Kari is an Education Outreach Expert of the EUIPO Observatory. He leads the Intellectual Property in Education project and Network, which promotes creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship and responsible digital engagement among young Europeans. He has over 30 years of work experience in teaching and management of international and multicultural schools in Finland, Luxembourg and Belgium.
In his free time, he has led the Finnish FaktabaariEDU (NGO) project, and he has e.g. edited the Digital Information Literacy Guide as part of EDMO Nordis project. The guide was published in October 2022.
Kari has participated in the development of series of documents dealing with Media and Information Literacy in the past year. He was a member of the DG EAC expert group on Tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training, which published their Final Report and Guidelines for teachers in October 2022. The Guidelines have been also translated into Maltese language. He has also collaborated with Joint Research Centre in developing new competences for DigComp 2.2.
He was invited to participate in the project initiated and coordinated by Stanford University. The report “Science Education in an Era of Misinformation” was published in April 2022.
Finnish Faktabaari had an interesting collaboration with Maltese Ministry of Education and European Schoolnet in 2021-2022. As an outcome, the European Schoolnet published in April 2022 the Facts4All-MOOC- schools tackling disinformation. In April 2023 Kari was invited to hold a seminar “Promoting digital literacy and & creativity in the classroom” in the premises of Malta Union of Teachers.
Recent articles / interviews / workshops
Center for an informed public, University of Washington (9-10.6.2023), Teaching for Resilience: FinnishED Workshop
Slate Future Tense (June 2023): How to Turn Kindergartners Into Fact-Checkers – Finland’s digital literacy education is an outlier. Does it have to be?
Issues in Science and Technology magazine (May 2023), University of Arizona: In Finland, We Make Each Schoolchild a Scientist Teaching research skills and encouraging inquiry from the earliest ages can build social resilience to misleading information
Times of Malta, Evarist Bartolo (12.5.2023), Dismantling the fortresses Students need to develop their critical thinking to be able to filter the content they find on social media
