Päivi Maria Rasi

Designing culturally inclusive affordance networks into the curriculum

This study addresses the challenges concerning the internationalisation of higher education, with a particular focus on designing new international programmes. It presents a case study of a novel international study programme: the MA in Media Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Lapland, Finland. The study looks into its curriculum as an affordance network and asks: How do the planned and experienced curricula respond to and support cultural inclusion? The results shed light on the risks of transforming existing domestic degree programmes into ‘international’ programmes. The core curriculum design challenges found in this study stem from the fact that the meaning of internationalisation has been defined ‘from within’; from the existing structures and expectations of the programme and from the host institution. We suggest that more attention should be paid to students life-worlds and the entire multicultural ecosystem that builds on the affordances inscribed in the curriculum.

Older People’s Use and Learning of New Media: A Case Study on Remote Rural Villages in Finnish Lapland

People aged 65+ generally use new media technologies less, in less mobile ways, and for less versatile purposes than younger age groups do. This has raised concerns about older people’s potential exclusion from the digital society. In this paper we present a case study on how older people, who were living in small rural villages in Finnish Lapland, use new media in their everyday lives. According to the participants, how do they use new media in their everyday lives? How do they learn to use new media? Our results point to the diversity in terms of the participants’ self-reported Internet use and related skills. The results also indicate that the participants’ social networks, especially grandchildren, play a more important role in their use of and learning about new media technologies than formal instruction does. Therefore, it is important to recognize that older people who lack social networks are most vulnerable in terms of being excluded from the digital society.

Authentic, dialogical knowledge construction: a blended and mobile teacher education programme

Abstract Background: Knowledge construction and technology have been identified as critical for an understanding of the future of teacher education. Knowledge is discovered, applied and created collaboratively from authentic starting points. Today’s new mobile and blended learning environments create increased opportunities for such processes, including learner-centred approaches, authenticity and dialogical knowledge construction. However, teaching still requires appropriate learning design and structuring. The presented study explored, and was designed and implemented, using the ‘Dialogical Authentic Netlearning Activity’ (DIANA) pedagogical model, which is seen as one of the learning designing models for existing digital, open and mobile learning environments. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the challenges and opportunities inherent in the adoption of the DIANA model and to examine student-teachers’ reflections concerning authentic and dialogical knowledge construction. The focus is on the learning process. Sample: Participants were 63 student-teachers who were following the study module ‘Networks in Vocational Education’ at the School of Professional Teacher Education, in Hämeenlinna, Finland. Design and methods: This qualitative study uses a deductive content analysis to discern relationships between the data and the existing theory. The data for this study were drawn from an online questionnaire and participants’ self-reflective accounts. Findings: The results indicate that achieving deep-oriented learning through dialogical actions is the most challenging part of using the DIANA model. Some of the students had difficulty understanding the concept of ‘authenticity’. Conclusions: The findings of this study suggest enhancing learner-centred scaffolding and guidance, particularly at the outset of the learning process. In addition, methods that develop dialogical skills and competences ought to be integrated into teacher education as extensively as possible, in order to make collaborative work and problem-solving genuinely dialogical and equal.

Student-generated instructional videos facilitate learning through positive emotions

Abstract The central focus of this study is a learning method in which university students produce instructional videos about the content matter as part of their learning process, combined with other learning assignments. The rationale for this is to promote a more multimodal pedagogy, and to provide students opportunities for a more learner-centred, motivating, active, engaging and productive role in their learning process. As such we designed a ‘video course’ where the students needed to produce an instructional video which could be used for university teaching. In addition to producing the video, the students needed to write a literature review of the topic of the video and a learning journal. At the end of the course the students filled a questionnaire regarding their learning and emotions during the project. Based on the students’ subjective answers, it appeared that producing a video, combined with writing the literature review can be an efficient way of learning. Most students found the project emotionally very positive and regarded it motivating to work on a video which they knew will have use in the future. This research suggests that a multimodal video project in a higher education setting enhances learning through increased motivation and positive emotions.

Toward personal and emotional connectivity in mobile higher education through asynchronous formative audio feedback

This study aims to develop asynchronous formative audio feedback practices for mobile learning in higher education settings. The development was conducted in keeping with the principles of design-based research. The research activities focused on an inter-university online course, within which the use of instructor audio feedback was tested, analyzed and developed further. Participants in this study were students (nu2009=u200950) from four Finnish universities who enrolled in the 7-week course. The teaching approach of the course could best be characterized as collaborative case-based mobile learning. Furthermore, we employed a novel formative audio feedback practice that has been inspired by and follows the peer-review practices employed by scientific journals. In particular, we wanted to find out how students experienced the use of audio feedback in terms of utility, emotional support and learning. Research data was gathered through a questionnaire to the course students, transcribed audio feedback provided for the students and students performance results. The study indicates that the novel formative audio feedback practice was successful in promoting the emotional engagement of students and personal connectivity between students and instructors. Furthermore, the audio feedback proved effective in terms of assignment revisions, and also in terms of students self-reports of the meaning of the audio feedback for learning. The majority of students welcomed the audio feedback, and also expressed a wish for the integrated use of text and audio. Therefore, in future implementations, we will integrate the audio and written feedback.

Integrating Web 2.0 Technologies into Face-to-Face PBL to Support Producing, Storing, and Sharing Content in a Higher Education Course.

In this article we present and discuss the process of developing and implementing a PBL-based course entitled Moving Images in Teaching and Learning that was held at the University of Lapland, Finland. In the course of the project, this fairly traditional face-to-face course was redesigned into a blended PBL course by integrating Web 2.0 applications into the course. The pedagogical rationale was to support students’ meaningful learning in various phases of the PBL process, and to enable easy storage and sharing of the ideas produced by the students. In addition, the rationale was to create more opportunities for students to report on their process during their independent knowledge acquisition phase and for the teacher to monitor and support students’ information searching processes. We focus mainly on students’ experiences of the implementation and conclude with ideas about our next steps.