Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

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Imagine courses that take place in wikis, blogs, social networks…

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

I am this week in the WikiSym / Wikimania double conference.

Its’ another great opportunity to spend some time with the world’s brightest wiki-minds: academics, developers, community members and bureaucrats.

I am going to give a short talk on Friday in the Wikiversity session. I am going to present the EduFeedr, a small and beautiful project I am working with Hans Põldoja.

If you can’t make it to Gdańsk — it’s sunny and with nice mixture (like good wikis) of Slavic flexibility and Prussian order — you may check the following presentation. I’ll copy here also the abstract of the talk:

Designing Tools for Supporting Wikiversity Courses: the Case of EduFeedr

In spring 2008 the authors organized a course on composing free and open educational resources (in the Wikiversity). It was officially a master’s course at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. The authors decided to make the course available with an open enrollment through the Wikiversity and promoted it in their blogs. As a result about 70 people from 20 countries signed up for the course on the Wikiversity page.

The course was organized as a weekly blogging seminar. In each week the facilitators posted a weekly theme and links to related readings on the course blog. The participants reflected on the weekly theme in their personal blogs and commented their peers.

One of the challenges in a large blog-based course is to follow all the communication. Typically this communication takes place not only in blogs but also in other environments such as Delicious, Twitter, etc. Most of these environments provide RSS feeds but typical RSS readers are not very suitable for following this kind of courses. Most of the RSS readers such as Google Reader are designed for personal use. In a Wikiversity course it would be important to have a shared feed reader that all the participants could use.

EduFeedr is a web-based feed reader that is designed specifically for following and supporting learners in open blog-based courses. The design process of EduFeedr is based on the research-based design methodology. We have organized several Wikiversity courses where we have tried out various online tools to manage the course. The initial user needs for EduFeedr came out from this contextual inquiry. Interaction design methods such as scenario-based design, user stories and paper prototyping have been used in the process.

As a result of the design process we have indicated the key features for EduFeedr. These include (1) signing up for the course, (2) visualizing how the students have proceeded with the assignments, (3) visualizing the social network between the students, (4) annotating blog posts and comments, and (5) archiving the course.

EduFeedr is currently a work-in-progress. The first version is implemented as Elgg plugin and we are currently doing internal testing with real data from several Wikiversity courses. In this version we have implemented signing up for the course and some of the planned visualizations. We are planning to launch the beta version of EduFeedr service in late summer 2010. The source code and more information about EduFeedr is available at the project web site (see http://www.edufeedr.org).

Posted in Aalto University, Collaboration, Conferences, Design, Open Source, Sharing economy, Social Software, Wikimedia, Wikiversity, educational tool | 3 Comments »

Design thinking and education

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

The Nordic Conference on Activity Theory and the Fourth Finnish Conference on Cultural and Activity Research (FISCAR10) started today. This time the conference takes place at the Aalto University School of Art and Design.

The keynotes are video streamed online. The recording will be available in the same site, too.

The original home of the activity theory is in psychology (cultural-historical psychology) but people in the community have always moved across different disciplines. The theory has also achieved interest especially among such areas as education, organizational studies, work research and human-computer interaction.

This year — because of the location where the conference is taking place, I think — there are more design thinking in the air than probably ever before. Also the concept of combining art and design, economics, science and technology in the Aalto University is interesting when analyzed in light of the activity theory.

During the conference, I hope, we will have many discussions about design thinking and education, with emphasis on product design, artifact creation, architecture — on things that have concrete impact to people’s life.

It’s not the first time that “design” is discussed in the context of education and learning. One branch of learning science have present the idea or design-based research (Barab & Squire, 2004; The Design-Based Research Collective, 2003). In design-based research the aim is to do research with designed interventions into real-world educational, teaching and learning situations. In design-based research design interventions are a research method.

I think design-based research is missing some important aspects of design thinking. In design field the designs — artifacts, products, “things” — are the main outcome of the activity. The design process is creative and intentional activity of composition: “brining parts, pieces, functions, structures, processes and forms together n a such a way that they have a presence and make an appearance, particularly of unity, in the world” (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003). The designs (the “things”) are the change agents. They are concrete things that are changing our way of doing things.

For someone coming from the field of new media design the impact of tools and artifacts in human life and culture is obvious. People playing with new media and internet know that these things are changing the way we live our lives, socialize, communicate, work, love, hate, and learn.

The sad thing with the new media is that we easily take the tools and artifacts for granted, as something that just comes like a natural force. This is of course not true. There are people “designing” these things. They are driven by values, ideals and intentions. They are humans.

