant memory, what’s next in line for the chopping block?

Pyska figures the transition towards electronic billing and invoicing will continue, as well as more self-serve checkout registers in retail stores. Easton meanwhile can still remember the days in Ontario when having a private telephone line in your home was a novelty and he thinks those days will come back soon. “It’s already starting and that will be next,” he says.

And anybody in the fiercely combative not-in-my-lifetime crowd, probably shouldn’t get too worked up. “Things don’t change all that fast,” says Easton. “We worry they do, but they don’t.”

University can be tough. Students shell out gobs of money to get a degree when pretty much every economist thinks this generation will make less than its parents. The specters of global aging, global warming, never-ending financial crises and giant killer robots loom just over the horizon.

So with that in mind perhaps it’s understandable that university students sometimes take easier classes to fill out their degrees. While underwater basket weaving has never been an actual college credit course, it does serve as useful shorthand to describe a cheap and easy filler course. The term first appeared in newspapers and magazines in the 50s in reference to the courses that university football players coasted through

We present to you with the five most silliest university classes. If you took or know of an even better one, be sure to leave it in the comments.

Introduction to Geology – GLGY 209 – University of Calgary

Commonly called Rocks for Jocks this course explores “basic concepts regarding the major features of the earth,” according to the course description. Although I picked the course from the University of Calgary almost any university will offer this course.

Canadian Sports History – KIN 3170 -  University of Manitoba

I can just imagine the course now: three hours a week of watching every minute of the 1972 Summit Series and then beating the importance of this cultural event into the ground.

There are some serious academics and thinkers out there who make the case for sport as some kind of civil society glue. I tend to fall into the line of thinking of sport as a societal distraction. Wherever you come down on that spectrum, I don’t imagine this class is very difficult.

Foundations of Game Design – DMED 503 – University of British Columbia

In this course you get to build both physical and electronic games. While I imagine this can be hard work, we’re still talking about game play here.

According to the course description there is also “Analysis of games as rules, games as play, and games as culture.”

There is quite a range from Red Rover to Call of Duty, I’m curious just how deep this course goes. Whatever its focus is it’s definitely no Super Smash Brothers Melee Theory and Practice course.

Music History and Literature – University of Calgary – MUHL 309

Given the post-Napster age that current students live in, the wonders of musical history are no longer just found in old record shops. It is easier now than at any other time in history to educate yourself about popular music. Still, the University of Calgary offers this breezer.

“The course will examine the meaning and messages of popular music, and its impact on present-day culture. Topics may include The Beatles and Rolling Stones, Rock and Roll, Black Music, jazz, music and media, blues, Sinatra, Broadway and others.”

Science of Superheroes

This course seems more like a way for Michael Dennin to get on television than a serious academic offering. Regardless, the University of California Irvine has offered this extremely popular course for the past several years and yes, it’s as silly as you think it is.

From the course description, “Have you ever wondered if Superman could really bend steel bars? Would a ‘gamma ray’ accident turn you into the Hulk? What is a ’spidey-sense’? And just who did think of all these superheroes and their powers? In this seminar, we discuss the science (or lack of science) behind many of the most famous superheroes. Even more amazing, we will discuss what kind of superheroes might be imagined using our current scientific understanding.”

The physics professor sees the course as a fun way to introduce students to science, but this isn’t pre-school. Students shouldn’t have to be tricked into taking university courses merely because they’ll get to talk about their favourite costumed heroes.

With all of this in mind however, what people think is an easy class can often be harder then you think. In 2002 at the University of Calgary a course was offered that examined the popular television show, the Sopranos. It got a lot of cable TV news and newspaper chatter but it was harder than you think. According to Connor Turner, a former student of the class, it was quite difficult with many ‘A’ students dropping out or receiving a poor mark while Turner scraped by with a ‘B’.

Originally published Sept. 1, 2010

The first school had homemade wooden desks and seats. An iron box stove, using long billets of wood, heated the room.

Mr. Richard Secord, who recently passed away, was our first teacher. He was very strict and made liberal use of heavy willow switches to keep our minds on our work

One of the lessons taught to the beginner was: “Is it an ox?—It is an ox.” The teacher taught us numbers by moving coloured pieces of wood on wire attached to a wooden frame. Old Ontario readers were used by the classes. For writing we used slates and slate pencils. Scribblers were then unheard of.

