<<September 18, 2008>>

<<September 18, 2008>>
Archived distributions can be retrieved at;
<http://preview.tinyurl.com/35zedj>
This archive includes a html version of this list distribution and its MS/WORD version with its filename as “month-date-year.doc.” You can also access all of its attachments, if any.

P. Tapio Varis, Ph.D., Professor <tapio.varis@uta.fi>

Kaisa Kautto-Koivula <kaisa.kautto-koivula@kolumbus.fi>

Michael Mino <mino@educationconnection.org>

Dan Cogan-Drew <cogandrew@educationconnection.org>

Jennifer Chung <Jennifer.chung@seh.oxon.org>

References:

(a) (08/22/08) (1) Tapio's keynote speech at the Education Leadership Symposium on 9/12/08, (2) Mtg with Prof. Ollor from Nigeria at Poly on 8/21/08, (3) Possible mtg with Tapio at Poly on 9/10/08
http://tinyurl.com/6lrxtr

(b) (02/01/08) Finnish Noblesse Oblige Project for Paradigm Shift and Change the World
http://tinyurl.com/2kx63c

Dear Tapio:

(1) It was my great privilege to listen your very interesting keynote speech at the Education Leadership Symposium which was organized by Mike’s Education Connection on 9/12/08 — see photos of this occasion in ATTACHMENT II below;

Tapio Varis
“Is Finland Leading the Way to the Creative Knowledge Age?”
<http://tinyurl.com/49duwp>

Dear Jennifer:
I was very glad to have met with you during this symposium. Your speech “Perspectives on PISA from the Finnish Education” was excellent. Pls send me your slides for our list members.

Dear Mike and Dan:

(2) I sincerely thank for your generous hospitality given to me during my participation. My wholehearted congratulations to your very successful conduct of this event.

If possible, pls send me the audio/video of Tapio’s speech you recorded, so that I will upload it to this list for our members.

Dear E-Colleagues:

(3) ATTACHMENT I below is the list of references about the Finnish’s accomplishment on attaining the World #1 status on education, vocational training, innovation, etc., etc., which I excerpted from a disk Mike’s group distributed at the symposium.

I have learned quite a bit from them.

Dear Kaisa:

(4) Pls talk with Tapio how to proceed your project (Reference (b) above). According to an info in ATTACHMENT I, more than 50 countries sent their mission teams to learn the secrets and know-how of Finnish accomplishments. Hence, I believe, your project should have quite a merit to proceed.

I hope that the info in ATTACHMENT I would be useful to your project, too, though I presume that you would be familiar with many of them already.

After talking with Tapio, pls send me a draft of your concept paper ASAP so that we can work on it together.

Best, Tak

P.S.:

(a) Right after I arrived to the U.S. as a Fulbright exchange student in the summer of 1954, I was very shocked to read an article appeared in Harper magazine, which was written by Mr. Rockefeller (who later became a U.S. Senator) after he graduated from the International Christian University in Tokyo. It said that Japanese children often attained high ranking status in PISA and hence indicated high capacity than American counterparts before college entrance, but, alas, after their college graduation, American’s capacity far exceeds Japanese.

BTW, I mentioned in the following list that Japanese college graduate is working on the same job as American high school graduate does. Some said that American does ten times more than Japanese at the similar job status.

(08/04/08) Possible funding sources for GUS in Niger Delta Region of Nigeria (Edo and Cross River States)
http://tinyurl.com/5bzoez

Then, what is the secrete of America’s creativity? The following slides may answer it, albeit I might show them to you before;

<http://tinyurl.com/4a3gzu>

<http://tinyurl.com/4c4h66>

It said that GM is now celebrating their one centennial anniversary. It was overcome by Toyota a few years ago. A Japanese newspaper reported recently that Google is now ten year old, and surpassed Toyota!! Clearly, the day of the old industrial age is over, though not many people have been aware of this significant paradigm shift yet as the very last sentence of Kaisa’s following paper said “The biggest barrier for new development of Human-Centric Knowledge Society is our Industrial Age mindset!.”

