Estonian Association of Educational Technology (EAET) was founded on 25.august 2011 by Anne Villems and Lehti Pilt from the University of Tartu, Varje Tipp from the Pärnu Vocational Education Centre, Jane Mägi from the Kuressaare Vocational School, Marge Kusmin form the Tallinn University of Technology, Ingrid Maadvere from the Tiger Leap Foundation and Mart Laanpere from CET. The new association will promote, define and develop the profession of educational/learning/instructional technologists in Estonian schools, vocational schools, colleges, universities, training companies and HR departments of various public and private organizations. One of the major tasks for the new association will be development of professional qualification standard for educational technologists in accordance with EQF.
Dragan Gaševič from Athabasca University and Simon Fraser University is visiting our research group for a few days. He is our partner in IntelLEO project and we share common research interests. Today we had a seminar where Dragan gave us an overview of learning analytics as an emerging discipline. His presentation slides are available in SlideShare.
From 20th until 23rd of June the University of Lapland held a conference NBE2011 - The Social Media in the Middle of Nowhere. This was the fourth conference of its kind and this time organized in Salla, Finland. There were participants from different European countries including Estonia.
CET was represented in the conference with five articles written by (from the left) Katri Tammsaar, Martin Sillaots, Terje Väljataga, Kersti Toming and Hans Põldoja. Also Mart Laanpere, Sonia Sousa and Sebastian Fiedler contributed to the papers. From the proceedings you can read more about what was written and presented in the conference.
On June 6th we had a joint seminar with guests from Finland. Our visitors were Jarmo Viteli (University of Tampere), Leena Vainio (HAMK University of Applied Sciences), Mika Sihvonen (University of Tampere) and Mika Petäsnoro (Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences). We introduced our institute and main research areas. Jarmo Viteli gave an overview of the research done in Tampere Research Center for Information and Media and Leena Vainio introduced AKTIIVI project. After the presentations we discussed the possible future collaboration between the institutions.
eVent is over for this year and from the organizers’ point of view, it was yet another successful event. For the first time we had many representatives from different companies and organizations outside Tallinn University. The presentations of projects are uploaded to SlideShare (use tag ifievent11) and some photos will also appear to web. This is certain that eVent 2012 will definitely take place and we will do our best for the next eVent to be even better. Thank you all for participating and see you on spring 2012.
The eVent is our demoday, where the students, researchers and business partners of Institute of Informatics present the coolest stuff we have done since the last spring. This year, the eVent will take place on Tuesday, 17.May 15.00-18.00 in the room M-225. We invite the students and staff to submit proposals for presentations in four different formats:
- 5-minute oral presentation
- 10-minute oral presentation (only if you have audiovisual content to present)
- hands-on demo at computer stand
- poster
All presentations and posters can be either in Estonian or in English.
Registration and additional information can be found on the eVent web page: http://htk.tlu.ee/event
Terry Anderson and Rory McGreal from Athabasca University visited Tallinn University on Monday, 4.April. Rory McGreal is Associate Vice President for Research in Athabasca University, his research interests are focusing on Open Educational Resources. Terry Anderson is Professor & Canada Research Chair in Distance Education. Terry is also the editor of International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning and author of the award-winning book Theory and Practice of Online Learning.
With the interested ones, a joint seminar in room T-201 was held where among other topics possible cooperation between two universities was discussed as well as ongoing projects from both sides were introduced.
Kersti Toming and David Lamas participated on LLP (ICT) project CoCreat‘s kickoff meeting in Oulu, Finland.
CoCreat is a three year long project which expectedly will lead the way in new solutions for promoting creative collaboration in terms of new and innovative learning models based on social media and mobile technology.
Expected results are:
- Models of how creative collaboration can be structured using notions of collaborative learning
- Promotion of creative collaboration with development of collaborative spaces using mobile technology and social media; and
- Practical and methodological guidelines to support the design and evaluation of creative collaboration.
And foreseen impact is to provide learners with the abilities to:
- Act in dynamic learning situations;
- Exploit technological solutions to support creative collaboration; and
- Solve real-life problems in creative and collaborative ways.
HTK will mainly contribute towards the design, implementation and evaluation of two (out of five) collaborative spaces targeting higher education students.
More details are available here.
The new semester for Tallinn University students has started. Among others, there was a chance to listen Emanuele Bardone’s lecture “Philosophy of Cognition”. The course was held for the first time in Tallinn University and became popular among IMKE students. I, as one of IMKE students and participants, have only positive reflections to pass on. Although the course was very intensive with five long evening after hard working day, I always went to the classroom with excitement. The lecture had a frame with specific topics held every day, but eventually turned out as a mix of discussions and dialogues between the students and lecturer. I believe I am not wrong to suggest the course to others as well and hope to see mr. Bardone giving lectures here again.
At the end of the course, I asked on question from mr. Bardone about human cognition. The question was as follows: “Recently you have published the book … and in this book you write interesting ideas about human cognition as a chance seeking system. This viewpoint is well related to our own research in distributed learning enviroments, where each learner can perceive different learning affordances. Would you like to tell about how your ideas could be used in computer-based education with new media, what are your future plans in this area.”
Here is the answer: “Contrary to popular belief, learning is not just storing some piece of information in our mind to be retrieved some other time independently from environmental conditions. I strongly support the idea that learning sort of implies the reconfiguration of the way we are used to engage our environment – our cognitive niche, in my terminology – for solving problems. Basically, as we start learning, we sort of establish a better functional relationship with our environment so that new problem-solving capabilities are successfully unfolded and eventually added up to our cognitive repertoire. But how could we facilitate or favor this process to happen? The very idea is that much of this job consists in seeking chances. A chance is not meant to be just an accident or uncertainty. Conversely, it’s a particular situation or event from which we can get information about how to get further information. In education the great challenge faced by the teacher is to collaborate with the learner so as to explore and exploit such environmental chances. With the advent of computer-based education and digital ecosystems the need to take on this challenge has become more pressing than ever. Consider this: if learning can really be described as a process aimed at establishing a better functional relationship with the cognitive niche, then the challenge learning designers are facing is huge, as they literally become part of the learning process. But what kind of approach should we adopt? So far Peeter Normak and Kai Pata have done a great job in the direction to tackle down this issue. Central to their approach is the idea that the learning process in technologically rich environments is an emergent phenomenon analogous to the way an individual organism as part of a species adapts to a specific environment, namely, a niche. In their analogy, learners are like organisms acting in a ecological niche – the learning space – which dynamically evolves. As a future project, to me it would be absolutely interesting to see how the chance-seeking approach can really be contributing to develop this ecological approach.”
On February 1st, members of the Estonian SIGCHI joined SIGCHI Finland in Tampere to explore possible cooperation.
The meeting was also attended by the current SIGCHI Adjunct Chair for Local Chapters and provided valuable insight into the following issues:
- What can we learn from SIGCHI Finland? What works and what doesn’t?
- What can we do and achieve together?
- How can ACM (and SIGCHI) support our activities? Namely, through the distinguished guests program?
