I’ve been one of the people hosting 9 Tanzanian guests from the University of Dar es Salaam and Butimba Teachers’ College in Mwanza. The goal of the program that we have been discussing is to improve the accessibility to high quality education in Tanzania through e-Learning programs. Read more about it in it’s Ning site.

During this past week in Tampere we have visited many interesting places, from meeting the City officials of Tampere to Tampere University of Technology and ProAcademy. Here’s a few words about some of these places we visited this week:

ProAcademy (www.proakatemia.fi/en)

ProAcademy is a special unit in entrepreneurship at TAMK University of Applied Sciences in Tampere, Finland. ProAcademy students begin their BBA studies by starting their own cooperative company. Learning is based on learning-by-doing, reading books, and sharing and generating knowledge with the team.

Thanks to one of the coaches, Jukka Siltanen, for showing us around and giving us a nice speech about ProAcademy’s methods.

Demola (www.demola.fi)

Demola is

• an open innovation environment for the creators of the next generation of digital services, products, and social practices
• an opportunity for students to contribute real-life innovations with end-users and globally connected organizations
• an opportunity for organizations to run agile development projects in exploring novel technology enabled products and services.

Thanks to Mr Ville Kairamo for presenting us Demola projects.

Mediamaisteri (www.mediamaisteri.com – in Finnish)

A company providing e-Learning services and open source solutions. Our host was the company CEO and one of the founders of COSS (Centre for Open Source Software) Timo Väliharju.

Thank you for the presentation and, among other things, for an interesting discussion including what kinds of social media services to use [open source or closed systems] and why. These were many interesting things and points of view that I have to cover here some more later on.

It seems that the guests have really enjoyed their stay in Finland; almost everyone of them experienced snow for the first time and visits to companies and to other places mentioned before have clearly opened up discussion.

Hopefully something really fruitful comes out of this all, and the visit and goals that have been set now make a difference in the future. I really believe that both the Tanzanians and the people who are collaborating here in Finland have learned much from this already, and we’re just starting up.