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).

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.

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.

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!

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!

I got my hands full of little goodies to bring home. I picked up a few TheOpenCDs to
bring home for Christmas, a Kubuntu
installation Cd, and brochures produced by OSS Watch, which is a Free
and
Open Source advisory service for UK higher and further education. Some
good advisory policies have been produced by OSS Watch, such as Developing
University Policies That Engage with Open Source Software, and Policy
on Open Source Software for JISC Projects and Services.  You
can find Stuart
Yeates paper on this, I guess slides will be available later on the
conference site.

Other interesting things that I had a chance to see:

• Of course, check out Stephen
  Downes’ presentation about his vision
  that he calls Metauniversity (he also called it Metaversity, I think
  combining meta-level and diversity). Open Learning
  and the Metauniversity , PPT Slides 
  and the MP3
  Audio.

  Mr. Downes talked about a concept for an information architecture, that
  could comply with the vision of M.Feldstein 
  “we need a system that is
  optimeised toward slotting in new pieces as they become available, not
  as an after-though or an add-on, but as a fundamental characteristic of
  the system…”. Neat, many good concepts, maybe this will work as a roudmap to inspire people to see further than tomorrow.

• My talk about Anticipating
  Round 2 of the EU Software patents battle took
  place on the second day.  Maybe one third of the audience was aware about the issue,
  so I had been asked to be pretty introductory about what software
  patents are, what is the current legislation in EU, and speculating how
  software patents could potentially
  hinder ICT in education. Slides will be available at the conference
  site later. I made a great impression (?) on the audience by stripping my
  jacket and showing off my "No Software Patents-Power to the Parliament"
  tee-shirt You can view a picture of that and the other pictures from the conference at vermario’s gallery.
• tOSSad project was also interesting. It’s yet another EU-founded
  project and the acronym stands for Towards Open source Software,
  Adoption and Dissemination. That is what the project is about, really.
  Check the site.
• About the presentations in workshops, I must say that I didn’t
  follow many. However, some are worth checking out, like this one: Using
  IMAP to Build a Virtual Learning Environment. It’s good that
  people think out of the box!
• To get an overview about what some Educational authorities and
  Ministries of Education are doing in Europe to promote the use of FOSS,
  you can find a paper
  by Karl Sarnow and me.

There were tons of other good stuff too, but you have to check it out
for yourselves on the programme.
Everything is available under Creative Commons and the conference used
this nifty Open Conference Systems
to make papers available online.

In general I got the impression that the conference audience was half
programmers and other half  was comprised of people who have
interest in using FOSS in education. Quite a fruitful mix, and I hope
some other stuff will come out of this. At least the continuation for
the conference would be great!

Other than that a variety of things were recommended such as an award for the best open source educational
software, this would raise awareness and by submitting products
to the award, the community would also create a good state-of-the-art repertory.
Also, a Yearbook idea was
discussed listing most interesting FOSS in education projects in
different fields and areas.

The preemptive position paper against
EU software patents idea got good reception at the conference.
We had a workshop about how to get going and many good ideas were
discussed. The timeline to get the arguments ready is by Dec 15, and at
the new year we will start campaigning about getting signatures,
spreading the word, etc. The minutes will be available also soon, watch
this space!

Some other people have posted on their blogs about the conference,

• Coverage of the conference by Josie Fraser (one http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2005/11/sound_bites_fro.html,
  two http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2005/11/stephen_downes_.html), 
• Graham Attwell

  http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell,

• Tom Hoffman http://tuttlesvc.teacherhosting.com/blog/blosxom.cgi/personal/holland.html, 
• Vermario http://www.vermario.com/blog/?p=112,
• Brent Simpson http://blog.cfdl.auckland.ac.nz/archives/brent/000153.html, 
• Stuart Yeateshttp://connect.educause.edu/blog/stuartyeates/open_source_in_education_conference/1583

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/eusoftpat" rel="tag">softpat</a>
<p></p>

Juha-Matti
was also interested in possibilities of corporate blogging and for that
purpose we created a blog for him. During the conference event we
posted over 10 posts, one being a podcast, right from the event. In
learning buffet we had George Siemens and Stephen Downes throwing a co-presentation about the changing nature of online learning. We used Skype for audio, S5 for slides, Dorgem for webcam, CGI::IRC for
chat (modified to receive mobile text messages) and some other
tools to carry out a very interactive and self-organizing event. Our
blog software, audio editing software, servers and everything else was
also Open Source. Next time I might try Gizmo project for audio, which relies more on open standards.

We also had teleconferences carried out with Centra where people like Jay Cross
gave presentations but my purpose was to show that all this technology
is already available for everyone who wants to be a prosumer, a creator
or a creative remixer in the networked world. The technology is cheap
(often no-cost and/or Open Source) and available for all. The
technology is able to achieve the exactly same capabilities and even
more than commercial alternatives. Online collaboration is already here
and not anymore a luxury of those who have the resources.

You can read all our blog reportages including presentations from
people like Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Jay Cross, Pirjo Ståhle,
Esko Kilpi, Bo Harald and others at Juha-Matti Arola’s blog.

I had a positive feeling at the conference. It seems a lot of people
think that platforms for online learning are dead. The approach to
design a business process for online learning, in which the learning is
only carried out in a separate learning environment and not embedded in
the work practices themselves is faulty. Information system-driven
business process thinking is dropping dramatically. Informal learning
also received a lot of attention and there was a lot of discussion how
we could support informal learning inside and outside organizations.
Our blogging effort and working as creators instead of consumers at the
conference was a living example of informal learning.

Another good thing is that many companies have moved from
technology-driven approach to competence-driven approach.
Technology is a very small part of their offering, the work always
starts from analyzing the needs, capabilities and people before
implementing any technology.

I also had a few good conversations why learning objects are dead as
well. Open Content, Open Source, consumers as creators, social software
and Web 2.0 also became familiar to people who attended the conference.