In Finland we have a lot of open source expertise and know-how. We have developers. I also assume that majority of the (liberally) higher educated people in Finland, at least know what is “Open Source” and “Linux”. This should be a great foundation to get open source software to all public schools (and public institutions).

Today I did a little Internet study on the topics to find out where we are now. Frankly, I am positively surprised. There are a lot of things happening in the field. But there is also something very crucial missing. I’ll get back to this in the end of the post.

The good news is that the number of schools using Open Source is growing. Relying on several sources I would estimate that around 5% of the schools are using Linux on desktop and over 50 % of the schools have some Open Source software in their desktops — mainly Firefox browser, whose share in Finland is estimated to be over 50%. This is a great result when the Linux’s is estimated to have only 1-2% share of all the desktops in the world.

Another good news is that there are several projects raising awareness on Free and Open Source software for schools. There are blogs and newsletters, webinars and get-together events. The outreaching and educational activities seems to be today professionally carried out and well organized. Still, I would claim that the information provided on the topic is far too technical and as such irrelevant for most of the decisions makers. The people making decisions on the educational technology are not really interested in the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project). They want solutions. It looks that we are still missing credible providers of solutions.

Probably, however, the most promising thing in the field of Open Source in education in Finland is, that there actually are several small and middle size companies that are specialized in providing Open Source solutions for schools. Some of them have also build their own products and services specifically for the school market.

I am maybe doing some unfair promotion of only three companies, but they are good examples of those that were catched by my survey.

Opinsys seems to be the most promising one. Opinsys designs and implements networks, computers and software for schools — in practice solutions for teaching and learning. They provide support and maintenance. All Linux and Open Source.

Dicole use to develop their own Open Source community/intranet/learning environment platform, but has since then focus more on knowledge work. I still, however, believe that they could pull together a package of software-as-a-service specifically designed for schools.

Mediamaisteri is a company with strong presence in the Finnish education sector. Their product / service portfolio includes Moodle, Elgg, Mediawiki and Open meetings hosting. All Open Source. (Disclaimer: the founders of Dicole and Mediamaisteri are my friends)

Could these companies find growth in the international markets? I think they could. At least, in the European markets. Maybe there are similar small companies in other Scandinavian / Baltic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Estonia) or in the large European countries (Germany, France, UK, Poland, Italy, Spain). Maybe these small Finnish companies could establish partnerships with them?

I honestly was happy to find out that the Free / Open Source in education is not dead in Finland. Some regions in some other countries, like Andalucia in Spain and some pockets in the UK are maybe far ahead of us. I still, however, think that in Finland we have great chances to make a real impact in the field.

I wrote in the title that there is still something crucial missing. What is that?

It is the simple Linux based device designed specifically for school use. I think OLPC XO is not the solution for us or the rest of the Europe. We need our own device that is basically a touch screen with a web browser, a camera, audio in/out and all possible forms of wireless connectivity (Wlan, 3/4G, Bluetooth).

I know there are people in Finland who are able to do perfect electronic engineering and industrial design for this. I know that there are software people able to do relatively minor changes to existing Linux distributions to make it up and running. If we can do it, why we are not doing it?

Just with the European market — close to 100 million school children — it should make sense.

I took some notes in the WikiSym / Wikimania.

I take notes in rather unstructured way. I carry several paper notebooks with me: often an A5 size and a small A6 sketchbooks. Then I always have with me a laptop and a phone which I use for note taking, too. Sometimes I also write notes to some random Post IT notes, which I often have in the case.

My logics with this kind of note taking is that if something is not really important I may and will lose it. Also if I really need something later I should be willing to take the effort to search it.

So, what is there, couple of days after the Wikisym/Wikimania, in the top of my pile of notes? There are many things, such as:

• proper knowledge building research on Wikipedia,
• the OER policies and the Wikiwijs in the Netherlands,
• wiki governance and politics (the picture is related to this: it is a simple version of the Wikipedia policy/rules),
• Wikis and OER’s in open and distance learning,
• new talk pages with LiquidThreads,
• wiki content to books, and
• many, many semantic wiki projects.

From all these I have some random notes in here and there. I may write blog posts about them later.

The most hypnotic new thing I found during the WikiSym/Wikimania is probably the Wikipedia article traffic statistics. Actually it is not even new and I think it was not even presented in the conference, but with some free browsing on wiki-related things I happen to found it now.

With the service you can check the popularity of any Wikipedia article from more than 70 language versions. The latest statistics are from December 2009, but it is still la lot of fun. I have been playing with it now for several days.

For instance, I have been comparing the top 1000 articles of the Finnish, Swedish and Russian Wikipedias.

