FLOSSE Posse

Hans Poldoja have initiated really interesting and important project, called EduFeedr. Hans aim is to solve the problems of using standard RSS readers in Open Education, more precisely in open online courses. He’s problem statement is:

Standard RSS readers lack the features for following and supporting learning activities which cross the borders of different Web 2.0 applications.

I have been “teaching”/ “mentoring” / “coordinating” (also with Hans) several open online courses. The idea of an open online course is to provide online learning experiences to anyone interested in to join the course. In open courses people often use pretty standard Web 2.0 tools (wikis, blogs, micro-blogging) to “deliver” content, to present reflections on the content (e.g. learning diaries), to share their learning exercises and to discuss about the course related issues.

If the group of participants is more than 20 it easily becomes very difficult for the participants to follow the process.

Can we help that with a better tool? I think we can. Please have a look of Hans presentation “Current state of EduFeedr project” on Slideshare. If you like it, please contact Hans and contribute. EduFeedr is (will be, when ready) Open Source.

I assume everybody have already read about the Apple’s iPad launch. What kind of devices it is, to be used in schools?

I have been Mac user for more than 15 years. I am not a “fan” but very satisfied customer – even relatively big customer. I do not like the close ecosystem approach of the Apple, but highly appreciate their design thinking behind the products.

In the demo yesterday Steve Job explained that iPad tablet should do a better job than a smart phone or laptop computer in some specific areas. This is definitely a right way to design a product like this: to think some important things and make a product that is really good at doing them. This sounds simple.

Job’s list of important things in which iPad is really good at was:

• web browsing,
• email,
• photos,
• watching video,
• listening to music,
• playing games and
• reading ebooks.

Now we may ask: what students need from their ICT device at school?

In 90% of cases this is it: web browsing with the ability to submit things online (including longer texts, such as blog posts), email, photos, watching videos, listening audio, playing games and reading books. In addition to this, students need a simple real-time communication channel with their peers, teachers and parents: a chat or phone. I assume, in the iPad there soon will be an application for audio/video call with add-on video camera. This is definitely something needed. On the other hand, I think students will anyway have their mobile phones, too for chating and calling.

I see in the iPad some similarities to the “ultimate network connectivity school device” I wrote about some time ago: a touch screen and “limited features”. That’s what we need in schools – well designed, simple and elegant tools that are non-distractive.

Why the simplicity is so important in school? Learning is a cognitive process. All extra cognitive load put on the use of tools is out from the learning. The technology used should never take the main role from the actual learning situation.

In a way this is the case with all human activity. That is also why Apple have took over smart phone market and have made internet mobile.

Often Apple is considered to be a “high-end” technology, but actually their competence is in their ability to design for the “masses”, the people. This is why they should have at least 50% of the school ICT-device market (actually I think this is already the case in some parts of the world, like in UK).

Some one just sent me a link to another example of simplicity and respect of human cognition. Do not make me think – I just want to “consume” my magazine!

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

The Wikimedia Foundation just announced successful fundraiser. In two months over 230 000 people donated money for the Foundation, resulting $US 8 million. This is a great result. With a simple math, the average giving was something like 30-40 dollars.

I find it amazing, that almost a quarter million people are committed to the mission of the Foundation, in a level that they were willing to give money for it. Interesting thing with the Foundation is also that there isn’t memberships, like in most NGOs, but an annual fundraiser. Because of this the Foundation has to deserve its existence every year in the eyes of the public.

This puts a lot of pressure on everyone working with the Foundation: from the paid staff to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers (I am a volunteer). We should all be aware about our mission and to think hard how we can achieve it.

“The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.” (Mission statement from the Wikimedia Foundation)

For me the key words in the mission are “empower and engage people”, “around the world”, “educational content”, “globally”, “multilingual”, “free of charge” and “in perpetuity”. Huh!

The people involved in the Wikimedia movement must be self-critical. The fact that Wikipedia is today relatively good source of education content in 20 European languages, Japanese, Chinese and Korean does not mean that it would be already “around the world” or “global” (if you want to know more about the Wikimedia’s global reach you may check the statistics yourself from the brilliant stat.wikimedia.org –site at: http://stats.wikimedia.org).

It is reasonable to say that we are not even close to achieve the mission. The mater is, however, well recognized by the Foundation and actually it is right now developing a five-year (2010-2015) strategic plan for the Wikimedia movement. You may participate to the process in here: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/

I think that the Wikimedia movement, and the Foundation supporting it, should aim to have exponential growth. Only with a strong growth it may reach its mission: be truly global movement.

