Conference for Higher Education Research (CHER) - Hong Kong 2023

 

Tänään ollaan Hong Kongissa, Lingnanin yliopistolla juttelemassa tekoälyn hyödyntämisestä opetuksessa. 

Today we are in Hong Kong, at Lingnan University, talking about the use of artificial intelligence in teaching.

...Ja Jetlagissa.

...And in Jetlag.

Tämä konferenssi on myös melkoinen scholar reunion, tutkijoiden kohtauspiste, sillä tällä kertaa mukana väikkäriopiskelijani Antti Ruonalan lisäksi ovat myös Prof. Henri Pirkkalainen ja Henri Jalo, Tampereen yliopistosta, Tore Hoel Oslo Metropolitan universitystä (ja Zhuhai'sta!) sekä unkarilainen JYU kollegani, Kristof Fenyvesi, joka myös piti keynote puheen liittyen kestävän kehityksen teemoihin. 

This conference is also quite a Scholar reunion, 

a meeting point for researchers, because this time, 

in addition to my fellow student Antti Ruonala, there are also 

Prof. Henri Pirkkalainen and Henri Jalo, from Tampere University, 

Tore Hoel from Oslo Metropolitan University (and Zhuhai!) 

and my Hungarian JYU colleague, Kristof Fenyvesi, 

who also gave a keynote speech related to the themes of sustainable development.

 

 Generatiivisen tekoälyn sovellukset puhuttavat panelisteja ja esitysten pitäjiä täällä tänään. Kristof nosti myös tekoälyn sähkön käyttövaikutukset ja siihen liittyvät mielenkiintoiset kysymykset:

 Applications of generative artificial intelligence are talking to panelists 

and presenters here today. Kristof also raised the electricity use effects of 

artificial intelligence and the related interesting questions:

- Nyt jo tiedetään, että ChatGPT vie valtavasti tietokonevirtaa: Miten tulevaisuuden tekoäly saadaan kuluttajien arkeen mukaan, jos vain osa maailmasta kykenee maksamaan tarpeeksi tekoälyn vaatimasta sähköstä... Eriarvoistuminen lisääntyy maailmassa. 

- Now it is already known that ChatGPT consumes a huge amount of computer power: 

How can the artificial intelligence of the future be included in the everyday life 

of consumers, if only part of the world is able to pay enough for the electricity 

required by artificial intelligence... Inequality is increasing in the world.

Kysymys siitä, miten voisimme hyödyntää tekoälyä ilmastonmuutoksen pysäyttämiseen ja kestävään kehitykseen on edelleen kesken. Emme voi tietää millaisten robottien kanssa tulemme elämään 3, 5 tai 10 vuoden kuluttua.

The question of how we could use artificial intelligence to stop climate change and promote sustainable development is still open. We cannot know what kind of robots we will be living with in 3, 5 or 10 years.
Tore and I also met 10 years ago at a Chinese conference, that time in Shanghai.

Toren kanssa tapasimme 10v sitten myös kiinalaisessa konferenssissa, sillä kertaa Shanghaissa. Tänään pystymme toteamaan, että 10v aikana maailma on muuttunut niin, että länkkäritutkija pystyy melko helposti kääntämään ja lukemaan kiinalaisia tieteellisiä artikkeleja mm. Deepl -tekoälysovellusten avulla.

Maailma on siis muuttunut jo sen myötä, miten tekoäly meitä auttaa. Voimme vain arvailla, mitä se tulee olemaan tulevaisuudessa.

 Today, we can state that the world has changed in 10 years in such a way that a link researcher can quite easily translate and read Chinese scientific articles, e.g. With the help of Deepl AI applications.
So the world has already changed with how artificial intelligence helps us. We can only guess what it will be in the future.
The question will also be - will we meet again in China in 10 years...

Kysymys lienee myös - tapaammeko uudestaan Kiinassa 10 vuoden päästä... 

 

Ombudsmen offices in 9 Caucasus Universities Established

Last week I was in Georgia, in the final conference of AESOP project. For three years, we have worked in this Erasmus+ on establishing ombudsmen offices in Azerbajzani, Georgian and Ukranian universities. The project has been successful in fulfilling its objective and it's been my job to provide good practices of Students' rights management alongside with five other European Universities from Italy, Austria, Poland, Portugal and UK. We as the European partners also conducted quality review on the project's activities to explore the impact and processes of the newly established ombudsmen offices.

