Yesterday and the day before, we enjoyed the Digital Theology in the Global South symposium and hackathon (https://ftlab.utu.fi/node/151).  

Thirty people from four continents were exploring the arising horizons of the encounter of interactive technology and faith expressed as theology in the context of the Global South, in particular Africa, the emerging epicenter of Christianity.

Among several highlights that you can read later in the coming proceedings, Solomon, in his presentation Smart Technologies in Digital Theology in the Global South, brought up the idea of flipped sermon that he later generalized into flipped church.

Flipped church comes from the concept of flipped classroom where the roles teachers and learners and processes of teaching and learning are transformed to their opposites.

Earlier, the teacher prepared the lessons, delivered them at the lesson or lecture, to be later studied by the students at home.

Flipping the scenario will have learners to get familiar with the material before meeting with teachers and peer students. In the flipped classroom, at what earlier was called a lesson, the prepared students will challenge the teacher to answer questions, lead the conversation and scaffold the joint venture for shared understanding. Afterwards, hopefully both learners and teachers will be inspired to synthesize what they learned together, for novel insights and ideas.

A flipped sermon translates to a process where the congregation will explore the readings of the next Sunday beforehand, individually or together making use of all available, occasionally seemingly irrelevant information, and thus preparing themselves for a novel experience of co-sermon.

Another presenter, Walter, in his talk Digital Theology and the expression, elaboration and communication of faith, exemplified a flipped sermon with a cartoon where the Pope (apparently Francis!) was sitting in the first row, alone, listening to a sermon given by a highly diverse group of people from around the world.

But Solomon continued. He called us to ponder the idea of flipped church. And imagine how smart technologies would facilitate it.

Flipping is a highly Christian concept. Christianity means rethinking, swapping, exchanging. Getting rid of the old, the sin that binds us, and continue our walks liberated. That is also the idea of learning.

Martin Luther used the term sweet exchange: a human gives their sins to Christ, Christ justifies them by his righteousness. Jesus beatitudes in his (co-?)sermon on the mount (Mt. 5) expresses similar exchanges, transformations, swaps.

A flipped church concretized. Leaders starting to serve, the first becoming the last, the clean the dirty. Children showing the example. Blind seeing, the captured released.

Technology, when designed for, with and at the church, should always serve flipping. This is what I heard also our Namibian participants, like Isak and Dan, sketching: flipped church, with apps made in Namibia.

Thanks all participants, and the organizers Ant and Anna, for starting a flipped journey for digital theology in the Global South, and beyond.

Recently at our ftlab.utu.fi, we launched what we call a Dream Team.

The Dream Team is a group of undergraduate students that – in a self-organizing, student-led way – will carry out projects and initiatives and missions and free explorations that take them closer to their own dreams.

And maybe not only come closer to something that they are not yet aware of.

More than that: they are co-struggling to grasp what they want of their lives and future. Within all anguish and anxiety that they are going through, in these troubling and confusing times when even the present seems to be hiding itself, making us lose ourselves.

This week they started to work on designing a game, intended mostly at primary school kids, to learn mathematics in context.

As you can imagine, the Dream Team can make use of the very inspiring and enjoyable weather of Namibia.

Three of them – Kondja, Lannie and Romario – started ideating in the outdoor (but of course!) pool at my home and the next day – yes, two of them stayed overnight at my home – they continued by a whiteboard next to the pool.

Better conditions than in California?

But even so, after a few hours the two looked really sad.

“What’s the problem? You look unhappy?”

“No, not at all, we are just thinking.”

But should you look unhappy when you are thinking? I was wondering.

And it turned out that they really were, seriously, thinking.

But not of – happily – designing the game for younger students to learn maths, but of – sorrowingly – their own struggling in Pre Calculus, as the name of the course of their test last week reads.

By me intervening in their student-led leadership – which I am trying to avoid – they decided to devise a plan for their own mathematical survival at the cost of helping others by the future game.

Sometimes one needs to be selfish to be able to be unselfish later.

