We had a great PhD day seminar, with about 13 participants from Finland, Estonia, Australia, UK, USA, and Spain. We want to thank Ulla Kakkonen and Eeva Turtiainen for allowing us to use the facilities at The Evangelic Folk High School of Kitee, and Ulla even teaching us about “toivon, valvon, and kiitan”.

In addition to building two excellent snow men (more pictures available at Antony Harfield’s blog), enjoying some s’mores with everyone, and having a relaxing time in the sauna, pool, and steam room — we also had some great presentations and stimulating discussions about a variety of topics.

Below are some of the presentations. Each description is now a hyper link to the corresponding mp3 of the discussion.

• Ulla and Eeva (from the Kitee Folk High School) presented about their proposal for using IT-education to promote democracy and equality in Zambia.
• Taavi and Heilo (from Tartu, Estonia) presented about Robotics in Education, and we discussed potential synergies with the Kid’s Club here in Joensuu and in South Africa.
• Eeva Turtianen (a part of IMPDET) presented about her dissertation topic: Educational Games in Mathematics (She shared a form she received from Johannes Cronje that helps when summarizing literature articles: click here for the form)
• Javier López (a part of IMPDET) presented a demo mock-up of a new EdTech Web Site. (He will soon have a link of the mock-up on his blog so everyone can comment on it)
• Michael de Raadt (from University of Southern Queensland, Australia) conducted a discussion about peer-assessments. (See notes here)
  
• Erkki Sutinen (from the University of Joensuu) presented on a topic that we were asked not to reveal out of the room, but we spent some time brainstorming how to make an exciting new initiative into a feasible reality.

My questions for you again:

1. Do you listen to these at all?
2. Are they helpful – or how could they be more helpful?
3. Should we continue to provide recordings like this?