—Alex McCauley recalling school life in Edmonton in the 1880s. (Kostek 1992)

I’m broadcasting, from my iPhone, live on Ustream.

—@gcouros, posted to Twitter.com, August 25, 2010

Whereas Richard Secord might have prepared for the start of another school year by piling up billets of wood or picking out the right willow switch, George Couros (@gcouros) is preparing by experimenting with live Internet broadcasting from his iPhone.

Couros is the principal of Forest Green Elementary School, in Stony Plain, Alberta and one of many teachers who are connecting with other teachers around the world using social media.

The work of teachers has changed dramatically since McCauley’s time, but the changes occurring now as a result of technology are profound. In particular, online networking allows teachers to advance their professional practice and improve the quality of educational outcomes by connecting with colleagues directly from their desktops or mobile phones.

Couros started blogging last year to provide leadership to his teachers on how blogging and social networking can be applied to educational settings. This year, students at Forest Green will begin producing online journals called blogfolios to demonstrate their learning and to showcase their schoolwork.

“We’re really focused on critical thinking and looking at different perspectives,” says Couros. “I think that through blogging you have that continuous reflection.”

Students as young as four or five will start posting to blogs this year and will keep posting throughout their time at Forest Green.

Cold Lake High School media arts teacher Jared Nichol (@mrnichol) also sees the power of blogs for reflection. He uses his blog Journeys in 2.0 Teaching to reflect on his teaching practice.

At the end of each day, Nichol records his thoughts on how lessons went and how they could be improved next time. He will refer to previous blog posts when planning lessons to ensure that his practice is constantly evolving. He also gets great value by reading ideas and feedback left by other colleagues in the comments on his blog.

“If you’re an early adopter or a keener, then you’re kind of on a technology island; you think you are the only one. So connecting to other people who are thinking the same and doing the same and sharing the same, that’s huge,” says Nichol.

Nichol says the real engagement is on the social networking and microblogging service Twitter and points to how people involved in education use it. For example, Alberta Minister of Education Dave Hancock (@DaveHancockMLA) is a regular user of Twitter and regularly participates in discussions marked with the hashtag #ABEd.

“I call it my bat phone to the minister of education,” says Nichol, noting that he can post a question for the government and often get a response within a day

Achieving change in the education system is the goal of another Alberta teacher who is connecting online. Joe Bower (@joe_bower) teaches Grade 6 at Normandeau Elementary School, in Red Deer. He also authors For the Love of Learning, a blog focussed on revamping assessment in Alberta’s schools. He advocates abolishing homework and grading in lieu of more authentic assessment activities, like the blogfolios being introduced by Couros.

Teachers like Bower are convinced that this type of assessment demonstrates student understanding and growth more effectively than traditional exams and assignments.

Like most teachers who are interacting online, Bower is impressed by the opportunities to connect with others around the world. Recently, while listening to renowned Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, Bower sent a tweet to a colleague in Finland. He was able to confirm that multiple-choice tests are rarely used in assessment there, before Sahlberg was even done giving his talk.

“My personal learning network is growing every day,” says Bower, who has nearly 2,000 followers on Twitter.

“This is the best form of professional development I have taken part in. It’s not only supremely effective and efficient, but it’s also cheap. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Bower is also bringing his experiences from collaborating online into the classroom. He has used Twitter during conferences and seminars as a backchannel to communicate with other delegates. Now he plans to bring that utility into his classroom by mounting a flat screen monitor in his room to display the comments of his students while they watch a video or participate in a lesson.

“Instead of it just being a Planet Earth video 1.0 where the kids just ‘sit and get’ alone in a crowd, now the kids are watching and they can interact through Twitter, and there is actually some learning and interaction happening while the video is playing.”

The Twitter wall not only enhances the learning value for the students, it also becomes an assessment tool for Bower. These types of assessments for learning are conducted in such a way that the students learn while the teacher assesses what they are learning.

“The best forms of assessment are done while the kids are still learning,” says Bower.

It’s tough to say what types of tools 1880s teacher Richard Secord used to assess learning, but it’s good to know that if he were in a school today he wouldn’t be isolated and dependent on “Old Ontario readers.”

Of course, if he were in a school today he might be more concerned with figuring out how to download the Willow Switch app.

References

Kostek, M. A. 1992. A Century and Ten: The History of Edmonton Public Schools. Edmonton, Alta.: Edmonton Public Schools.

