Koli Calling: from the ten past years to the future: a developing country's perspective

• Authors: Erkki Sutinen
• Venue: Proceedings of the 10th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research
• Year: 2010

Koli Calling was set up to shake Computer Science (CS) education, in Finland, and beyond. Around year 2000, CS seemed to have lost its original spirit of a fascinating discipline that attracted young people in masses to explore a new terrain. With very few students opting for CS as career, reshaping education was essential and Koli Calling was a call for action for all concerned. From its early beginning, Koli Calling was a grass roots level academic movement, not depending on any of the global CS societies, like ACM. The idea of keeping the movement unorganized and uncontrolled was to support an organic maturing process of the conference. During the years, the participants very actively contributed to issues like different categories of the papers and presentations, securing the diversity of the program. Today, a decade after we started this journey, though Koli Calling is an international event, very few papers have addressed challenges of Computing Education (CE) in the context of developing countries (DCs). Despite the expansion of CS and CE in DCs, graduates have had significant difficulties in getting employed at the job markets and the much sought after socio-economic impacts of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are not commonly visible. STIFIMO is a determined attempt to facilitate and encourage grass roots level initiatives for improving living conditions by academic research in the areas of science and technology. STIFIMO is a five-year program to stimulate science, technology and innovation as Finnish-Mozambican collaboration in 2010--14. The Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs funds STIFIMO by 22 million euro. The aim is to enhance the expertise and interest in engaging methods, such as participatory design, which can turn rural and urban potential into realities in the Mozambican setting. This requires brave openings from the Mozambican ICT education community, and calls for international and interdisciplinary collaboration. Maybe, then, in ten years from now, the long expected renaissance of CE has made its roots in the soil of Mozambique?