Happy Lunar New Year

The lunar new year is the most important holiday in Chinese calender. This celebration is shared among many nations in Asia, such as Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Taiwanese etc.



Not only in Asian cities, but also in many cities around the globe, the Chinese community with the local government arrange a local celebration of the holiday.

Yesterday, we had a quite big Chinese new year event in Lasipalatsi, Helsinki. There were many stalls and attractions related to Chinese culture. The event was not only attracted to Chinese community, but also to Helsinki community in general. It was so crowded that you would not miss the atmosphere of a Chinese market in Asia.

We saw a lot of interesting performances, such as dragon and lion dances. Everyone was so enthusiastic to watch and document the cultural performances. They tried hard to catch the best moments with their digital cameras and videos. Some people may forget to bring their cameras or videos, so they took their camera phones from their pockets and tried to take as much as pictures and videos from that event. What a jungle of devices above your heads.

Camera phones may not give the most satisfactory image or video results, but the devices help people to catch interesting moments that may happen unexpectedly in their daily life. It is more often that people forget their digital camera or video than their mobile phone.

Intercultural aspects in ICT

This year, ITK conference 2006 has its first English program. There were not many English presentations in the conference, however, as a foreigner who are not yet speaking Finnish, it is a good opportunity for me to understand what is going on in the field of educational ICT in Finland.

One interesting presentation was given by Byoma Tamrakar entitled “Guidelines for Intercultural Competence”. She discussed about some aspects of intercultural competence. Intercultural competence enables someone to act effectively and appropriately in cultural, ethnic, race, gender and age diversities. One of important aspects of intercultural competence is ability to understand the context. This requires sufficient knowledge and suitable motivation. She gave several interesting examples about cultural competencies, for example differences how Finnish or European people and Asian people remind their colleagues when they make a mistake.

When reflecting to my own research, intercultural aspects should not be neglected when developing any ICT applications and services, particularly if the applications and services will be deployed a multicultural environment.