Keeping up with advances in technology is a job all on its own. Every other day something new comes along, promising to revolutionize the way we work, socialize, or otherwise handle tasks that are suddenly crucial. Not every aspect of technology will help you in your career or your life, but there are definitely a few that you should know to keep up with the changing digital landscape.

Manage Your Online Reputation

The easiest way to manage your online reputation is to not post anything online that you wouldn’t want anyone else to know about. No matter what your privacy settings think of social networks as open systems.

Mistakes do happen though; it’s not out of the question for someone to post something without you knowing until its too late. Or maybe someone has an axe to grind, and you or your business happen to be the target. There are websites out there that can help make push unwanted things downwards in search engine results.  If you want to have some control over your own online reputation you need to get proactive. Here is a helpful post on how to manage your online fame (or infamy).

Be Search Engine Literate

Search engines are usually pretty good at finding what you’re looking for, but finding specific pages can prove tricky; especially if those pages don’t get much traffic. There are simple commands you can give search engines to make sure you find exactly what you want to. These symbols will allow you to find specific phrases, exclude certain words or differentiate search terms, all of which make research a whole lot easier.

Make Sure You Back Up Your Data

Backing up data is not a difficult thing to do, but it is an invaluable one. If your hard drive crashes and you didn’t have your data backed up somewhere, it’s gone. The easiest way to back up your files is to buy an external hard drive. A one terabyte (1000 gigabyte) external hard drive costs $100-$200 and has enough memory to back up all of your pictures from your summer vacation several times over.

Innovations like cloud computing can store your data remotely, allowing you to access it on any device whenever you’re online. The biggest challenge with backing up data is remembering to do it, so set a date every month or every two weeks to back up your files – it could save you a massive headache later on. Here is a helpful video highlighting the best ways to back up your data, and another one that teaches you exactly how to use an external hard drive.

Make Sure Your Data Is Secure

There are plenty of programs and protocols out there that can help protect your data from being stolen or otherwise compromised. These are a good start, but as Lewis Kelly wrote in his article last month, given enough time, a hacker can get into anything if they’re good enough. So on top of having good security programs, you should also take matters into your own hands, starting with not using the same password for everything. This post will help you with some more advanced data securing techniques.

Learn Some Search Engine Optimization Techniques

When you Google your name or business, what is on the first page? Where do you appear? How about when you Google your name and the city you live in? Is your name so common that you don’t show up until the fourth page? Search engine optimization will help you get noticed by pushing your page up in search engine results. Do it well enough and you might end up on top. If you do it right the other John Smiths won’t know what hit them. Google has a whole PDF devoted to teaching you how to optimize your results; it doesn’t guarantee you’ll make the top page, but it’s an excellent starting point. It also has a robot that has green hair and likes flowers, for some reason.

Learn Some HTML

HTML is a language all on its own, but it’s one worth knowing. It wouldn’t be wise to travel to a foreign country without first learning some basic phrases in its native language. The same goes for the web. No one is saying you need to know how to create a rival for Facebook in a day, but knowing how to fix minor problems with text or color on a web page can be helpful. With a little practice, you can improve the overall presentation and effectiveness of your websites and online documents and perhaps your reputation too.

Learn to Edit Sound and Video

In grade school, every so often classes get assigned video projects. Despite the amount of fun groups have, teachers must want nothing less than to suddenly be struck blind and deaf. When nine or 10 years olds are armed with video cameras, editing boils down to hitting record, stopping when their partner inevitably messes up, rewinding it back to the part where they started recording, and recording over it. Somewhat like this, only with nine year olds trying to sell rocket-powered rollerblades. Videos or podcasts without a reasonable amount of  competence won’t get taken seriously. Neither will you or your business. While you might not be producing it helps to know how the medium works.

If you want to be more technically competent than an elementary school kid, learning to edit video and sound is a good start. There are many programs you can download for free online that are relatively easy to use and will serve most of your editing needs. If you’re more serious, there are ones you can pay for that have more features. Not only is proper editing more professional, it can be a lot of fun to present things exactly the way you want to.

September means school, and school, for many, means existential anguish with a side order of physical torment. Aside from replacing protractors with iPhones and cutting back on the canings, Western education hasn’t changed a ton over the last fifty years. Teachers still strive to cram their students’ heads with knowledge, reverting to power tools if necessary; students still chafe at the attempt and do their best thwart it. Will tomorrow look the same? Unlimited tracked down three leading education thinkers to find out.

