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Aalto University Art Design General Music Theater Uniarts Helsinki

What and why I think about AI and humanity?

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 […]

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Aalto University Book Collaboration Design educational tool General Wikipedia

Learning Society

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 […]

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General

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 […]

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Aalto University Collaboration Design General

Wellbeing of a university community and its members during remote working

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 […]

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Design educational tool General

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 […]

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Design educational tool General

Forest as a learning environment: children and a trail camera

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 […]

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Aalto University Collaboration Conferences Cumulus Design educational tool General

Art and design education in the future?

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 […]

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Aalto University Conferences Design educational tool General

The last 20 years of mobile learning and the grand challenge in global learning 

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 […]

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Aalto University Collaboration Conferences Design educational tool General Social Software

MOOCs are like marathons: you must train for years to complete one

I think it was Pierre Dillenbourg, who once said that MOOCS are like marathons. You may find a map and run the Stockholm Marathon by yourself, but doing it together with some 20 000 other people is just more fun. With a crowd it is easier. People motivate each other. It is known that only […]

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Collaboration educational tool General Open Source Sharing economy Wikipedia

Why free/libre/open source in learning is important?

I just realized that maybe I should explain the connection between the three points presented in my last post and the overall theme of this blog — Free, Libre and Open Source Software in Education. To improve learning in the era of Internet we should follow these rules: (1.) Do not select one of the […]