On April 11 & 12 Webmaker and Open Badges had teachers cutting, gluing, and sharing at the first annual Oppi Festival in Helsinki, Finland. Since “oppi” means “learning” in Finnish, this was the perfect place to have exciting conversations about celebrating learning; we challenged participants who came to our Mozilla Space to share what “open learning” means to them.

Over two days, we held 2 discussion sessions and 4 hands-on workshops about everything from Mozilla’s mission to web literacy’s learning pathways and the new Badge Kit (still in private beta). When we first arrived, we were excited at the prospect of building teaching kits and sharing them with the Webmaker community. In reality, we were a bit too ambitious; the 50-minute sessions didn’t allow for thorough introductions to Thimble and designing teaching kits. Even so, we had rewarding conversations about the intersection of privacy and collaboration, and spoke with young people about how to best surface these ideas in the classroom. And by preparing an etherpad of links used throughout the unconference, everyone had access to all the resources as we went along; hopefully they’ll continue to use them beyond the Festival.
With exhibitors like Rovio’s Angry Birds Playground, speakers like Dr. Sugata Mitra of “Hole in the Wall” fame , and performances by talented artists like Finland’s deaf rapper Signmark, it’s no wonder the 1300 participants were buzzing with conversation and ideas as they came coming through the Oppi doors. We look forward to hearing from the organizers of the Oppi Festival during this week’s Teach the Web call on Thursday.
More photos from the Oppi Festival here.