Liz Dwyer

Education editor at GOOD, blogger and former teacher

How would you characterize the state of education in North America today generally?

On the one hand we say that we want results and we want things to improve for children, but we also don’t want to invest in it and really commit to it over the long term. It’s like being on a diet – we want very short-term fixes to really macro-level problems.

And because education is so tied into broader social issues, I think that there are a group of education reformers who are just now really starting to think about [the fact that] you cannot divorce what happens in a school from low-income neighborhoods, from the fact that children don’t have adequate healthcare, from the fact that they go home and their parent is stressed out because they don’t have a job or safe housing.

There is that frustration – and I felt it as a classroom teacher myself – when you know that when your students go home that night, they may not eat dinner, or it may just be Ramen noodles. Students that I had in third grade, when they got to high school some of them had to drop out of school to help support their families.

And no matter how much I said to them, “Stick it out, you can do it, you can go to college,” there was that immediate need. Their family needed someone else bringing in money. And that’s very real.

It’s not very pretty, and I think that sometimes people don’t want to see the interconnectedness of things – they want to put things in very isolated silos, but I think a very futuristic way of thinking is to see how the disparate entities in our system are not so separate at all. It’s like having one body. Education is sort of like the heart, and you have heart disease, so it’s affecting the rest of the system.

What’s education going to be like in 2050?

Pie in the sky version, it’s like schools basically don’t struggle for resources. At my son’s school, it’s a math-science-technology school, and because of budget cuts the technology coordinator was going to be laid off. So the parents and community members banded together and raised the 50 grand needed to keep that position. Schools shouldn’t have to do that. So in the future I think it would be fully funded, equitably funded.

I imagine there will still be people who support an idea of education that’s very separate and unequal. There will still be people who don’t see that educating someone else’s child benefits us as a whole. I think we will still have a very individualistic approach to education, where people can be very much like “I got mine, too bad you can’t get yours.” Hopefully that will be dying off as people have a greater level of understanding about the level of interconnectedness of all of us. But yeah, I don’t think that’s going to completely die off.

Dr. Lawrence Baines

Professor of education at the University of Oklahoma and language prophet

What’s the biggest problem facing modern language educators?

Number one is engagement. This is happening around the world, as well, it’s not just an American deal – Finland and Canada. You have central governments deciding what students should know and be able to do. So you have this externally driven curriculum that students must go through, and so what teachers do is they start with the curriculum, say “This is what they’re going to be tested on.”

It’s popular, in the United States now, to attach student test scores to teacher salaries. Teachers are all frantic about getting this curriculum in the heads of students. I think the emphasis is totally wrong. It should be on engaging the students first, get them interested in something that is pertinent to their lives that they would find interesting and then work from there.

I’d say engagement is the biggest challenge that we face in this kind of externally-driven, fill-in-the-box model. It’s been proven that it doesn’t work for a hundred years, so we decided to have another go at it. That’s the major problem.

How are we going to solve it?

You have to give the teacher who’s there with the students some degree of control. Right now, we’re trying to declare what all the outputs should be for everybody. We call that “outcomes based education.” That’s why we have all these standardized tests.

I think a shift in that, if we look at the student as a human being rather than a widget, we’d say “Well, what kind of experiences can the student have that would enhance their intellect and their social skills, their character?” That’s kind of an input-based model, and that’s why I think we need to empower the teacher to provide those kinds of environments in order to make that stuff work.

What excites you most about the future of education?

The possibilities out there. I keep thinking that we’re going to turn the corner, that it will be humanistic, that all this technology will really kind of force us to examine our values and say “Hey, wow, we’re all kind of connected here.” That’s another aspect that’s going to really evolve over time — this kind of interconnectedness. Already we’ve got schools here in Oklahoma, we’ve got relationships with K-12 schools in China and Sweden. That changes the curriculum there, when you really get that perspective of a different person.

I think that’s very exciting, and I think that will continue to grow over time. Some countries like China and some countries in the Middle East keep trying to shut that down, but I don’t think there’s any way to repress it.

Dr. Maria Andersen

Professor of mathematics and learning futurist for the LIFT institute at Muskegon Community College

What’s the biggest problem facing teachers today?

