Inspirations and insights from Denmark

Greetings from Denmark - Land of flat plains, bridges, rain, innovative universities, stylish design and very nice people!

University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Odense and Copenhagen University College of Engineering (IHK) are among TAMK's partner universities in Denmark. During the first week of December I was at an Erasmus staff exchange in Odense and I had the chance to meet many of the staff and students who are teaching and studying at both institutions in various engineering and international programs. I was very inspired by the visit and wanted to share some highlights here in TAMK's international blog.

First I visited Copenhagen University College of Engineering and especially their semester-long exchange programs. Innovation and Business Design Semester is a 30 ECTS program for everyone interested business development and innovation regardless of the discipline studies. It runs both in spring and autumn and it has modules for example in cross-cultural management and marketing, innovation and business design, and global business development. Their also have a very popular program called European Project Semester where interdisciplinary students across Europe work together on large projects. I also encourage our engineering students to have a look at their International Business Semester which a program specifically designed to give general business skills to engineering students. Many modules from these programs are also available in their Summer School programs. For more information, check http://ihk.dk/international/exchange-students for details.

I spent the rest of the week at University of Southern Denmark in Odense where I worked together with my colleagues from SDU and University of Tromsø to design an innovation camp concept based on our experiences from the Nordic Business Week at TAMK ProAcademy that would allow students in our Nordic partner network to work on company assignments and innovation cases together in week-long workshops in Finland, Norway and Denmark. Draft of the concept is now ready and we will soon contact other partners and companies about it for feedback. We plan to organize the first innovation camp using this concept next year in Finland and then 2010 in Denmark and Norway.

Another definitive highlight of the SDU visit was meeting local integrated design students who were here in Tampere a couple of months ago for the Nordic Business Week. They introduced me to their study methods, group work and equipment that they use in their studies. I especially liked the problem-based projects on which they work in teams for the semester. Very challenging and practical tasks that require a lot of teamwork and coordination. They also had some very cool equipment for their studies: Who has heard of a 3d-printer which prints the object when you send it a cad-drawing?! Very nice!! SDU has an international exchange program in integrated design among other interesting programs ;) ...

Next year in April University of Southern Denmark is organizing an international week where we plan to try different innovation and brainstorming techniques for different real-world problems. I hope some TAMK students will have a chance to take part in this.

University of Southern Denmark students who were in Tampere and who I also met in Odense

Jukka Siltanen

TAMK ProAcademy Coach

UN Millenium Development Goals Blues

Today I was setting up posters of The World Summit Youth Awards 2009 on the notice boards of our school, with a fourth year producer student. As we were removing the expired notices and finding usable pins, we chatted about the Millennium Development Goals.

My companion confessed that she was only vaguely aware of the goals, but managed to point out female rights and education. It is not at all unusual that in Finland people don't know what the MDGs are, "something to do with Bono?". I started thinking about the situation. A non-military service person with a female student of a free education facility, in the field of culture. What a long road our society has travelled to make this happen. Maybe the reason we don't know about the goals is that most of them are stating the obvious for us.

Even though Big Brother gets more attention than MDGs in western countries, it doesn't mean the issues behind the MDGs are not seen important. In fact, many projects in this university and universities around Finland deal with the issues, most probably unaware of the MDGs.

I try to promote The World Summit Youth Award and MDGs as part of my job here. But I keep asking, for a young pioneer, is it important to know the name of what you do? I call it saving the world. It takes the seriousness away.

Story & Photo: Wesa Aapro

UN Millenium Development Goals

World Summit Youth Award (WSYA)

TAMK University of Applied Sciences is one of the WSYA partners, putting the Millenium Goals in action.
Wesa Aapro is member of the WSYA International Team. He does his non-military service at TAMK.

Hello from Europrix, Graz!

The Operaatio Hurrikaani women team headed off to Graz, Austria 27.-30.11.2008 to present the project and TAMK University of Applied Sciences School of Art and Media.

The festival took place for the most part at Kunsthaus Graz, a modern art centre located in the heart of the city. Graz was full of Christmas atmosphere and we fell in love with it totally!

During the festival, the Kunsthaus was full of seminars and nominees from all across the Europe. All 23 Top Talent nominee projects presented their work on Saturday afternoon, and in the evening the winners from all categories were celebrated at the Multimedia Awards Gala 2009.

The overall winner of the Europrix 2009 was a French project called mü. It’s an fairytale based interactive multimedia device targeted to kindergarten kids. Pretty cool!

The winner of our category, Interactive TV was Kika & Bob from the Netherlands. We were even more happy to be nominees, and will still keep on working hard with Operaatio Hurrikaani. The production will continue and we will make the new series even better and bigger.

During the festival we heard that Tampere is almost the capital of Finland, at least when it comes to multimedia & culture. Maybe it has something to do with MindTrek? The new TAF festival’09 is also awaited.

So, stay tuned….

Greetings,
Riikka & Kaisa
aka The Hurricane Angels

Pictures:

Picture 1: The Exhibition of the projects took place in the Kunsthaus’s ”Needle”. Kaisa is checking out some cool project.
Picture 2: Riikka is testing some touch-screen technology by Amigos from Germany.
Picture 3: RoboVox has a little brother, RoboVoice who made it to Graz. The Robot speaks based on SMS messages you send to it. 8 meters heigh installation can be spotted for example at the marketplaces.

See all Europrix nominees
mü-project
Robovox

Operaatio Hurrikaani
Operaatio Hurrikaani (In English)

MindTrek
Tampere Art Factory (TAF)

Riikka Hiekkaniemi studies Media Production, Kaisa Hakala has completed interaction design studies at TAMK School of Art and Media. Both work with the Operaatio Hurrikaani, Riikka is assistant producer and Kaisa web-designer at YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company.

Professor Freiburghaus

Doctor Markus Freiburghaus from Olten, Switzerland, gave lectures in management at Tamk. When visiting the School of art and media, Cai Melakoski presented him with the brand new interactive dvd made by the students. Professor Freiburghaus also showed interest in computing classes and Proakatemia

Academic Network Conference in Graz

The Academic Network of the European Academy of Digital Media (EADiM) had the annual conference in Graz, Austria, end of last week. This year the conference was titled "Design, Develop, Deliver - Multimedia and e-content trends".

The sessions covered actual topics like

• Smart Interfaces – intuitive use of augmented and mixed realities
• Mega trends in e-content – what do they mean for education?
• Learning and Teaching Methods – innovations that raise the learning curve
• Students and Social Networks
• Teaching Interactive Story Authoring

I made a presentation about Demola, the New innovation environment in ICT and Media education in Tampere. It was good to see many of the partners of TAMK School of Art and Media again, also making new friends. All participants of the conference were welcomed to attend our International Week and Tampere Art Factory in May.

The Conference was arranged at FH Joanneum, which also is a TAMK partner university. On day 3 the conference joined an parallel event, the EUROPRIX Multimedia Festival. You will find a story about that soon in this blog.

EADiM Academic Network
EUROPRIX

Demola
Tampere Art Factory

Photo: Advent was celebrated in snowy Graz on Saturday. Trams were free of charge, and people enjoyed the Christmas Market in the old town. The picture was taken from the Needle of Kunsthaus Graz, venue of the EUROPRIX Multimedia Festival