Why Wikimedia then should be a global movement?

I think that the world greatest challenges of the next hundred years — from poverty to climate change and humanitarian disasters — can be solved only with education. We know that the current educational system(s), the formal school education, is not the solution. It simply do not scale. In a global scale, systems based on schools will not produce “educated people”. We need systems that are better in scaling.

Is Wikimedia able to scale? I think it holds the potential to scale.

Still, it would mean that next coming years the number of people donating for the Foundation, should be in millions and the Governments’ should include Wikimedia in their multilateral development cooperation “payroll”. I think it would payoff.

In the Wikimania 2009 Erik Möller, the Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, gave a talk promoting the objective “to make Wikimedia a 300 Million People Movement By 2020“. In the presentation there are many great and practical ideas for scaling. Check out the great presentation (video) and the slides.

Holy Trinity of New Media (modification of Negroponte 1995)

The roots of the concept “new media” can be located to the late 1980’s and early 1990’s emergence of digital and computerized media products, such as CD-ROMs and WWW-sites. The reason to call these products “new media” was to distinct them from such “old” media products as television and radio programs, feature films, recorded music, news papers, magazines, printed books etc. The new digital technology made it possible to explore new forms of media that are interactive, networked, social and also able to emulate and remix all existing media formats and technologies.

In his book Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte (1995) describes how we are entering to the era of convergence. He describes how the traditional printing, telecommunication and computer industries will converge. A book publishers must take in use new computing technologies to distribute their products for readers through communication networks, the operators of telecommunication networks must think about content and computing, and the computer industry should look to the direction of content and telecommunication industries.

I have called the convergence of the three and the emergence of the new the “Holly Trinity of New Media”. In my version of the picture (above) in the crossing point, in the middle, there is the “core” of new media. The printing, telecommunication and computing I have named to be simply “media”, “networked communication” and “computing”. The reason for this is to have focus rather to the essence of the phenomena and less to the industries merging in and from them.

Negroponte was right or influential or both. The old media has worked hard to get to the middle. What Negroponte didn’t see very clear was the emergence of new formats, services, project and companies right in the “core of the new media”. The companies found in the middle — today already many of them huge corporations — have from large part “spoiled” some parts of the traditional businesses operating in the old bubbles or in the crossing points of them. New media companies and projects, such as Google, Amazon, PayPal, Yahoo, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Facebook and thousands of smaller “new media” companies and projects have shown that there really is something new in “new media”. These companies and projects are not looking for convergence, but rather emergence. They have shown that moving to the center is difficult – easier is to born in there. Interesting is also to see how the “new media” are today expanding from the center to the three “old” areas and especially in the crossing points of them. Google is working hard to get a bite of mobile phone business, Amazon is producing e-book readers, Wikipedia offers printed version of its articles and so on.

An interesting trend in new media in 2010 is that everything that finally got to be bites (digital) will start to become atoms (physical) again. The physical computing and tangible interfaces is a good example of this trend. Services offering physical replicates of digital models are another examples of the bites becoming atoms. Several avant-garde Media Art pieces have predict this development already a decade ago. For instance, the Mixed Reality Pong by Kiia Kallio (2001) is an example of the first one and the Dump your Trash ! by Blank & Jeron (1999) where one can order any web site sculpted on marble or granite, is an example of the later.

The title of my professorship is “new media design and learning”. For more than 15 years I have practiced new media design with specialization to collaborative learning tools that could be today called social software or social media tools and services. For me new media has always been social media – a process of collaborative meaning making in a peer- and use production.

Still, daily “new media” keep on surprising me. The new forms and practices of new media designed and emerging in different areas of human life from family to work, from leisure to consuming, from children to elder people, from activism to politics keep us busy. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

PS. The song you ain’t seen nothing yet is actually some kind of pre-historical piece of new media: a smart repacking of several song of the Who. The remix video on YouTube is also a cool new media piece. “Thank you for watching”

If you are interested in to “understand the recent shift from an industrially organized era to an era of networks and open information and social production” join us in the Open 2009 symposium, taking place right now in Helsinki and online.

We have a video stream and the videos of the talks will be online in the conference site for a later use.

Threaded backchannel is in Qaiku.

Symposium Program.

The first keynote is given by Yrjö Engeström. His topic is “The Educational Value of Learning by Cheating” – and he is not joking.

Engeström is most well known as one of the founders of (Scandinavian) activity theory.