Seminar.net with special issue from Finland

Abstract

Most of the world has learned to ”see to Finland” over the last decade, beacuse of its reputation as a leading nation in educational achievement, as well as its many creative and diligent approaches in technology. Since 1990 Finnish researchers in media, technology and education have met annually to discuss research matters and further advances in the area. For the conference of 2016, held 13-15th April in Hämeenlinna, Finland, we were asked to have the best papers published in Seminar.net. After a rigourous review process we will print six papers, four in this issue and two in the next.

Antti Syvänen, Jaana-Piia Mäkiniemi, Sannu Syrjä, Kirsi Heikkilä-Tammi and Jarmo Viteli, all of the University of Tampere, present the paper “When does the educational use of ICT become a source of technostress for Finnish teachers?» This interesting paper is based on the analysis of questionnaires filled in by 2741 Finnish teachers. It provides significant insight into what causes teachers to experience stress and alienation when using information and communication technologies (ICT) in their classrooms.

Tuulikki Keskitalo and Heli Ruokamo of Lapland University present a paper dealing with “Students’ Expectations and Experiences of Meaningful Simulation-Based Medical Education». Simulation in nursing education is a very rapidly developing area, and the students – as well as their teachers – have high expectation. This project is about student’s expectations and the very positive result from this study was that their experiences were even higher than their expectations.

Hanna Vuojärvi, of the University of Lapland and Miikka Eriksson, of the University of Eastern Finland, have written the article «Using Mobile Tools to Support Meaningful Work-based Learning in Vocational Education» together. Their case study focused on meaningful work-based learning (WBL) and the pedagogical use of mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs) in vocational tourism education. It demonstrates how the use of smartphones was applied in the project and its usefulness in the student’s work with the learning material.

Antero Lindstedt, Kristian Kiili, Pauliina Tuomi and Arttu Perttula, all from Tampere University of Technology, Pori department provide the paper called “A user experience case study: two embodied cognition user interface solutions for a math learning game». They have used a particular game development environment, Semideus, to test out how different user interfaces influenced. They found interesting differences, mainly in favour of the «tilting user interface».