I also needed to refresh my own calculus after, yes, decades!

But that also offered me a bridge to the brains of my young Namibian friends.

Next day my dear colleague Laszlo continued with them for another three hours, practicing maths by hands-on exercises.

But also conversing what really is important in maths: comprehending it, applying it, bringing it into one’s own life.

Converting maths from an oppressor, alien, master or enemy towards a companion, friend, partner.

Because a former boss and master should be tamed rather enslaved.

Making a dream come true always calls for a fight for freedom. Freedom and liberty are spaces one has to have for true creativity and expression.

Namibian people have successfully fought for their political freedom. Role models are there.

But all of us have many other freedom fights to do.

One is the fight for digital freedom, another for a freedom in mathematics.

Because if one does not understand mathematics but needs it anyway for realizing their dreams, one either needs to give up the dreams or will end up in the slavery of incomprehension.

A freedom fight requires further companions and allies. I was but a modest troop for a few hours, Laszlo volunteered a longer time.

And now were are talking of setting up a co-mathematizing team as an online community to fight for maths freedom together. Anyone reading these lines and getting interested?

Somehow I feel that the Dream Team is joining the walks that many other (sic!) mathematicians wandered before them.

Like the Spaniard Miguel de Guzmán who wrote his Aventuras Matemáticas – wasn’t it when he was at hospital? – to heal the fear of mathematics.

Or the originally Dutch but later Mozambican (isn’t it fair to say this?) Paulus Gerdes who got inspired, while teaching the Frelimo freedom fighters in Tanzania, by the number systems and mathematical patterns in African languages and cultures for his later studies and books on Ethnomathematics.

Even when Mathematics strives to be universal and free from any particular cultural context or folklore – and in that way struggles its independence from any given setting – its applications are explored and enjoyed in real-life settings.

And the understanding and creation of Mathematics always takes place in the confusion, conditions and chaos that surrounds mathematicians.

The Dream Team is participating the universal struggle for freedom. And that fight requires blood, sweat and tears.

But the role models show that the struggle pays off.

To my daughter Laura on your birthday today

This is the jacaranda season in Namibia.

Trees blossoming in purple all around in Windhoek celebrate the turn of the short Namibian spring into the full summer and all the glory of its first days.

A week ago I was driving with Liesa, my domestic worker, and Anna, my PhD student, to a mall a few miles away.

On the fifteen minutes’ drive, I could not but mention jacaranda quite a few times, in infatuation.

• What are you talking about, asked Anna.

And it turned out that during her many years of studying and working in Windhoek she had never paid attention to, or even seen or observed, a jacaranda.

I got curious.             

And yes: most local people I talked to had never seen the purple miracle of Windhoek.

My colleague Prof Meurig has been working almost his lifetime with what he calls Empirical Modelling.

The idea is that you start learning from observations that he calls observables (but, again, what makes a thing observable). Little by little, when you get familiar with the observables, you start to see how they are dependent on each other: their ecosystem.

Empirical Modelling is based on a viewpoint very complementary to the deductive model of starting learning from theories (‘theory’ comes a Greek verb for seeing, btw – but how many of us can see by theories).

Meurig and his group, including my colleague Nick now busy leading a development project for remote presence, have invented a whole platform for Empirical Modelling for facilitating the process of explorative learning.

So what I learned from my dear Namibian friends who now saw the purple jacaranda (and more and more of them, day by day) the first time in their lives: they had travelled their life along a fast track, following the advice, guidelines and directions that someone else gave to them. They had followed a curriculum, a racecourse of life.

When I got out of high school, I got many gifts. But the only one I recall was a book of poems that included one:

”Kuljit elämän pitkin nopeaa ohitustietä,/ ja niin jäi elämä löytämättä.”

“You traversed your life by a fast bypass,/ and so the life remained hidden.”

In fact, jacarandas are not native to Namibia but newcomers or immigrants from Latin American and the Caribbean.

That might another reason that they blossom unobserved. As so many human immigrants around the world.

