Kirsti Ala-Mutka

Kirsti Ala-Mutka is a research fellow at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), a European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) based in Seville, Spain. She holds a doctoral degree in Information Technology, specialising in ICT-supported computer science education and educational assessment. She has developed and published results of learning applications, educational assessment tools and teaching collaboration with open educational resources in various journals and conferences. At the IPTS, she is working on topics relating to the potential of ICT-enabled learning for lifelong learning in the European Information Society. Her projects have included research on the challenges and opportunities of ICT-enabled learning for ageing societies, developing a vision for future ICT enabled lifelong learning and exploring the socio-economic impact of collaborative content approaches with social computing. Her current main projects include 1) a project studying the development and state of e-learning in the recently joined EU member states 2) a project studying the opportunities and challenges of the new learning communities (often emerging with social computing applications) in developing creativity, innovation and lifelong learning in Europe.