There’s not really any value placed on learning. I think students approach school from this very task-oriented “Tell me what I have to do to check the boxes to pass this class,” and in our society, because we’re in the developed world, we no longer value education in the same way that education is valued in the developing world. In the developing world, education means a path to a better life.

For most of the students we have in the developed world, they’re already in a pretty good life. Even the kids who live in the inner city in poverty are still living a better life than many of the people outside the developed world. They have iPods and they have a roof over their heads and they go to schools and they don’t have to do manual labour all day. The motivation to learn is no longer a part of our value system. Our value system is based on sports and entertainment and these kind of activities that can make you a star.

Kids, when you ask them what they want to do, they want the rockstar job. They don’t want to be in a job like their parents were in. They don’t seem to understand that they have to learn just to be at the same point that their parents were at. There’s a lot of speculation that Generation Me, the Millenials, will be the first generation to do worse than their parents, because they’ve always been provided for. They don’t have anything driving them to do better.

How do we change that?

I’m not optimistic that real change is going to happen from within education. I think education is kind of a behemoth. It’s an interconnected system, and any kind of interconnected system is really hard to shift. You can push on parts of the system, but they still have to align with the rest of the system. You can’t push too far.

We can’t radically change our curriculum because that would affect the students coming in and the students going out. K-12 can’t radically change their curriculum without affecting their students’ ability to do well in college, and college can’t radically change its curriculum because students would be coming in out of K-12 and not prepared.

We can’t move unless everybody moves together, and that’s the thing that I think is particularly rough.

But we have seen in other industries major disruption to the industry. Look at the communication industry – the telephone was a major way to communicate 20 years ago. That was how you communicated with people if you wanted to get a hold of them. Now, it’s email and social media. I rarely pick up a phone now to talk to somebody on the phone. Think about the number of minutes you use now, it’s really amazing how much it’s gone down.

But none of that innovation happened from within the phone industry, right? It happened outside of the industry.

I think the same has to happen with education. I think something better has to grow up outside of education and then infuse its way back in. If the system can develop outside of education and become so well-used and important that it’s used by industry and valued by the population, then it has to get back into education.

Education would have no choice at that point.

The Finland Phenomenon, a short, succinct documentary explaining the unparalleled success of the Finnish school system, is an arresting and interesting take on a subject on which I had never before devoted much brainpower to: primary and secondary education.

I don’t have kids and I’m not planning on having any in the foreseeable future, but it’s hard to escape the outcomes of our society’s education system. The better educated and the more engaged students are in society the better off we all are as those students take the lead from the older folks.

So how did this small nation of approximately 5.4 million people come to have an education system the envy of the world over? The Finland Phenomenon does a decent job of laying this out via statistics, interviews and video of Harvard researcher Tony Wagner (author of The Global Achievement Gap) interacting with the Finnish school system. Let’s look at some of the more notable characteristics of Finland’s school system:

• No high stakes tests (until the end of secondary)
• Few private schools
• Far less homework for students
• Very brief curriculum frameworks allowing schools and regions to decide on what gets taught
• Admittance standards are extremely high for teacher-training programs and the programs are rigorous, intense and competitive
• Meaningful technical education

Another detail that struck me throughout the documentary is how much emphasis is placed on learning to think over purely mechanical learning. This becomes doubly important since, according to a just-released study, 65 per cent of grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

The film is technically adequate and the narrator, Tony Wagner, is engaging and is really quite interesting and able to draw insight from some fairly mundane (to my eye) details. However, the film does lose the plot a bit near the end with Wagner’s take on trust. He sees “trust” as the magic bean from which the educational success of Finns has grown. The teachers trust the students, the administrators trust the teachers, the state trusts the administrators and so on. However , trust is merely something that springs from competence; you can’t just identify trust as the missing ingredient and walk away.

Instead, the success of the Finnish education system would seem to be contingent on a number of factors that produces this competence, including the focus on teacher education. A stat that really stuck out for me that after five years of working in the school system, 50 per cent of teachers in the US move onto other professions. In Finland more than 90 per cent retire as teachers.

Another important idiosyncrasy is the national dialogue and the consensus that was established around focusing on education. Finland has little natural resources, except lumber, it’s cold and it’s small. They collectively pulled up their socks and decided to invest in themselves and their children as opposed to some scheme. It turned out to be the right choice.