Kaisa Kautto-Koivula and Marita Huhtaniemi, Nokia Ventures Organization
"Evolution Towards Human-Centric Knowledge Society. Can Societies Learn from Global Corporations?"
http://tinyurl.com/y5ja49

This is in the following book;

Global Peace Through The Global University System
Tapio Varis - Takeshi Utsumi - William Klemm (Eds.)
University of Tampere, Finland 2003
ISBN 951-44-5695-5
The entire contents of this book can be retrieved at;
http://tinyurl.com/kofpf

In the bottom line of this page, you can find the following;
“Interview with Takeshi Utsumi” by Parker Rossman
http://tinyurl.com/fnxxt

The combination of Finnish education system and American innovative social structure may be the way of the future. For example, as one of symposium attendees mentioned, Linus Torvalds rewrote UNIX for mini-computer (which was invented by Bell Lab in New Jersey) to PC while he was a graduate student at the University of Helsinki in 1991. But its great success was due to his humanitarian action as making it the so-called Open Source with anyone’s contributions for improvements at free of charge, which spread widely in silicon valley in California, and which was squarely against and threatening to the Microsoft’s Window operating system. Since then, the open source movement is everywhere, particularly in education and healthcare fields as benefiting many developing countries, e.g., to name but “Wikipedia.”

ATTACHMENT I

List of References

Finland Economy

(a) Overview: Finland as a Knowledge Economy, Elements of Success and Lessons Learned
Edited by Carl J. Dahlman, Jorma Routti, Pekka Ylä-Anttila
<http://tinyurl.com/3lkb7j>
(Tak Utsumi’s note: the full report is 136 pages, and to be obtained from the World Bank Institute.)

Finland Education

(a) Finnish Education System
<http://www.edu.fi/english/SubPage.asp?path=500,4699>
<ChartFinnishEducation.pdf>

(b) Curriculum Development in Finland
<http://www.oph.fi/info/finlandinpisastudies/conference2008/basic_education.pdf>
<CurriculumDevelopment.pdf>

(c) Education and Science in Finland
<http://www.minedu.fi/export/sites/default/OPM/Julkaisut/2006/liitteet/eng_opm15.pdf>
<EducationandScienceinFinland.pdf>

(d) National Core Curriculum for Upper Secondary Schools 2003
<http://www.edu.fi/julkaisut/english/LOPS_2003_engl.pdf>
<FinishCoreCurriculum.pdf>

(e) Education and Vocational Guidance in Finland
<http://www.cimo.fi/dman/Document.phx/~public/Julkaisut+ja+tilastot/English/guidance-eng-2003.pdf>
<FinishGuidancePacket.pdf>

(f) Finland is #1!
<http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3749880>
<Finlandis#1Scholastic.pdf>

(g) Reasons behind Finnish students' success in the PISA Scientific Literacy Assessment
<http://www.oph.fi/info/finlandinpisastudies/conference2008/science_results_and_reasons.pdf>
<ReasonsBehindPisaSuccess.pdf>

(h) Special needs education and student welfare services – basis for quality and equality
<http://www.oph.fi/info/finlandinpisastudies/conference2008/special_needs_education.pdf>
<SpecialNeedsEducation.pdf>

(i) Teacher as Future Maker - Research –based Teacher Education in Finland
<http://www.oph.fi/info/finlandinpisastudies/conference2008/teacher_education.pdf>
<TeacherEducation.pdf>

PISA

(a) U.S. Student and Adult Performance on International Assessments of Educational Achievement
<http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/2006073.pdf>
<ConditionOfUSEd2006Findings.pdf>

(b) PISA — The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment
<http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/51/27/37474503.pdf>
<PISA2006Brochure.pdf>

(c) The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
<http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/13/39725224.pdf>
<PISA2006Summary.pdf>

(d) PISA 2006, Science Competencies for Tomorrow’s World, Volume 1: Analysis
<http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9807011E.PDF>
<PISA2006Vol1.pdf>

(e) PISA 2006, Volume 2: Data/Donnees
<http://www.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/display.asp?CID=&LANG=EN&SF1=DI&ST1=5L4GTMX7N7BQ>
<PISA2006Vol2.pdf>
(Tak Utsumi’s note: You need to purchase its hard copy at the above URL.)

