About Kai Pata

Name: Kai Pata
Tallinn University, Center of Educational Technology

I am an Estonian researcher in Educational technology. My experience in the field started at 1994 as a virtual teacher in learning environment Miksike what we developed with collegues. From 2000-2007 I worked at research positions at the University of Tartu, Science Didactics Department doing various science related ICT projects. During Tartu times i did my MSc study about decision-making role-play in chatroom and PhD study about scaffolding patterns in chat systems at the University of Turku. From 2006 my job as a senior researcher is related with Tallinn University, currently I am actively involved in iCamp project of IST 7th framework. I teach master level courses Self-directed Learning with Web 2.0 tools and Research Trends on Educational Technology. So i have had quite some experiences of using social software for teaching purposes.

I am actively using weblog, aggregator in Netvibes and Pageflakes, microblogging in Jaiku, MSN, Skype or Gabbly for chatting, Flickr for images. I have accounts in Facebook and LinkedIn.
Other tools like wiki, online collaborative writing tools (zoho spreadsheets, googledocs documents) i have used as part of my courses.

I am expecting that this course will be a playful event for the students and for me as a facilitator. We are going to have a lot of freedom in the tool selection and when preparing a joint e-learning course. I expect to learn from this experience.

I like nature, reading fantasy books and travelling. I have three sons who are very interested in science and physics.