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Paying for post-secondary and graduate education is challenging. I know first-hand how it feels to be slapped with a $10,000 bill for tuition, books, and supplies each year.

When you choose to hit the books for two, three, four, or five years, you forfeit immediate income-earning opportunities; you’re typically not working full time. So while some of your friends are bringing home a nice paycheque each month, you’re doing just the opposite: spending money on education.

An undergraduate degree in Canada costs, on average, between $30,000 to $50,000. Graduate and doctorate programs can cost upward of $70,000 to $100,000. Most graduates leave post-secondary with at least $20,000 to $30,000 in student debt.

So, the underlying question is, is it worth it? The answer is “Yes!” Getting an education is exceptionally valuable. I’m not just talking about college and university. I’m also talking about trade, technical and apprenticeship programs. Your long-term income-earning ability is anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to over a million dollars greater than a high school graduate’s[1].

Research has shown that education is an incredibly valuable asset and a big part of developing a strong personal brand. Educated people not only earn more money, but also enjoy a higher quality of life because they have more choices in terms of their career opportunities and lifestyle.

Statistics Canada conducted the National Graduate’s Survey based on 2006 census data. Over a 40 year period, college grads are expected to earn $200,000 more than a high school grad, a Bachelor’s degree holder is expected to earn $745,000 more and a post-bachelor degree holder will earn $1.2 million more than a high school grad. [2]

The US Department of Labour and Census Bureau conduced a study in 2004 that suggested that 75 per cent of future jobs will require some type of post-secondary education. Additionally, they found that jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree would grow twice as fast as national average for other occupations.

If you know you’re going to hit the books, try saving for school in advance. Tuck away regular amounts of money through automatic bank deductions into a Guaranteed Investment Certificate, money market mutual fund or high interest savings account. Each is low risk, earns stable returns and can be accessed when the time comes to pay your fees. To make this even more beneficial, save within your Tax Free Savings Account so that your money can grow tax free.

Also, consider working while you’re going to school. Check with your current employer to see if they will be able to accommodate your school schedule. If you’ve done good work, companies will often want to keep you on part-time or even allow you to work remotely from wherever you go to school. Second, check out if there are any part-time jobs on campus. The libraries, restaurants, stores, fitness centres, and so on need staff. Within your own faculty there may be opportunities to help with academic research or various studies, or you could become a teaching assistant. Third, if you’re studying a particular subject like engineering or education, look for student-friendly employment within your field of expertise. This is a great way to apply what you’re learning and have employers test out your skills. Fourth, don’t forget about entrepreneurial ideas. If you’ve got a special skill such as photography or fitness training, use it to make money.

I’d recommend applying for scholarships. Your effort combined with the right qualifications can result in thousands of dollars of free educational money. The registrar’s office or library on your campus will have information on scholarships, bursaries, and income assistance.

Additionally, apply for government student loans. Student loans must be repaid in regular installments once you graduate. The interest rates are competitive and you can write off the interest after graduation. Student loans often have associated grants and bursaries which you can apply for. Visit Canada’s student loan website for general student loan information www.canlearn.ca. If you don’t qualify for scholarships, student loans, grants and bursaries, pay for school through a student line of credit. Lines of credit are available through most financial institutions and have highly competitive interest rates with flexible repayment plans.

Yes, there are very successful people in North America who don’t have post-secondary education. But this phenomenon is becoming less common because the corporate cultural norm has changed: education is critical.

[2] http://www.millenniumscholarships.ca/images/Publications/090623_POK1_backgrounder_EN.pdf

In spite of Prince’s protestations to the contrary, the Internet is anything but dead. In fact, it’s been the one doing most of the killing of late. From enforceable copyright to respectful disagreements and the ability to listen to an album from front to back, the internet has left a litany of dead or dying cultural trends in its digital wake. But while some of these cultural casualties will be mourned, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who will miss the repetitive intellectual strains associated with rote learning.

It wasn’t that long ago that rote learning, and the regurgitative mimickery that is its most common form of expression, was the educational model under which students laboured during their primary and secondary years. They were expected to behave like inert intellectual vessels into which a series of teachers would dump ever-more complex packets of information and ideas, like computers receiving their regular software upgrades. But with the rise of the Google-powered universe and the ability to locate information about anything, anytime and (almost) anywhere, the need to remember the dates of the Hundred Years War or the name of Canada’s fourth Prime Minister has become an academic skill nearly as quaint – and irrelevant – as using an abacus or perfecting one’s ability to write in script.