In her short story “Invisible Child”, Tove Jansson, as I recall, needed to regain her voice to be heard and observed.

But for someone or something to be heard or seen or tasted or touched or scented, their observers need to open their senses as well. Become curious, aware of the richness and diversity and surprises of the surroundings that have this far remained unknown to them.

We need a trusted outsider to help us in becoming more sensitive.

Many years back I got a card from my uncle who was visiting Paris.

Find colours, Erkki!

Thanks Laura for opening a horizon of rainbows in my life, ever since your birth on a glorious Finnish autumn day!

I guess Supreeta, the wife of my dear friend Kavi, would join in my congratulations to you, by her poem Jacaranda:

Jacaranda

On a dull Monday morn

As I stare vacantly forlorn

A sight shocks me out of stupor

The Jacaranda blooming in splendor…

Tresses of vibrant purple

Forming a magnificent spectacle

Ever so gently swaying

Celebrating life, mocking

The scene subtle yet so sharp

Whirls me into a time warp..

Long lost memories cascade

In kaleidoscopic palisade..

The warmth laden spring air

Of languorous days without care

Times filled with zest and hope

When the spirit could bounce and cope

Reminisces cloaked in hues of green

Of new born foliage sparkling clean

A meadow dotted with the magenta head

Of a mimosa sprig sprung from the dead

Of Gulmohurs flaunting their blazing red

With carpets beneath waiting to be tread

Soporific summer afternoons

Enchanting dreams under silvery moons

Flying kites, scraped knees

Fleeing from angry bees

The first delicious rainy spell

Grandma’s wafers’ heavenly smell

Of monsoon ponds with croaking frogs

And balancing on slimy logs

Over streams gushing

And brooks rushing

Jacaranda!—fill me with passion and desire

Oh Jacaranda!- keep me alive forever!

– Supreeta Arya (2011)

I visited with my PhD student Anna and her student Maggie the Integrate Sensory Centre in Windhoek.

Maggie, with two of her peers, will do a design project at the school that Carmen the principal with her whole loving learning community of learners and their teachers and other staff had opened to us.

It will be an open assignment in co-design: the three university students will work at the school with learners to come up with digital solutions – or one – that would help them to express themselves and their talents, learn and communicate.

It was the first time ever that Maggie or Anna visited what usually is called a school for special needs education.

Maggie told that she was expecting something that could be a regular- (“regular minus”) school; something that would resemble a school for regular education but lack in some of the resources, furniture, equipment, and so on.

So the surprise was huge for all of us when we came into a most modern learning milieu that lets everyone to be themselves, learn from their own starting (or why not staring) points, express themselves, explore by their own interests.

I got even a personal treat.

Giovanni, a young gentleman with autism, was generous enough to hug me at the very outset, and decided to stay in my lap throughout the two hours that we spent at the school.

When he thought that I was ready to communicate with him, he moved my fingers to touch the dinosaurs that he was playing with.

He is nonverbal, but who cares – he does.

So why on earth do we talk about special needs education when the whole idea of learning is about respecting the diversity – a small theologian in me would say “diversity of creation” – and finding the ways that everyone can express their own and unique talents?

Needs are excuses for us to fix the holes that we see in others; strengths are what we can invite others to complement us with.

So what about Special strengths education? Where a tailor-made, co-designed technology facilitates its individual user to grow and bring to others where they excel and be at their best.

For me, Giovanni’s unique strength is that of welcoming and including me in his sphere.

His open heart made me feel that I belong here in this city and country and continent – an expression of Ubuntu beyond any of its theorization.  

I am sure that the students will find a way—with Giovanni and his peers—by which technology extends their users’ personalities and special abilities, and releases them of any barriers whatsoever that might prevent them from being their true selves.  

The solutions that we are exploring with the school can be known as open arms technology, loving technology, or cozy technology.

A bit like a red wall in the kitchen of our Finnish home that my other PhD student Hesam—an industrial designer—interprets as welcoming him to our home in Finland.