This really interesting journey has taken me to exotic places like Baku, Vienna, Kiev etc. Definitely also to places that I would not have seen without the hospitality of my native colleagues in Azerbajzan, Ukraine, Georgia and Austria. This group of people have also bonded over the years quite a lot. I could really see us writing more project proposals together, sharing Phd students and making Erasmus exchange of staff agreements etc. I am proud of the achievements of the target countries. They have taken steps toward students knowing their rights in the universities' life as well as having an independent party to defend those. These kinds of issues in the Nordic countries are perhaps taken in for granted... It is so eye opening to meet new cultures and see student life also from perspectives out of our normal bubbles. Thank you my AESOP colleagues for teaching me so many interesting lessons on how Universities are run in the Caucasus area. I will miss you guys!

/Viime viikolla olin viimeisellä AESOP-projektin reissulla eli lopetuskonferenssissa Kutaisissa, Georgiassa. Tämä projektihan on vienyt minut moniin eksoottisiin kohteisiin Kaukasuksella: Azerbajzan, Georgia ja Ukraina ovat olleet tämän Erasmus+ projektin kohdemaita ja me Eurooppalaiset yliopistot olemme päässeet jakamaan hyviä käytänteitä opiskelijoiden oikeuksien varmistamiseksi ja sekä toimimaan projektin laadunvarmistuskomiteana. Projektin aikana suunniteltiin useampikin kyselylomake perustettujen Ombudsmen -toimistojen ja niihin liittyvän koulutuksen vaikuttavuudesta. Mielenkiintoista on ollut lisäksi pohtia sitä, onko Ombdusmen -toimistojen perustaminen Kaukasukselle sittenkään kovin erilaista kuin Eurooppaan - lopulta kyse on luottamussuhteen rakentamisesta Ombudsmen-henkilön&toimiston ja opiskelijoiden välille, jotta he uskaltaisivat ottaa yhteyttä tähän auktoriteettiin ongelmiensa ratkaisemiseksi. Kirjoitteilla on luonnollisesti parikin julkaisua aiheesta nyt sitten projektin viimeisten kuukausien aikana. 

Henkilökohtaisesti antoisinta on kuitenkin ollut tutustua näihin kulttuureihin uusien kolleegohen kautta, joista on vuosien varrella tullut ystäviä. Uskoisin, että ainakin osan kanssa tulevaisuudessakin työnteko jatkuu yhdessä uusien projektihakemusten myötä. Ja onhan meillä muutama (viisi) yhteistä hankehakemusta sisällä vetämässäkin vielä... Pitäkää peukkuja!

Inclusion for Higher Education - A4A Final Conference in Romania

This morning I am in Bucharest, Romania, where the conference is talking of access and inclusion in Higher education. I have been working in EU Erasmus+ funded project ”Access4All”.

Audience had come internationally and all over Romania

Today is the time for the final conference of this project, looking at the results that we have achieved.

Access4All created tools for Higher Education Institutes to self-evaluate their access and inclusion strategies and policies and to raise discussion on these issues.


The toolkit includes:

• Institution self-assessment tool
• Pyramid model to develop inclusion strategies and
• A bank of good practises

These tools are all available online for free use of any higher education institute.

For the conference today, Prof. Luise Morley from University Of Sussex talked of the rather unresearched topic of Roma in Higher Education. In her key note speech on the inclusion of the Roma, she raised some of the key issues which Are true with many underrepresented groups:

Some groups do not have visible signs for belonging to this group - they Are so called ”invisible” underrepresented groups. Often those persons also want to remain invisible, as many predjudicis Are directed toward them from the majority. But how can ”help/attention” be directed to them unless we know who they are..?

The audience raised their voice at the Q&A session pointing out that more attention should be directed toward self-esteem of people in these groups. If they feel that they Are accepted as they are, they no longer will remain invisible and therefore also the awareness of their group will increase in the society.