“I don’t think the world needs more people who can play Trivial Pursuit, if you know what I mean,” says Chris McCullough, a Red Deer teacher. “There’s a place for that, but at the same time the world’s changing so fast in terms of what you can and can’t do. I think the schools need to reflect that.” In order to do that, schools need to – and are, increasingly – move away from the traditional memory-oriented model of education and towards a more dynamic and interactive one. Likewise, the role of the teacher must evolve, McCullough says, from that of a Socratic fount of wisdom to a tour guide to its possibilities. Making kids memorize names and numbers when they know perfectly well that they could just look it up on the internet is an exercise in mutual frustration, according to McCullough.

Tracy Lyons, the vice-principal of a high school in Onoway, Alberta, describes the move away from rote learning as nothing less than a paradigm shift for her entire profession. “We’re not sages on the stage anymore; it’s a different way of looking at things. It adds a kind of accountability, in that teachers are now forced to constantly be aware of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.” But it’s not all toil and trouble, either, she explains. “There’s a fun factor here, too. You can be so creative in what you do and how you do it, and it might look different from classroom to classroom and community to community. It really opens doors, yet at the same time it really reinforces what’s important.”

What’s important, Lyons says, is the school system’s ability – and willingness – to provide kids with the kind of intellectual tools that they’ll need to thrive in the 21st century. “There’s a push towards big question, big idea-thinking about things, and looking at process as opposed to just content,” she says. “There’s a real push for inquiry-based thinking, critical thinking, and collaboration. It’s about really paying attention to where the kids are, rather than ‘this is the box that we teach from.’

Of course, not everyone is quite as enthusiastic about the demise of rote as Lyons is. “It’s a personal thing,” Lyons says, “and everybody’s at different stages, just like our kids. Some teachers like the way things have always been. Change is a difficult thing.” But McCullough believes that reluctant adopters will find the benefits far outweigh whatever costs might be associated with the adjustment period. “From a teacher planning perspective, I guess that could be a little scary,” he says. “But 99 per cent of teachers are in it for those ‘a ha!’ moments where they’ve piqued someone’s interest or made someone interested in something. That’s why teachers teach. So when that happens, and they can see that the helped facilitate that, you have a very powerful situation happening.”

For Sir Ken Robinson, a renowned education expert and public speaker, that situation can’t unfold soon enough. In a recent TED talk on the subject of education in the 21st century, Robinson described the dangers associated with traditional approaches to education. “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it,” he said. “Or, more precisely, we’re educated out of it.” He describes the western education model as a tool – and a blunt one, at that – of industry and commerce, one that does more to enrich those in positions of power than the students themselves. “The consequence,” he said, “is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think that they’re not, because the thing that they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized. I think we can’t afford to go on that way. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

That process is already underway, it seems, if Lyons and McCullough and their attitude towards alternative approaches to education are any indication. And while traditionalists might bemoan the end of the test-obsessed, memorization-oriented approach to education under which they were schooled, Lyons thinks that they’re the ones that are truly out of touch. The kids, in other words, are just fine. “There’s that whole idea that there’s something wrong, and our kids are not the way they should be. You know what? Things are changing so much and so quickly, and it’s us, the adults, that aren’t keeping up. I really think we need to take that step back and try to realize that it’s not them that need to change, it’s us.”

In a traditional university setting, a student pays to register for a course. The student shows up. A professor hands out an outline, assigns readings, stands at the front and lectures. Students take notes and ask questions. Then there is a test or an essay.

But with advancing online tools innovative educators are examining new ways to break out of this one-to-many model of education, through a concept called massively open online courses. The idea is to use open-source learning tools to make courses transparent and open to all, harnessing the knowledge of anyone who is interested in a topic.

George Siemens, along with colleague Stephen Downes, tried out the open course concept in fall 2008 through the University of Manitoba in a course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or CCK08 for short. The course would allow 25 students to register, pay and receive credit for the course. All of the course content, including discussion boards, course readings, podcasts and any other teaching materials, was open to anyone who had an internet connection and created a user profile.

“The course was the platform, but anyone could build on that platform however they wanted,” says Siemens. “There’s this notion that technology is networked and social. It does alter the power relationship between the educator and the learner, a learner has more autonomy, they have more control. The expectation that you wait on the teacher to create everything for you and to tell you what to do is false.”

