Monthly Archives: November 2014

Finnish observers ready

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ipp  In Finland almost 300 observers were trained to observe the everyday activities of early childhood education. The observed items include general activity, children’s activity, children’s object of attention, physical activity, involvement, emotions, social orientation and the activity of the nearest educator. Between January and May 2015 every minute four observations based on random sampling is conducted somewhere in Southern Finland. The picture is from the Helsinki training. Other training places were Hämeenlinna and Turku. The observers send their greeting to other observers in Asia!

IBM & Big Data

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Orientation project and IBM have been cooperating since 2009. The cooperation has been concentrated around the KidSmart heritage, see https://blogs.helsinki.fi/simulaatio/. The 10-year old tradition of providing Finnish early childhood education kindergartens and preschools KidSmart computers has now come to the end. We are happy to announce that the cooperation continues. IBM cooperation in Finnish early learning  will continue and  the flagship in 2015 will be analytics part of the Orientation 2.0′ project to understand how and why the kids do actually learn – the massive research to be done and data gatherer in four countries and with more than 100000 observations. The plan is that the IBM part of the research  – the analytics –  will be funded by IBM Impact Grant program funded by  CSR / Celia. The discussions to proceed with the project  to secure funding as part of IBM Impact Grant program have started. Descriptions of IBM analytics are introduced here.

Multicultural children and families

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The importance of multicultural children and families in early childhood education is growing as the culture is becoming more global. Outi Arvola is making her doctoral thesis on the subject at the University of Turku, Finland. She is using the project data in her thesis. We will also use the project results for improving the conditions for the multicultural children in early childhood.  Outi Arvola is interested in discussing the topic and the possibilities of international cooperation. Outi’ email address is outi.arvola@turkuamk.fi. Do not hesitate to contact her if you wonder about the possible mutual interests.

Children’s fears in Finnish day care and preschool

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Heli Soderqvist has just finished her graduate thesis on the Orientation project data about children’s fears. The children were interviewed by their parents. For the question Are you afraid in day care? answered 3434 children. In average the children were not afraid and they liked to be in day care. For the additional open question What are you afraid in day care? answered 1095 children. These descriptions by children themselves open up a unique view on the everyday in day care and preschool. Unfortunately, only the abstract is in English! Fortunately, Google translate seems to work well with the text 🙂 Take a look at Heli’s work here. Discuss children’s answers with the children of your group of with your own children!

And note that there are a lot of interesting graduate thesis presented in here!