Schooling System

4.1. The Finnish Education System

The Finnish education system is based on the ideology that all people must have equal access to high-quality education. Key values in education policy are quality, equity, efficiency and internationalization. The basic educational system aims to pro-vide consistent results and equality. The Finnish education system is free (tax paid), and it consists of a compulsory nine-year primary education (comprehensive school) for the whole age group from a child turning seven years old. This is preceded by one year of voluntary pre-primary education. Upper secondary education consists of gen-eral education and vocational education and training. Higher education is provided by universities and polytechnics. Education is guided by legislation, national core

curricula and qualification requirements. Teachers are recognised as keys to quality education, and the high level of education is based on university level teacher educa-tion; meaning that teachers are highly educated- at university level- and this in turn insures high level of education to kids. The teaching profession is regulated, and the qualifications required from teachers are defined in legislation (FNBE, 2011).

In the future, Finland wants to lead in the development of learning culture. The strategy of the Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE) aims at developing into a centre of expertise in the use of information and communications technology in education and digital learning environments. The goal is for learning and teach-ing to emphasise collaborative approaches, combined with buildteach-ing knowledge. All learners will be guaranteed equal opportunities to access and produce information and to make efficient use of information and communications technology in sup-port of learning. Electronic learning materials will form an integral part of learning.

Digital infrastructures and digital skills at all levels of education will be developed systematically. New educational technologies and learning environments will be put to active use in teacher education. Databases will be developed to support teachers.

Finnish teacher education will be developed to include the utilisation of information and communication technology (FNBE, 2011).

Some schools in Finland are practicing new methods where instructors work more as coaches than as traditional teachers, and students may do homework at school and learn from lectures at home through online videos.

4.2. Growing Demands for Teachers

Learners need to develop critical technological and communication skills needed for the twenty-first century. Future teachers must be able to teach new literacy skills―in-formation, media and technology literacy. Pupils must be taught how to find and collect reliable information and data and how to make sense of it while thinking criti-cally. Historically knowledge was scarce: teachers read aloud, lectured, dispersed their knowledge to unknowing learners. Pupils memorized facts and figures and retention or this memorized knowledge was tested. Now content and information is found on the Web, and using search engines is so commonplace that Googling has become a verb. What will be important is not memorized knowledge but how well and fast a pupil collects relevant information, what is deducted and how this knowledge is ap-plied. Future teachers will be more like coaches of content (Järvilehto, 2009).

Information technology skills are important for future teachers as well as for learners.

Children become adept in the use of technology and ICT, and therefore teachers must keep up with new technologies that children will embrace fast. This must be considered in future teacher training. In Finland less than 10 percent of applicants gain entrance to university teacher training. Finland’s high scores in Pisa tests have been attributed to the high level of teacher training, free education and uniformity of the curriculum. But teachers may refuse to use new technology in their teaching. In the Education

Minis-try’s future plan (OPM, 2007) is mentioned only in passing that nationwide training programs at university level are needed for teachers in subjects such as new technologies.

To remain at the forefront of education, new teachers must be well-versed in computer skills, and these should be a major subject in teacher’s training (OPM, 2007). A global ecosystem of collaboration among educational institutions and educators will be needed to keep Europe competitive as the population ages.

Global trends in education and the use of ICT affects teachers everywhere. Song (2010) writes that China, where educational reform is ongoing, could become a leader in designing teacher education programs. To produce highly qualified, future-oriented and ICT-savvy teachers, designers need to shift to a transdisciplinary cur-riculum. Teacher education needs to embrace innovation which includes an emphasis on global collaboration via the Internet.

Communication skills that can be used globally are important. Sanna Lukander, an educational expert and exporter of Finnish primary education from Rovio En-tertainment, emphasizes the need for global communication skills to be taught to both teachers and learners. She also predicts that peer learning―on a global scale―will increase as the digital world supports collective doing.

Kati Tiainen, an education expert from Microsoft, also stresses the importance collaboration in learning, in producing content and in teaching. She says twenty-first century skills focus not so much on what is in the curriculum but on how learning happens. Learning will be more personalized, tailored to pupils’ needs, interests and strengths. She also emphasizes that teachers will become more like coaches.