The times and days are fortunately gone in which deaf people needed to simulate a language spoken and heard by the mainstream.

I am writing this on the day that marks the 21^st anniversary of my own PhD defense at University of Helsinki.

I am always thankful for the encouragement that I received—during the seven years’ walk to my academic freedom—from my co-supervisor, professor Jorma who turned his own personal struggles into openness and patience that he needed to lead my first steps of the academic life that has now taken me to Namibia.

But today also marks the day of funeral of my old friend Esko who likened my work as a professor to that of a conductor of a symphony where everyone plays with their own instrument.

A hundred years back in the European continent—during the peak years of colonization—a movement called Bauhaus started to influence the ways that a design process would lead to industrial products that serve their everyday functions in a natural way.

In the middle of the global pandemic, European voices expressed by her leaders call for a new Bauhaus movement.

While waiting for that, we are starting another at the Integrate school in Windhoek.

celebrated the Mother of Tanaka Makuvaza, the student that received his award for being the best fourth year student at the UNAM Faculty of Science this year.

She had joined her son onto the podium. Tanaka was there to get his trophy from the dean of the faculty. There they were, congratulated and photographed. And when leaving back for their seats, the Mother acclaimed what I want to repeat and what each and everyone in the Gym Hall could hear:

-He is my son!

These four words captured the lifelong love, belongingness and shared road of the two. The pride. The goals, determination, and finally the achievement that the trophy stood for. The four words were a symbol for all that a mother can experience in and by her son. Simple words, content beyond expression.

I had been invited to the annual event by my colleague, Dr Kauna Mufeti, the associate dean of the Faculty and the head of the School of Computing. The formal program consisted of speeches and music. The best students of each module, of each subject, and finally of the whole faculty were recognised.

What really impressed me most was the excitement, encouragement, and mutual care of the students and their loved ones.

One student, of Statistics, could not help but run to her Mother right from the podium. Another one, a young biologist, got hugs from his girlfriend (well, I suppose so), and the girlfriend got his medal as an exchange. A student from Mathematics – well, you know, mathematicians are usually a bit reserved in showing their emotions – received an award in all the categories, and with each one, the smile of his Mother got wider and wider. Yet another student, from Physics, burst into tears, only to be consoled by her head of the department who gave her award.

That Physics professor also told the audience how all achievement starts from the love for science. In some way, the students’ love, for science but also for the extended learning community, concretised in the event.

Last Saturday at my home, I had an honour to host – if not more than for a cup of tea – the mayor of Oniipa, a town in the North of the country that he told was established by Finnish missionaries.

The Mayor, Mr. Kambonde, came with a team of three people from Aalto and LUT universities. Together, all of the four are working on a project that aims at ensuring reliable electricity and internet connections to the rural areas around Oniipa.

It is strange to realize how people that you had never seen before feel instantly friends that you have always known. Maybe it is the curiosity raised by a new situation that makes you ask questions whose answers get you connected.

But then there is another layer. As a teacher of IT, you wish to make a difference to people’s life, whether by invention or innovation. Then you need to dig deeper.

On Saturday I learned from the Mayor that Namibia has 51 kings who are in charge of questions requiring traditional authority, like land ownership. And land ownership is a question that allows for or resists novel practices or technologies that we tend to call innovations.

In fact, land belongs to the king, as I understood. But only at a deeper level. The first 30 cms from the surface belong to the farmer, house owner or the one that has bought that surface level of soil.

So if the king wants to take over your land, you can still get the surface soil and take that with you to your next place.

The king has power, by tradition. Even the president of the country, when meeting with his or her king, need to kneel in front of him (I think him, but I did not ask).

All the 51 kings belong–that is what I learned from the Mayor, a family of whom is in charge of ordaining the next king–to the universal community of royal families that got their power from God. “Jesus is the King of kings,” told the Mayor.

When we design technologies that would make a difference, we cannot operate only on the surface level of 30 cms, but have to integrate our activities also with the deeper level of the complex fabrics of the Namibian, and for that matter global, society.

