”There is too much to read”

Perttu Heino: How to match interactive technologies with the best pedagogical approaches in education is a complex domain for research and development. I participated in the annual event of Finnish Interactive Technologies in Education researchers in Hämeenlinna on April 18th in order to get an update of the current state-of-the-art.

Professor Jarmo Viteli from the University of Tampere opened the event with a Chinese proverb: “When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills”.  How about integrating windmills into walls?

Next, Prof. Eric Duval from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, gave a very inspiring keynote speech under the title “Research 2.0”. He cited the Belgian visionary Paul Otlet (1868-1944) who already 100 years ago observed that ”There is too much to read”. Duval strongly supports the openness of materials and public discussion using the platforms of social media. This helps us to more efficiently identify and understand the latest results of research relevant to our on-going research work. Exponential growth of the number of scientific papers has taken place since 1930’s. Reading faster is not the solution!

www.slideshare.net/erik.duval
http://erikduval.wordpress.com/
https://twitter.com/#!/ErikDuval

In the afternoon session, the most interesting presentation was given by researcher Erika Tanhua-Piiroinen from the Information Science Unit of University of Tampere. Her group has recently started a project on the sharing of tacit knowledge and expertise in the working life. Also finding and filtering relevant information from the outside world for shared use within an organization will be studied.  This sounds like a very challenging topic.
http://tsrlyhty.wordpress.com/

The day in Hämeenlinna once again confirmed that we have a great community of researchers in Finland on interactive technologies and learning environments! TAMK is proud to be a member of that community.

Perttu Heino