I decided to make this blog bilingual; Finnish and English. At some point maybe Swedish and Spanish, too. Suomen ensimmäisen yliopiston, Turun akatemian, avajaisissa vuonna 1640 piispa Rothoviuksen kerrotaan sanoneen, että yliopiston perustaminen on maailman luomisen jälkeen parasta mitä Ruotsin valtakunnan itäiselle niemelle on sattunut. Rothovius näki, että yliopiston myötä taikuus ja noitavainot saadaan kuriin. […]
Category: General
General
In November 2022 at the FERA Conference on Education, we discussed with some colleagues how there is very little going on in the field of philosophy of education in Finland. The field of educational sciences is dominated by studies of learning results, motivation, use of ICT in education, STE(A)M. We get rarely to discussed about […]
I met Marvin Minsky in a conference in Toronto in 2013. After his keynote, I wanted to ask him something I had recently thought about. I approached him, introduced myself, chit-chat a bit about Finland with him and his wife, who had some friends from Finland. Then I said something like this: “As we humans […]
My first book in Finnish was published last week by the PS Publishing House. We have some plans to have translations, at first in Spanish and at some point in English. The English title could be: Learning Society — What is good for children is good for all. As you know, if you are reading […]
Decisions, emotions or bad luck?
I admit, I like the famous Wayne Gretzky cliché quote “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been”. I, however, just noticed that I have always phrased it a bit differently — and never have used it seriously. My version is: “Don’t skate where the puck is, skate where the puck […]
I wrote some weeks ago a Twitter Thread related to the story by the University of Helsinki, telling that university students’ wellbeing continues to decline. To keep this in my own files I copied the tweets to this blog. I made some minor edits, too. In the fully remote mode we are not able to […]
E-learning for Dogs
This week at the Helsinki airport two coronavirus sniffer dogs started to work. More dogs are trained to detect Covid. The dogs are trained to detect the virus by sniffing samples taken by swiping skin with a wipe. The test wipe is then dropped into a cup, a dog will sniff the sample and signal […]
We just published a research article in the journal Educational Media International: Vartiainen, H., Leinonen, T. & Nissinen, S. (2019) Connected learning with media tools in kindergarten: an illustrative case. Educational Media International, DOI: 10.1080/09523987.2019.1669877 The article reports a study of an illustrative case of using digital media tools — iPads, a trail camera & PCs […]
OECD Education Director Andreas Schleicher recently claimed that because of the tech revolution, in a near future arts may become more important school subject than maths. I agree with Mr Schleicher on the principle, but also see a lot of challenges in the way we teach arts and design — and mathematics, too. Maybe a […]
The concept of “mobile learning” (m-learning) started to appear in research literature in the early 2000’s. The first mLearn conference was organized in 2002. I have done mobile learning related research for 20 years. In 1998, we released the Future Learning Environment (FLE) that was already designed to be usable with mobile devices that feature […]