Introductions

Dear all,

I work as a designer, lecturer and researcher in the Institute of Informatics at the Tallinn University, Estonia. Also I am a doctoral student in the Media Lab Helsinki at the Aalto University School of Art and Design, Finland. My main research interest is the conceptual design of open and personal learning environments.

I hope that this course will provide some valuable input for my doctoral research. I am one of the designers behind the open educational resources authoring community LeMill (see http://lemill.net/ ). We have more than 15 000 teachers from 62 countries who have created 24 000 learning resources. So there is quite a lot of data to analyze. My special interest is to analyze what kind of content-focused learning environments teachers have created using LeMill and other Web 2.0 tools.

Another reason why I decided to take this course is my interest in MOOC courses. I have organized several open courses in Estonia and our research group is developing a special feed reader for open courses where all participants use blogs - EduFeedr (see http://www.edufeedr.net/ ). This tool handles course enrollments, aggregates blog posts and comments, creates various visualizations and gives out course data in various formats. You can see an example course here: http://www.edufeedr.net/pg/edufeedr/view_educourse/34

I hope that I am able to keep up with all the readings and communication in this course.

Best regards,


Hans