Course facilitators, Siemens and Downes, gave learners control over how they learned. Each student was encouraged to create their online networks, using the forum that appealed to them: Moodle (an online learning software) personal blogging, RSS feeds, Second Life, Facebook, podcasts, YouTube videos – if something was missing from the course, the course facilitators encouraged students to create it.

The concept was enough to lure in D’Arcy Norman, an educational technology consultant at the University of Calgary, who described himself as a “lurker” in CCK08. He was one of the 2,300 students who signed up for a free account that would allow him to access class documents, receive emails from the facilitators and participate in online class discussions.

In his day job, Norman helps U of C staff with technology and online teaching methods and he is researching educational technology for a master’s degree, so the course fit with his interests and he signed up out of curiosity after reading a blog post about it. When the course got underway, Norman did some of the readings, but he didn’t write any of the three assigned papers, nor did he complete the final project.

“Because I was one of the lurkers, it was come and go,” says Norman. “When you have time, you do the readings and then when you don’t, or when it doesn’t sound interesting, you just don’t do it. It’s a very free-form kind of thing. When you say you participated in the course, it might not be in the traditional sense.”

Norman was one of the more passive participants, while others participated fully, doing all the reading and the assignments, without receiving recognized credit for their work. The instructors only marked papers and the final project from for-credit students, but others were free to post papers on the course website for other students to view and comment on.

Siemens estimates about 10 per cent of those 2,300 students were active participants. Even with only 10 per cent, traffic could get heavy on some of the online discussion threads.

“At the beginning, we had quite a number of students feeling quite overwhelmed because you would get 200 or 300 posts going into a discussion forum per day and that’s just about impossible to follow,” Siemens says.

As the course progressed, the initial flurry of posts became more manageable, says Lisa Lane, a history teacher at MiraCosta College in Southern California who was one of the 25 registered participants in the class. Lane says she didn’t have a problem finding her niche in the online course, by using a blog, Twitter and the online discussion forum. Other students did the same, using the hashtag #CCK08 on Twitter to discuss and post links to their blogs.

“I’m really good at drawing attention to myself as needed,” Lane says, laughing. “I’m not exactly a wallflower.” But, Lane sees how other participants in an online course might have a problem finding their way, especially if they weren’t already familiar with the technology.

“You have people in there who were really interested, but they were afraid to explore the technologies that were being used and they got lost,” Lane says. “There were people who just disappeared because they couldn’t figure out how to get in the Moodle or how to set up their own blog.” The other challenge with learning in such an open environment, she says, is that people might be afraid to put their ideas online to, potentially, 2,300 students.

Even if students in massively open online courses master the technology and overcome their virtual stage fright, a third problem remains: how to recognize the value of a learning experience that isn’t for credit. Even through Lane is an advocate of open courses, she had to officially register for the course through the University of Manitoba in order for her credits to be recognized by the college she works at.

“If you’re in a business and you’re a young professional and you want to take an open class, how do you get your superiors to respect that, and say ‘Wow, that’s really good professional development. We should put that in your personnel file,’” Lane questions. “If it’s open and everyone can drop in and drop out, it’s just not seen in the same way.”

It’s a question that proponents of online education continue to grapple with. Even if a student in an open course gains from their experience, there is no guarantee that the boss, or a potential employer, will recognize their learning without a certificate or other official, institution-approved record to prove it.

Wend Drexler, a professor and grant administrator at the University of Florida who also took Siemen’s class as a for-credit student, says that as more professors are posting their content online, figuring out how to recognize non-credit learning will continue to be an issue. For example, much of the course material at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is available through its MIT OpenCourseWare site, which was named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010 by Time magazine.

“You could really piece together a good undergraduate education based on what’s available out there, but how do you prove to an employer that you have done that?” Drexler questions. “I don’t know, but it’s something that everyone is trying to work through.”

For this reason, Norman says that open classes appeal to people like him who are self-motivated and ready to learning for learning’s sake, not because they are going to receive recognition at the end.

“It comes down to the motivation,” Norman says. “Are you intrinsically motivated person who does things because you’re interested? Or do you do things because you want the gold star. If you’re motivated by the gold star, then this probably isn’t interesting to you.”

Click here to see Wendy Drexler’s final project for Connectivism and Connective Knowledge.