In some way, last Saturday, we managed to hit also some centimetres below the 30 first ones.

Yesterday I attended an event organised by the Satakunta University of Applied Sciences (SAMK), at the modern conference facilities of the Namibia University of Science and Technology, SAMK’s partner in Namibia for years.

SAMK, together with partners from around the Baltic, had received a significant EU funding for opening business ties between Southern Africa and Central Baltic. The project took tens of entrepreneurs and business people from the North to Namibia, and over the next few days, to South Africa’s and Zambia’s equally interesting, growing markets.

I paid a particular attention to the possibilities that Latvian and Estonian companies saw in Southern Africa, in the areas ranging from security to human resources management (including recruiting engineers from Africa to Germany) to alternative energy solutions, and much beyond. Mostly, they were looking for representatives that would sell their products and services to end customers. And end customers there are in Africa – hundred times more than in Finland or other small countries around the Baltic Sea.

Business is Africa is international. One of the entrepreneurs in the Baltic countries was originally from Belarus, but was now based in Silicon Valley from where she had come to promote her products in Namibia. International encounters allow for cross-design, or X-design, where products and services grow in inventiveness and quality when they need to learn from diverse users’ demands. I guess also many Africans are interested in the dynamic atmosphere that has changed countries like Estonia in just about the past 20 years.

The Ambassador of Namibia in Helsinki, H.E Mr. Bonny Haufiku, opened the event. He marketed his country as a safe and organised environment for businesses. That’s one point of view. For us Finns, Namibia is also a country where businesses and universities – both African and Finnish ones – get inspired to co-create solutions unheard of before, as we discussed later in the evening with the Rector of SAMK, Dr. Jari Multisilta, my friend since the times that I had just left FELM, back for further studies at university.

Today I had three visitors at my home. I find it very inspirational to have discussions by the terrace (the pool is not very far away). The longest one – almost four hours – was with Margaret Angula, from UNAM. She works in Geography and Urban/Rural Sociology and studies for a PhD at University of Cape Town.

Margaret had had earlier today a Skype call with my team at Turku. Together, we are exploring how smart phones could help even illiterate subsistence farmers to cope with the changing climate. In my own team, we have worked on the topic for quite some years, with farmers in Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania, trying to co-design an app that the farmers really would like to use and see the benefit from. So that the co-design process would not just result in a few scholarly papers and PhDs.

While Margaret agreed that co-designing the app within a real setting, a farmers’ community (which are getting older because the youth are moving to cities, as from European rural areas), would be essential, she also emphasised that the bottom-up approach should be complemented, in parallel, with a top-down exercise, with MPs.

Margaret’s point was that the app(s) should promote awareness. Awareness of the changing climate and what everyone can do for fighting it. And then was the time for my lesson.

Margaret said that there should be only one app, to be used by illiterate farmers and highly educated MPs alike.

So no adaptation according to the users? No profiling? No smart user interface?

No. Because the one app should help the MPs see the realities that people at the grassroots are struggling with, when they see their farmland dying, their cattle taken to butcheries at low prices, because of no water.

The one app that might need to be cross-designed by teams of people from different backgrounds so that they could see the common, shared challenge. Becoming aware, together.

Margaret told about divisions in Namibia. In some way, besides a very concrete boundary, a symbol of divisions is the Red Line (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Namibia)). It is a border, within the country, that divides the land into that of subsistence farming for local markets, and that of commercial farming for approved exports.

Although there are reasons for the Red Line, as explicated in its other name of veterinary cordon fence, the line separates not only cows or sheep from their peers on the other side. Take for example the observations on drought. South of the Line, we have scientists with our explanations. North of the Line, people explain the phenomenon by the sin that caused God’s punishment.

Margaret told me that she contextualises the Southern science to her relatives in the North: yes, God asked people to protect the land, which apparently did not happen; a cross of scientific and faith-oriented explanation. And what happened: her relatives said that people in even further North should repent and start protecting the land. No more inevitable fate. In a way, her relatives turned into global activists.

