Internations days- what I learned

Day 1: Warming up sessions started off well and it was nice to see familiar face once again! we were introduced briefly on how to document our final reflective blog on ipad. After that we had an interesting talk from Lisa Holmberg from the Sami educational institute. From her impressive talk I was introduced to what is like to live in a smaller community. How difficult it is to be able to preserve of what once was their very identity. She talked about how students all over Finland and other Sami communities are free to go and learn art and crafts of the Sami people. One important occupation is reindeer herding and I understand that it is very challenging to learn and practice at the same time. We also saw that young Sami people are offered courses like nursing, and butchery as alternative professions and she also mentioned that they are trying to expand the choice for the Sami people. I understood that they have a really tough time to organise the courses in Sami language as they have nit existed before. She also showed some videos about importance of relationships in life with family and that was very touching.

The following speaker was Kari-Pekka Heikkinen from Oulu Gamelab. He introduced new idea of project based learning in gaming field. There seems to be a bright future for this, if this idea comes into practice as it shows potential employment opportunities. Since it was the first of its kind that I heard about, it was a bit too early to interpret anything. He talked about the success and expansion of the gamelab in Oulu and that many people are infact interested to come from all over Finland to OUlu to be a part of it. He also mentioned about plans to expand to other areas like education and health and it would be interesting to see the development. 

This was followed by Blair's talk on MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). It was always a pleasure to hear Blair's talks as they are usually packed with information. There are two types of MOOCs: cMOOCs based on networking and circulation of knowledge and xMOOCs that are based on traditional courses. We were later divided into groups and asked to design and present our own MOOC ideas. I was in a group with a health care professional and a teacher student. We designed a MOOC for an integration course in Finnish for students who aspire to study in Finland. This idea came to my mind as I would be interested to take such a course before coming to Finland. We also included basic information about health and security services and all the basic information necessary for the beginning days of living in Finland. The presentation went on well and everyone liked it.

Day 2: The theme of the second day is ´'International networks between schools'.  Although I did not attend the day due to baby sitting reasons, I would like to write down what I learned from other participants blogs and videos as that would keep the continuity of the overall big picture. I learned that the students were divided into three groups and sent to : International school, Tietoma Science center and Oulu University of Applied sciences-Business kitchen. The participants have to answer three questions in the form of a video blog or a journal.

Core questions:

1) What does the network competence mean to the target of the visit? 

2) What existing networks does the school already possess?

3) How to build and maintain international networks?

 These days all the schools and educational centers are well connected and there is a fair amount of exchange of ideas through blogging sites for example. International school is well connected in the sense that the students are international and some of the teacher are as well, either having studied abroad or completely from an international community. This also applies to the Tietoma science center and the Business school. When we look at the web today, we notice that it plays a key role in aiding our learning process. A standard course can also be taught via a video clip with an advantage of dividing it into many segments and playing them at different times and repeating of necessary. video lessons, network tools that help in trouble shooting during/post a lecture etc have made it more easier to handle the bottlenecks of distance learning.on day 1 I spoke with Nijole shortly and came to know later that she delivered a talk on mentoring.

Day 3: The topic for the last day is `Multiculturalism on the work of a teacher´.Yrjö Mikkonen presented a very interesting talk about multiculturalism. He said that it is very important to include the international persons into 'US' but not 'them' or 'those'. I think so too, if we refer to some one as 'them' then the whole concept of multiculturalism is not fulfilled in the first step itself. I really felt Yrjö connected well with the audience with his thoughts about how to make international people feel at home in Finland or anywhere else and what local people should do in small ways to make them feel at home. In the present days everyone is talking about internationalization, multiculturalism and so on but really how many are talking from their heart and mean it really? This is because internatioanlization is also important for the development of a community or country. Water in a river is purified only if there is constant flow of water, new people from new places bring new ideas and competences and so on. 
In the after noon there was a panel of teachers, social workers and business people to discuss about the multiculturalism. There was a teacher that somehow created unpleasant vibrations and created some debate. I got a feeling that she treats her students (international) as not 'us' but 'them'. On the other hand I found some panel members like Yrjö and Shehnaz and all the others really empathetic towards creating a favvourable welcoming atmosphere to the international people. 

To wrap up, the international days in Oulu was productive in the way that I learned many new things like MOOCs, gamelab and many different view and thoughts about internationalization and multiculturalism.