Here are the top-10 articles in the Finnish, Swedish and Russian Wikipedias in December 2009:

Finnish Wikipedia

1. Suomi (Finland)
2. Wiki
3. Talvisota (Winter War 1939)
4. Brittany Murphy (Hollywood celebrity)
5. Irwin Goodman (a Finnish protest singer, rock and folk singer)
6. Suomen itsenäisyyspäivä (The Finnish Independent Day)
7. Joulu (Christmas)
8. Twilight – Houkutus (Hollywood movie)
9. Lady Gaga (American celebrity)
10. Yhdysvallat (United States of America)

Swedish Wikipedia

1. Sverige (Sweden)
2. Brittany Murphy (Hollywood celebrity)
3. Wiki
4. Lucia (Saint Lucy’s Day)
5. Anna Anka (Swedish Hollywood celebrity)
6. Julkalendern i Sveriges Television (Christmas calendar in a Swedish Television)
7. Kurt Wallander (character in Henning Mankell’s novels)
8. Jul (Christmas)
9. Wikipedia
10. USA (United States of America)

Russian Wikipedia

1. В Контакте (Russian social network service)
2. Турчинский, Владимир Евгеньевич (Vladimir Turchinsky; Russian celebrity, bodybuilder, TV/radio, actor)
3. Википедия (Wikipedia)
4. Россия (Russia)
5. Порнография (Porno)
6. Мой Мир@mail.ru (free e-mail service)
7. Аватара (Avatar concept of Hinduism)
8. Москва (Moscow)
9. BitTorrent
10. Новый год (New Year)

Looking the top lists of English (I love The Beatles, too) German (and adore Elisabeth von Österreich-Ungarn) and French (and listen to Johnny Hallyday) Wikipedia’s and comparing them is also interesting and fun.

From the top 1000 lists we may already conclude some hypothesis / theories. All the lists show the actuality of using Wikipedias. For Finnish and Swedish people Christmas is important, whereas in Russia New Year is the Christmas (Orthodox Calendar). The Finnish Independent day is in December. In December 2009 it was 50 years from the Winter War.

Also the celebrities in the list were actual in December 2009. In Finland and Sweden people seems to follow Hollywood. In Russia they have their own stars. Brittany Murphy in the Finnish and Swedish WIkipedia and Vladimir Turchinsky in the Russian Wikipedia represent the celebrities who died in December 2009.

It looks that the Russian Wikipedia in December 2009 was still dominated by technology / internet people. The general public was not yet the main user of the Russian Wikipedia as it obviously was the case in the Finnish and the Swedish Wikipedias.

The high position of Irwin Goodman, a Finnish protest singer, rock and folk singer, in the Finnish Wikipedia could be a result of some new research about him that was published in December 2009, but why is the Hindu concept Avatar so high in the Russian Wikipedia? Could it be that people were looking for information about the movie Avatar but end-up to this page?

Then you may ask why the Twilight movie and Lady Gaga are in top ten in the Finnish Wikipedia but in the Swedish Wikipedia only in the places 43 and 36. In the Russian Wikipedia these great cultural products are in the places 60 (Twilight) and 352 (Lady Gaga).

I already started to copy paste the data to spreadsheet to do more analyses, but gave up. I know that there are people who really can do statistics. I am not very good with them, but I would love to do some cultural-historical analyses of the Wikipedias with someone with solid skill in statistics. Let’s do some hypothesis and see what the data tells us.

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).

Anyway. Here is my advice for local and national decision makers to do the “learning revolution”, caused by the digital revolution. I am sure my “reforms” would payoff, exactly the way learning does: educated people are able to provide higher output, economically and culturally.

Public Libraries
Invest on public neighborhood libraries with (1) wide collection of different kind of reading materials (books, newspapers, magazines, electronic materials) and (2) public access to Internet: Wi-Fi and laptops. Do a marketing campaign about the libraries. Let people to know about the services of the libraries.

Basic Education
Guarantee universal (for all) high quality basic education: literacy, math, arts, music, civics, culture. Make sure you will have highly educated and motivated teachers, and seamless access to internet, Wi-Fi and laptops (in every classroom and in every space). Support the schools to have continues effort to develop their operations; pedagogy, school culture, workplace. Request all schools to publish their mission, vision and curriculum in their website and to have a blog with weekly updates about their work.

Higher Education
I think Universities are the liver of the society. Make sure that they will function. Research and higher education is there to renew things that should be renewed and protecting things that should be kept.

Network Connections
Guarantee that all the citizens will have inexpensive access (cheap and free) to Internet, network computers (mini laptops) and mobile phones. Make sure that there is competition that will work for the benefits of the consumer. The markets work only when there is true competition.

Media, Journalism and Free Speech
Guarantee public broadcasting media services (radio, TV, online) that are, as independent as possible, from the markets and the politics. Do not limit the public media to news. Politics, civics, culture, arts and music in a widest possible meaning — including cotemporary and independent pop culture — should be the core of the offering. A strong public media will help the commercial media to renew itself to meet the future challenges. This way the public media is a bit like a liver of the media field (compare to the Universities).