Järvilehto (2009) writes that collaboration and communication can be taught through games and ICT. In the future, the learner will also be the creator and produc-er of content, often in a collaborative way. Schools should teach ways of working to-gether to produce, share and communicate information and other content. The author emphasizes the need for learning to be fun, enjoyable and meaningful for learners.

We are transitioning from classical lecture-learning to facilitated learning in which students take more control of their learning process. The trainer’s role becomes that of a facilitator and coach. But not only does the teacher’s role change, so do the sub-jects that need to be taught, as described in the following.

4.3. Rising Awareness

Different social platforms are used to facilitate learning. However, the primary pur-pose of these services is something other than learning. It is more about implement-ing a business goal that can be pretty much anythimplement-ing from targetimplement-ing ads to gatherimplement-ing direct marketing contact lists. For students, it is important to understand that these business goals can differ from their learning goals, resulting in undesired effects.

Examples of these effects are:

• Twitter does not forget: the U.S. Library of Congress is archiving all Twitter use.

This means that whatever gets tweeted cannot be untweeted or deleted. One

must be careful about what is morphed from your personal life into the cyber world, which may exist digitally forever.

• Social media leak information: social media services often have closed groups for professionals or study groups. These closed groups often give consumers a sense that these are exclusive environments. But they are not. The boundary between public and private is incomprehensible for many (Rosenblum, 2007).

The above companies are not trying to be intentionally evil to students. Unfair or deceptive companies are hunted down by various legal systems around the world. But a great majority of different privacy incidents are not privacy incidents from a legal perspective, rather just from a personal viewpoint. For example, private information shared on Facebook can become public, and it may not possible to remove this infor-mation afterwards. People feel that their privacy has been violated, because, e.g., they can be bullied at school for something they have said, and they cannot deny it, since it is ‘on the Internet’. These incidents happen for the simple reason that students are not aware of services’ functionality, even they are very well aware of how they are us-ing the service. When the functionality differs from the students’ own use, different privacy ‘violations’ are possible. But, as said, these privacy violations are usually so-called personal privacy violations, not legal privacy violations and rarely result in any legal action.Understanding these aspects of data retention, confidentiality, use of the data and other related issues is a necessity for the efficient use of media in education.

This calls for raising awareness around these concepts amongst students. The key in awareness building is to help students understand what kind of potential threats there are and what impacts may result. Of course, it will not be possible to explain all possible causes and effects to students, but the key is to help students make informed decisions regarding the use of media services. The schooling system should bear re-sponsibility for students’ awareness creation towards privacy and other related aspects.

Students need to learn to protect themselves and others from harmful content and behaviours online (Andrews, 2013). This calls for the use of common sense to review what they post and review what is available on the Internet about them (Rosenblum, 2007). Developing such critical thinking and responsible behaviour regarding their online behaviour would be a valuable asset for the students. But currently the school-ing system fails to build such a skill set for students.

5. Methodology

We have approached the research problem through a literature review (as described in previous sections) that serves as a source for defining signals. A ‘signal’ is a small or local innovation or disruption that has the potential to grow in scale and geographic distribution (IFTF, 2014). At the time of an identification, this signal is still too incomplete to permit an accurate estimation of its impact and/or to determine its

full responses (Ansoff, 1982). Signals are useful for anticipating an uncertain future.

Using signals, emergent disruptions can be captured before they become obvious.

Trends (“a general direction in which something is developing or changing” (Oxford Dictionary, 1998) are usual methods to describe something obvious, and signals could capture a trend before it is identified and acknowledged. The identified signals were used to draft a simplistic scenario for the future of primary education. The sce-nario describes a prediction of how the identified signals are shaping the world. The goal of the scenario is not to be rich in details, but to be brief and to present views that can be supported by the identified signals. To test the validity of our scenario, a number of expert reviews were conducted. The goal of the interviews was to gather feedback from media professionals that have made their own predictions regarding the future. The interviewees were presented with the suggested scenario from this case and asked to provide their opinions on the scenario and the building blocks of the scenario. The expert feedback was incorporated selectively: some pieces of the feedback could have been integrated directly to the proposed scenario, whereas most of the feedback was noted and possibly used to draft an alternative scenario. Based on this methodology, we will forecast “a day of a Junior in 2025” in the Finnish schooling system.