Yes, we need a one app for all, instead of adapted solutions for people in different sides of all red and other lines.

And I cannot publish this entry without telling about her soon 99 years old Grandmother (based on Margaret’s stories, she might a climate activist as well – but I did not ask). She hates technology. She calls a smart phone a gossiper because within a few seconds all her stories are shared and modified by people hundreds of miles away.

Her way to refer to fake news and disinformation, at the other side of the Red Line.

Yes, we need one app.

PS. Today I saw, at my yard, one of these animals that even the owner of my house did not remember the name of. One of the things that she did remember, though, was that the animal might carry rabies. Earlier I have been afraid of dogs, but maybe there are aliens more frightening than canines.

opened the pastor the 9am worship service at the Inner City Lutheran Church where I went with my colleague Marko.

A beautiful day. For a Finn that escapes to Africa (not only, though) for the sunshine, the day reminded of one of those grey autumn days that make you feel wet even inside. Rain, rain, rain.

A beautiful day, indeed. I heard that Namibia has been suffering from one of its worst draughts for decades. And we are supposed to be going towards the end of the rainy season. In the agricultural north of the country, the situation seems to be even worse. So, the day – as well as the whole weekend – with the continuous rain has been beautiful, indeed.

The etymonline.com tells that the word beauty comes from “state of being pleasing to the senses”, a very physical connotation. Beautiful drops that please us with all our senses. Rain, rain, rain!

The Psalm, No. 84, that we heard at the service, could not have been more timely for the day. Listen to the verse 6:

“As they pass through the dry valley of Baca, it becomes a place of springs; the autumn rain fills it with pools.” (Good News Translation)

Also the congregation was beautiful. You could see all around yourself the church filled with images of God, people from all ages, men and women, created as imago Dei. All newcomers, all those who had had a birthday, anniversary of baptism, confirmation, or wedding, who had been promoted during the past week, were greeted by the full congregation. Choirs, solo singers, a celebration of being alive together; dignity of human existence.

What could be, indeed, a more beautiful day to start a new week in Namibia?

PS. This is also my Mum’s name day that she has celebrated at her home apartment in Iso-Heikki, an elderly people’s service home in Turku. So in Finnish: “Iloista nimipäivää, äiti!”

I had to come all the way to Namibia to attend my first seminar on Women in Computing. I was invited to the event by my dear colleague Prof Heike Winschiers-Theophilus that I met just yesterday in her office at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Computing and Informatics.

Heike is one of the leading scholars in the demanding and highly inter-disciplinary area of co-design. She has initiated and is involved in exciting research projects on how to integrate heritage and indigenous wisdom with the opportunities opened by existing and tomorrow’s technology, for example with the San youth. This is close to my interest in engaging with people on the ground, in their everyday, real life. A universal theme that is equally important for people in the Global South and North.

But women. I grew up in the 60s in a home that was almost gender neutral, in terms of how to divide the everyday responsibilities and household. As always is the case, children either follow what they learn at home or do exactly opposite, and I am afraid that I did the latter. Listening to the panel, I figured out that I had lived with my wife and children in the way similar to that of some Namibian husbands that the panelists were referring to.

However, the main theme of the seminar was about how to get rid of all the diverse barriers or glass ceilings that prevents one from reaching their goal or living up to their talent. At the time of emerging conflicts, worldwide, we need to make use of all the human potential that we have; the academia as well as the rest of the society have to act as channels for releasing the dormant power, whether indigenous or learned.

It was actually one of my former Namibian students, MSc (University of Joensuu, Finland) Helena Nahum, that asked the panelists how to ensure that the countless inventive student projects would not get lost after the students get the marks of them and finish the course.

I left the inspiring seminar by wondering how we could shape our software engineering curriculum towards one that integrates the students’ potential and elaborates it towards concrete outcomes that make our world better. Otherwise, the learning community will stay comfortably under another glass ceiling, or for that matter, within a glass box.

Maybe a topic for Helena’s further research?