Design is communication. Design thinking is a skill of moderating design communication, deliberating different intentions and interests. But this is not enough. Design thinking is also an issue of leadership. When there is a request to deliver the “thing”, the designer must be able to do decisions. To get the thing done.

Here is a video nicely explaining how design process can go wrong.

Posted in Aalto University, Collaboration, Conferences, Design, educational tool | No Comments »

18.04.07 workshop on social software (hands-on) – Hämeenlinna

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

We (Teemu Arina and Teemu Leinonen) are running a beginner friendly practical hands-on workshop called “Uudet sosiaaliset ohjelmistot käytännössä” (new social software in practice) with three facilitators at Interactive Technology in Education -conference on 18th of April, 2007 in Hämeenlinna, Finland. The main language of the full day workshop is finnish (tervetuloa vaan kaikki mukaan :) . Well if you happen to speak just english, we will make sure you will have a lot of fun, too.It’s aimed for anyone who wants to understand, try and start using all these new tools like blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, Flickr, Youtube etc. but has yet lacked a good opportunity or guidance to do so. It will be practical, which means you will be blogging before you know you do. The pre-conference workshop will culminate at the conference itself, where you will be fully armed to the teeth to turn yourself from a passive conference audience member to an active blogger, participant and contributor together with the rest of your colleagues. Don’t miss George Siemens and Barbara Dieu, who are also among the speakers.

Osallistu!The conference will feature a service called ITK 2.0, which has wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, Flickr images, chat, del.icio.us bookmarks and all of that to provide a social backchannel, a sort of shadow schedule for the conference participants to continue the conversation before, during and after the conference. Last year we had primitive implementation of this and the result was a great success. The organizers have provided us with a completely empty track to fill with unconferences. This means we will make the program together in a wiki, no dictators doing the decisions here. Thanks to conference director Jarmo Viteli for having the vision, too.So take your laptop and register to our workshop at the conference to see what’s all this fuzz about. The registration will end on 13.4, but you can also send me an email at teemu AT dicole.com if you are interested to participate even after the registration deadline.

Posted in Conferences | 2 Comments »

Distance working the Australian way

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

I have understood that in the field of distance learning there is one country that is very much ahead of everybody else. Australia.

In an audio interview Martin Dougiamas, Creator of Moodle, tells how he grow up in a middle of Australia. In 1970’s he did his first years of school with four or five other youth talking via radio with a teacher who was 600 miles away. Every other week an airplane would stop by with school materials (via Steve Hargadon and Stephen Downes).

Distance learning has a long tradition in Australia. It looks that using Internet and web is very natural next step in the Australian history of distance learning already including use of post (letters), radio and TV for the same purpose. Many Australian are use to communicate, study and learn with people at distance.

On Friday I will participate in an online session organized by a group of great Australian people. I will give a short brief and we will then discuss about the MobilED initiative – our mobile learning project.

The session is open for anyone to participate in. If you want to see how the Australians do distance sessions online, please join us! Here are the details:

Place / platform: Breeze – Flash based online conferencing system
-> just get in to the event room.

Time: ESB Australia 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
-> check your time around the world.

Hope to see you there!

Posted in Conferences | No Comments »

ITK’06 conference blog reportage

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Interactive Technology in Education (ITK)
–conference is the largest conference in Finland about information- and
communication technology in educational use.

This year the theme is Carpe Diem – create the future.
There are some interesting presentations including several blogging
related presentations this year. I’m also sitting with representatives
from the finnish media in the Web 2.0 keynote panel on thursday evening.

Last year I blogged about Graham Attwell. There I talked to several people how nice it would be if such contributions in the social web were visible to other conference participants. This is all about turning the static conference site into a live and dynamic one. I decided to do something about it this year and the conference manager Jarmo Viteli was very open to my ideas.

I
will be blogging there and a few of my friends will join me. It’s the
first conference in Finland which acknowledges the presence of
participants from the social web. For this reason I incorporated a feed aggregator
as part of the conference website. Participants have the ability to
register their own blog in the service to make their own writings about
the conference visible on the conference site. Flickr and del.icio.us services can be used with the tag itk06 to display images and weblinks to other participants.

I
look forward to incorporate similar features to other conferences as
well. If you are planning to run a conference and would like to make it
more interesting to participants by utilizing the possibilities of the
social web, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

If anything Open Source related will catch my eye, then I will write about it here at FLOSSE Posse. Otherwise I will post to my personal blog.

We’ll see you at ITK’06, on 5th – 7th of April 2006 at Hotel Aulanko, Hämeenlinna, Finland!

Posted in Conferences | No Comments »

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