Online Content
Invest on free and reliable online reference and other educational content, like Open Educational Resources, Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Bring the content of museums and archives online (Wikimedia may help museums in this effort).

Online Learning
Support peer-to-peer online learning and teaching communities. The open education movement is fast moving to the direction where people are self-organizing themselves to learn together online. The P2PU is a good example of this. People learning new things is almost always good thing. Still, to avoid people to do “home chemistry”, it might be a good idea to provide people something a bit more “guided”.

Community Colleges
Support community colleges and open universities online and on campus. In addition to the online learning we also need the “traditional” community colleges. Still, one should help (and force) the community colleges to go online. In Finland, Otavan Opisto is a good example of a college that is strongly online (and on campus).

A long wish list? It is and it will cost a lot of money. A good thing is that it is not a risk investment. The economist know that these things have a high return of investment. It is true that to get the return for the investment may take some time — 10, 50 or 100 years — but it will come.

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.

My second example of informal learning in a Real World is a Master Thesis work from our MA in New Media program. Linda Kronman’s Killer Fashion Revolution is a project that uses fashion hacktivism to promote human rights. Check the video:

What is common with the two projects is a strong community aspect in them. Pauliina and Linda have not build Personal Learning Environment to benefit themselves, but have started a project to build and maintain platform for community interested in important and common interest. The communities also have clear missions, shared values and commitment. The operations are transparent.

The topic of role of informal learning has been a widely discussed among online learning people. The idea of Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and Do it yourself University (DIY U) are considered to be a real game-changers in learning and education in the digital era.

I agree with this but have found the PLE and the DIY U problematic, because they emphasize individuals over communities. In them the individuals are considered to be in the center, with all the rights and the responsibilities to choose whatever he or she wants to study, when, where and with whom.

The weak social ties in pure online communities easily results as opportunistic and no or only short-term commitments.

I see that the Real World does not work like this, or should I say, that the Real World requires different kind of approach. I see that the ultimate individualism and lack of commitment may cause a lot of trouble — actually some very serious problems.

It is —I admit — a strong claim, but I see connection between the PLE and some of the most shocking accidents in Finland, in recent years: a bombing in a shopping center in 2002 and in two school shootings that took place in 2007 and in 2008.

From the Wikipedia articles you can check how the perpetrators were active online “learners” in an anonymous “home chemistry” group and in online hate groups interested in school shootings. All the perpetrators were individual learners online.

To blame “Personal Learning Environment” about the incidents would of course be silly. So, I am not doing it. I am, however, either not one of those people who think that technology and tools are neutral and can be used for good and bad.

Guns kill people. Killing someone with hammer is possible, but there is a difference.

I get this kind of requests about twice a month. My common practice with these is that I just send people the user name with the teacher’s rights.

This time — I do this maybe once in two years — I decided to check whatever our Fle3 demo server is still up and running. Tarmo has setup the server so that it is pretty much bullet proof but sometime it is good to check that everything in there is ok.

So, It was not a surprise for me that the server was up and running, but a surprise was that when clicking a bit around in Fle3 I realized that it is still very relevant collaborative learning environment.

In a way it is maybe today more relevant than 10 years ago when the first version of Fle3 (just called FLE at that time) was released in 1999. In the late 1990’s and early 2000, the Web was not very social or collaborative.

If you are interested in to have a look of Fle3, feel free to visit the demo server with the following username (it is a teacher/tutor username – the login is in the right upper corner):

http://fle3.uiah.fi/demo/courses/1297/announcements/

username: tutor
password: saapask1ssa

If you rather read about Fle3, we also have a nice colorful booklet:

Learning with Collaborative Software – A guide to Fle3.

In a way Fle3 was (and naturally still is) a social media and social networking service. For instance, it has a lot of similar features to Facebook, but with a special focus to support learning projects.

In Fle3 you always work with a group of people you trust and are willing to share your most stupid thoughts and ideas. This is because sharing your early hypothesis and theories is important in learning and you rather do it with people you trust.

For instance, Fle3 is very strict with privacy: you work and share things only with your class or group of students with whom you have build a social cohesion in a level that everyone can trust each other.

When Facebook is now claiming that privacy is no longer a social norm we may expect that closed network services will become more popular. I assume people need social online spaces (like Fle3) where one can be open with their “friends”, without a fear of someone using your early ideas and pondering against, you or your data/media to sell something to someone.

Practically speaking, there are needs for different kind of services: open and closed, socially and technologically open and closed. This is why in our research group we are also interested in to develop fully open tools that could support the idea of knowledge building in the open Internet. I will write about this another post, soon.