Experiences of travelling

Watch video!

Here is a compilation of mine and Veera’s trip to Beijing some one and a half month ago. Our focus was to work with teachers in primary schools and meet with scholars at the Graduate School of Education, Peking University. But, still, there is no such thing as a one-way directed experience. So, this is an effort to tell our story visually and multimodally and draw a more comprehensive picture. Like the video, this was a multi-level experience in the sense that we wanted to get into as many dimensions of living in Beijing as possible within one week. In a sense, we compacted time in a similar way that the still and moving images recount 7 days’ events into 6+ minutes. Technically, the musical background has been selected by the editing software. So it cannot be really seen as personal touch. But there are interruptions of still images with very short edited clips to show what are our reactions were like or how we felt during the visit.

Some new approaches to storytelling may be on the way?

Digital Storytelling goes Beijing

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Last November Digital Storytelling traveled in Beijing where Veera Kallunki and myself discussed previous research experience and findings with Primary School Teachers, Principals, Professors and Post-graduate students at the Department of Educational Technology, Peking University. It was a warm welcome for our presence there as members of CICERO Learning-University of Helsinki Research team specialising on the integration of digital technologies in pedagogical practices. The interest in Digital storytelling as pedagogical method developed during the Round Table discussions that Professor Hannele Niemi (Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, HU & Scientific Leader of our team) hosted and co-organized with Professor Jiyou Jia (Graduate School of Education, PKU).

The delegation of Chinese scholars agreed about the potential of digital storytelling to enhance student engagement and deeper learning and a joint plan for research collaboration between PKU and HU was established.  Our visit in Beijing was an opportunity to meet with professionals and scholars and get further and deeper into the details of storytelling. Also it opened up new perspectives in approaching storytelling from both a scientific and a pedagogical lens.

And, most certainly, this new twofold experience and how it develops and grows is something that we are all looking forward to.

FINNABLE 2020

FINNABLE 2020 is a value network project that will create and develop

• a new ecosystem in learning, enabling people to learn regardless of time and place
• technologically enabled practices which bring added value to learning and teaching
• social practices that connect learners to global collaboration promoting life-long learning
• new forums for sharing knowledge and experiences promoting 21st century skills with an emphasis on creativity and problem solving
• new pedagogical models on how to break barriers between formal and non-formal learning settings using new technological tools
• a new prototype of Global Sharing Pedagogy and its applications globally and locally.