Hello fellow educators welcome to podcast number 113. How challenging is the world becoming and how amazing are the opportunities for opening up for us. Globalization! Four years ago I wrote about this phenomenon as one for the four significant shifts taking place in the Digital World. It is strange and a curious experience when you write about something as a principle that becomes a reality. You might be saying, here goes Greg again on one of his favourite rants, and you would be right, but let me share the last month with you to give you context of why I am here again.

Five weeks ago I received a request from my friend Ralph Bromley, one of the most globalized men I know, he runs Hope for the Nations a support ministry for missionaries around the world, and he asked if we could show an East Indian head of school our Online School program. It turns out that I was entertaining Dr. P.P. Job who is a significant evangelist to the nation of India. He regularly holds crusades of 500,000 plus. He is known for his enormous sacrifice for the kingdom; both his sons have been martyred in the last 10 years. I can go on and on about his contributions to the Kingdome of God but he came to us to talk about ways in which we can help his school for girls. Fifteen years ago he took over the care of a girl’s orphanage and started a school for them. This small school of 30 girls has grown into a major institution that provides K to PHD education for women. One quarter of this school of a 1000 Indian girls is made of up of orphans. He has opened up scholarships for our Kenyan orphanage when our girls there are ready for post secondary. I am trying to find the resources to provide 300 computers for their school. Speaking of Kenya, over the last four weeks our Bible School the Global Ministry Training Center has just been in Kenya working with the orphanage our Church sponsors. We send these 30 children to Christian schools in the area. One of the schools we have provided a computer lab and they are just working on internet connections. When this is completed we will be able to provide curriculum for their high school.

The weekend after our big Convention I attended a fund raiser for the charity “Nations Cry.” This organization has asked us to work with their orphanage in Sierra Leone, Western Africa. They will be using our online curriculum and teachers to begin a school for 20 orphans. This will start in September. That same weekend we hosted a visit from Stephen Harris and Andrew Clucas from New South Wales, Australia.  You may recall I did a serious of podcasts and an interview with him about the aspects of blended online and campus school education. He is the Head Master of Northern Beaches Christian Schools and the founder of the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning. We spent two days discussing ways which we can collaborate in our efforts in both online learning and blended approaches to education. We will be sharing some of our courses with them and developing Math curriculum for their Australian market. Two weeks ago I was asked to put together a presentation for the South African Department of Labour. They are looking for ways to improve their retraining program for those who have to retrain for different types of work and want to develop this online. This comes from our consultation for the last two years with Hatefield Christian School. We have helped them start an online program which started Grade 10 last year and will be adding Grade 11 this year. Then this last week I we had a wonderful visit with Len Stoyarchuk. He is the head of school for the International School of Tomorrow in Moscow. We have been working on a similar project in Russia. They are developing online curriculum in the Russian language and started Grade 10 last year as well they are continuing on to Grade 11 this year.

You may or may not be aware that we have started the International Christian Online School which can be found at www.icos.ca.  Right now this is how we are launching our English as a Second Language program but we hope to expand this to continue our online education throughout the world. I will be heading to Hong Kong next week to work with our office there as we work to provide ESL opportunities for Chinese students. I will be visiting a number of schools in an effort to share our curriculum with them. While I am preparing this podcast we have one of our ICOS staff in Mexico looking for opportunities to start our ESL program there.

What inspired all of this talk of our global enterprise is an interesting meeting I had last week. I was called to Victoria to meet with the head of Offshore Schools and several other Ministry of Education heavy weights to talk about the potential of using our Online Curriculum in offshore schools. You may already be aware that British Columbia has been accrediting schools abroad to use the BC curriculum and give a BC diploma. This is obviously very costly especially when we have to send BC certified teachers to these nations. We have several schools in China, Korea, India and Egypt. If we can take our Online School to these and other places we will be able to save considerable costs by keeping our staff in BC while we teach kids around the world. Although you might point out that we are already doing this, as we have students in faraway places such as Hong Kong, Iran, Tunisia, France, South America and anywhere our kids are traveling at any given time. But these are BC residents abroad. The opportunity I went to Victoria about was to start enrolling and educating indigenous students in other countries.

So this month was truly a global experience contemplating the possibilities and the work of discipleship in Hong Kong, Australia, Russia, South Africa, Kenya and Sierra Leone. These are not just starry eyed dreams but are actual places in which our school and staff are beginning to have an effect. As I started out saying, I wrote about this four years ago and perhaps it is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy as this has determined some of our direction. But certainly the changes in our world have facilitated our global opportunities.