Saana Mehtälä presents JYU Good practises of Inclusion

Personally I reflect these issues through my personal experience: AS a mother of an autistic child, I see often that some families do not want to get their children diagnosed. Sometimes the reason is that based on a this ”stamp” in the forehead of the child makes them feel shame or they believe that the child will be bullied for being ”different”. However, the stamps also result into different aids, help and benefits for dealing with the situation. My son for example gets theraphy for his learning challenges and the family gets various support to help him at home. So for us, it has definitely been more useful to be out in the open rather than invisible.

Yes, it sometimes it takes courage to do so: People do not always know many things about underrepresentative groups like the autistic... and like Luisa mentioned in her keynote - the discussion can often be rather negative. People feel sorry for you to be different... but this is not the full picture. There Are many positive sides of diversity - these aspects Are just rarely raised into public discussion. Minorities tend to have a bad reputation. This is something we can change: do we just focus on the problems and hard ships or do we see the richness of diversity of people in our world?

/Summary in Finnish:

Tänään Access4All -projektin loppukonferenssissa Bukarestissa. A4A-projekti kehitti viimeisen kolmen vuoden aikana korkeakoulujen inkluusion kehittämiseen tarkoitetun työkalupalkin, joka löytyy verkosta täältä. Tänään Bucharestissa esittelemässä Jyväskylän Yliopiston inkluusiopolitiikkaan liittyviä kokemuksia: mitä toimia meillä on tehty ja miten nämä ovat toimineet opiskelijoille ja henkilökunnalle..?

IMAILE goes ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2017

 Today I am in Berlin for Online Educa, or OEB Conference. This is due to my two projects in innovative procurement of learning technology: IMAILE & Learntech Accelerator (LEA).

 IMAILE became a part of an interactive session called:

Opportunities and Challenges for Education Start-ups in the European Market: Understanding Your Customers' Needs

In this session, we the panelists told our various stories of connecting with the users. Having supply & demand on the same page would be something that would make software projects succeed... However, specifically in the field of Education, this is rarely the case. One of the reasons is that in the field of education, the buyer is very rarely the user. Whatever learning technology you are buying - it's usually the city or the municpality or the school or the parent who pays... and the teacher/learner/student/pupil that uses... Perhaps this is a simple case of broken phone: Developer to seller to buyer to user... That's a long journey and the information gets lost in the middle. The users also do not know what they want or what they could be asking for... And on the other hand the developers can't really spend enough time thinking of the user's needs... They are busy coding. It's someone else's problem to collect the user needs... And when none of these people in the chain speak the same language... well, that's when money and time gets lost... That's why there's many-MANY learning (and other) technologies out there, that never simply get used.

The discussion was so vivid that it went on for one hour after the panel ended with the audience joining in... People just simply were not leaving. It is rare that I have been a part of a conference program item with this much depait, interest and it's simply a very satisfactory experience. It told me that there is clearly need for European projects like IMAILE and LEA, supporting the learning technology innovation within Europe.

 This was my first visit to Online Educa, even though of course my colleagues have been going for years.

 I also had the privilage to attend my professor Jan Pawlowski's learning cafe workshop on using OER in Public Administration.

 Conferences like OEB are always a good idea. To meet all the key players in the area - I figured that in the 4-5hours that I invested today in talking to all the PLEs in the market, I save about 2 weeks of my time next year trying to map who is on what level of innovation...

Run into some familiar face...

 So basically I had the whole Friday to go through stand to stand, asking about learning analytics - about adaptive learning paths - gamification - virtual reality - augmented reality... And so on.

 I had also the privilege to listen in to some innovative speakers. This panel was on open education. It is interesting to see people still talking about OER - even though the buzz on MOOCs is long gone and the field has somehow moved on...

  I also thought to myself that perhaps Germany it's a bubble of its own... It promotes certain topics beyond the rest of the world.

 Still, Online Educa... Very much worth to visit...

 I sneaked into virtual reality to shoot some classroom walls even.

 It was also quite amazing to see so many Finns here. When walking the corridors, almost at all times, you can hear Finnish spoken.

 My little spying scouting trip turned out much more useful than I could have ever imagined...

 Today only in English...

I am sorry my Berlin friends, to have disapointed pretty much everyone for not being really up for more than work here. It was my intention to do more, but I have been under the weather with a cold. Still - Good times. See you again shortly!