(f) PISA 2006: Science Competencies for Tomorrow’s World
NO MEDIA OR WIRE TRANSMISSION BEFORE 4 DECEMBER 2007, 10:00 PARIS TIME
OECD briefing note for the United States
<http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/16/28/39722597.pdf>
<PISAUSBriefing.pdf>

(g) OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): Science competencies
for tomorrow’s world: Seeing school systems through the prism of PISA
<http://tinyurl.com/3zvmrc>
<PISAUSOECDPreso.ppt>

(h) Highlights From PISA 2006: Performance of U.S. 15-Year-Old Students in Science and Mathematics Literacy in an International Context
<http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/2008016.pdf>
<USPISA2006Report.pdf>

(i) “OECD’s PISA 2006 survey ranks Finland number one in science”
<http://www.investinfinland.fi/news/2007/en_GB/Finland_tops_Pisa2006/>

ATTACHMENT II

<DSCN1327.JPG> <http://tinyurl.com/4oo9e6>
(a) Mike at podium

<DSCN1330.JPG> <http://tinyurl.com/53zhv7>
(b) Attentive audiences

AppleMark
<DSCN1333.JPG> <http://tinyurl.com/3n2sj6>
(c) Tapio at podium

<DSCN1337.JPG> <http://tinyurl.com/4u35ta>
(d) Jennifer at podium

List of Distribution

P. Tapio Varis, Ph.D., Professor
Acting President, Global University System
UNESCO Chair in Global e-Learning with applications to multiple domains
Professor and Chair of Media Education
Research Center for Vocational Education & Hypermedia Laboratory
University of Tampere
P.O.Box 229
FIN-13101 Hameenlinna
FINLAND
+358-3-3551-3608
GSM: +3358-50-567-9833
Fax: +358-3-614-5611 or +358-3-3551-3611
tapio.varis@uta.fi
http://www.uta.fi/~titava
www.ecml-eu.org -- about ECML project.
http://www.uta.fi/conference/mediaskills/

Kaisa Kautto-Koivula
Ph.D.(educ.), Lic.Techn., Docent
Adjunct Professor, New Learning Environments
Tampere University
Tampere, Finland
Mobile: +358 400 403 632
kaisa.kautto-koivula@kolumbus.fi
or
Kruununtie 8 C
02180 Espoo, Finland

Michael Mino
Director
Center for 21st Century Skills
@ EDUCATION CONNECTION
355 Goshen Road
P.O. Box 909
Litchfield, CT 06759-0909
(860) 567-0863
Fax: (860) 567-3381
mino@educationconnection.org
www.educationconnection.org
www.skilIs2I.org

Dan Cogan-Drew
Assistant Director
Senior Online Development Specialist
Center for 21st Century Skills
© EDUCATION CONNECTION
355 Goshen Road
P.O Box 909
Litchfield, CT 06759-0909
(860) 567-0863
Cel: 203-535-3172
Fax: (860) 567-3381
cogandrew@educationconnection.org
www.educationconnection.org
www.skills2I org

Jennifer Chung
Ph.D. candidate at Oxford University
Jennifer.chung@seh.oxon.org

*******************************************************************************
* Takeshi Utsumi, Ph.D., P.E., Chairman, GLOSAS/USA                           *
* (GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the U.S.A.)          *
* Laureate of Lord Perry Award for Excellence in Distance Education           *
* Founder and V.P. for Technology and Coordination of                         *
*   Global University System (GUS)                                            *
* 43-23 Colden Street, Flushing, NY 11355-5913, U.S.A.                        *
* Tel: 718-939-0928; Email: utsumi@columbia.edu                               *
* http://www.itu.int/wsis/goldenbook/search/display.asp?Quest=8032562&lang=en *
* http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/                                     *
* U.S. Federal Tax Exempt ID: 11-2999676 <http://tinyurl.com/534gxc>          *
* New York State Tax Exempt ID: 217837 <http://tinyurl.com/47wqbo>            *
*******************************************************************************