The world has become very small in a number of ways. The ease of travel is an enormous factor in globalization. It takes 12 hours to fly to Hong Kong,  a trip that just 100 years ago took an entire month. Last week I traveled over 2600 kilometers, Kelowna to Victoria, to Vancouver to Vanderhoof all in two and half days and only spent about 7 actual hours in transit. I flew in several jets, a float plane, a train and in a car. I can’t even imagine how long this would have taken a hundred years ago. We live in an age that clearly allows us to experience culture, people, commerce, education, language and leisure in ways that are unprecedented in human history. What a time to live and follow the Great Commission. “Go into all the world and make disciples.” Matthew 28:19. It has become really easy to “Go.” As dramatic as the world has change because of transportation technology even more so the impact of the internet has made our world even smaller. All of the opportunities that I have been mentioned would have never existed for us had we not saddled up and gone into cyberspace. I have likened the internet to the time of the Apostles as they took the gospel to their world. They had the superhighways of Rome. Of course by our standards they were just small roads but these roads linked the entire world in ways that had never been possible before the Greek and Roman conquests and construction. These pathways of relatively safe and easy travel in the first century created a path for the Gospel to be spread to “all the world” as stated in Colossians 1:6. We can now travel the super-information highways of our world and instantly go places virtually that we would never have access to before.. This morning I have been working in a course that a student in Tunisia is taking. He has to be one of our most engaged students in our school yet he lives in a place where very few westerners are even allowed. His family is in the diplomatic core there and yet he is able to continue his education online without missing a beat. Just a minute ago I was interrupted by a Skype call from our partner in South Africa. He appeared in my living room while I was typing this podcast out in my bath-robe. I was hoping he would only want to communicate through voice but, sure enough he clicked on the video feed as well and wondered why I hadn’t done the same. With a bit of embarrassment I clicked on my video and behold there I was in South Africa in my house coat as he came into my living room in suit and tie. I don’t know about you but I am absolutely blown away with the seemly magical way we now can communicate and interact around the world. I am sure this has some apocalyptic implications and I should be careful not to gush about the wonders of technology but I can’t seem to help myself here. The opportunities before us are so vast. Ok, let me talk myself down here. I can hear the statements of Neil Postman ringing in my ears right now. Yes, technology is a friend but it is also a foe. It changes us in ways that can cheapen our life and experience. It automates things and processes that cause us to lose our way without this friend or foe. When it brings innovation it also brings disruption and often destruction of our ways of doing things, living and connecting with other.  So let me sober up here and talk about it in balanced ways.

Travel, the internet and global economies are also bringing in a Babel like world. What I mean here is that our world is again being unified in ways that people came together back in the time of Babel. We are seeing a unity of purpose and economy emerging in the same way it did under Nimrod. But, probably the most significant sign of this taking place is the emergence of a one world language. This, of course, is English. This started over 200 years ago when the sun never set on the British Empire and has continued today because of the American dream and demand for global commerce. As in ancient times when the Greeks conquered the known world and built roads the Romans came behind them and created trade and worldwide commercial systems. So to the US has followed its British predecessors around the world and can now conduct business and trade in the global language of commerce, English. I dare say the implications could be as serious in the future of our world as they were for Babel. This is not to say that we should not take the opportunity to use the Global networks, transportation and language. In fact if we don’t “cease the day” we will miss one of the greatest moments in human history. We have to travel these information path ways in the same way that Paul traveled the Roman Roads. We are just doing it for very different reasons than our worldly counterparts. As Paul spoke and taught in the language of his day so too we need to speak in and teach in the language of our day. So yes, Carpe Diem!

Another thing is happening as I podcast this week. We have our entire Grade 12 class from our campus school in Puerto Escondido, Mexico doing school from there. They are participating in our Global Citizenship Program with Steve Smith and his team. Just two months ago we took a dozen of our online students to Europe for our Comparative Civilizations trip. They learned about the Greeks from the actual steps of the Acropolis. They understood the sacrifice of the early Christians while sharing communion in the Catacombs. Yes these are incredible educational experiences. Our online technology allows our Grade 12s to continue their schooling while they spend these six weeks in somewhat of a third world experience; although, arguably Puerto Escondido is becoming more and more modern.  What I believe to be more important here is the global experience and education our students are receiving. Over the last 20 years we have been taking advantage of the ease of travel and bringing our students to different parts of the world but these experiences only let them contrast what they had in Canada verses the places they went. A two week outreach doesn’t allow the environment to change and impact the students. It doesn’t let them see the world from a different set of paradigms.  The Global Citizenship Program goals are to help create and shape truly globally minded citizens. We want our kids to begin to see the world through the eyes of the great commission, “Go out into all the world.” We want our students to begin the thought processes necessary to cross cultures, embrace differences, share experiences and transcend boarders. I don’t have much eschatological insight into the prophetic moment we are in but I do know that this is a time of opportunity. We have to prepare our children in ways that will help them transcend our pre-internet way of thinking. Most of us that are listening grew up in a pre-internet world. Our students are the digital generation that has never known a world without the internet. Their world has changed enormously in boarders, cultures, commerce, language, technology, civilizations. All of it is very different and one of the key mindsets they will need to fulfill their calling and purpose in this small world is to think and act globally.

Kofi Annan former Secretary General of the United Nations said it very plainly: “It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.” He is an example of how globalization has empowered him and his people. Annan is from the west African country of Ghana. He went to a Methodist School growing up and has degrees from both African and Western institutions. He is one of the key leaders in his own nations that have made Ghana one of Africa’s most stable governments and economies. It is the bright light of Western Africa. Globalization has impacted his country in ways that have empowered his people. Yes, perhaps I am just dreaming right now, but I can’t help think about those orphans in Sierra Leone or our kids in Kitalie Kenya. Perhaps some of the girls in Dr. Job’s school in India. Could we be reaching out to the next Kofi Annan? And if I am just dreaming please don’t wake me up because I can only see possibilities in our future.

If you are a campus educator or an online teacher, one of our school administrators or a home education parent, it is critical that you begin to think about how you are training your students to think about this world. Globalization isn’t a possibility just because of technology it is also a possibility because people are willing to go to the nations. The world is a much different place today than just 17 short years ago in a pre-internet society. If we don’t prepare our students and schools for this new digital, global world then I suspect we will be sidelined. Not in a local sense but in the ways that truly count. We will come short of our responsibilities to fulfill the Great Commission.  We won’t become the true innovators of the new digital age. But if we can change, if we can think globally we can see our children participate in the digital world in ways that will make a difference for Christian Education, Great Commission opportunities, humanitarian work, empowering the poorest of the poor and moving wealth of the rich to places of greatest need. Ok, it has been a busy month, thanks for listening.

Please email us your comments and thoughts on this podcast. Also, if you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book or send you the download link for the audio version of, Discipling This Generation for a Digital World, simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.