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).

In Sweden I am on the right,” Mr. Westerberg said, “but in the United States, I’m considered a Communist.”

Some days ago David Wiley wrote that with the open content the Open Knowledge Foundation gets it wrong when claiming that share-alike licenses are open but non-commercial ones aren’t.

For those who are not that familiar with the open/free content/knowledge discussion, the share-alike (SA) license has a condition asking people who remix or build upon the content to distribute the resulting work under the same license. The license ensures that later works will be open, too — will stay in commons. Wiley wrote:

“When authors adopt a share-alike license, they are saying: we value the freedom of content over the freedom of people.”

As an author using share-alike license I see this a bit differently. I value the *freedom of mankind*, the common good, over the freedom of content or individuals.

I think that this is the way most SA people see it: When you are given, you should give back, too.

I also do not consider use of SA to be any kind of violation of individual’s rights. Individual’s rights is something I am not willing to negotiate about. In the case of content anyone is still free to release *their own stuff* under whatever license. So, as a such SA is not really communism. It is a way to contribute to the common good.

Later Wiley wrote a follow-up post with the title Openness, Radicalism, and Tolerance and asking “Why isn’t the open crowd more open-minded?”

I see here some signs of a straw man arguments.

I think we should look how the Free / Open Source Softeware movement and the Open Content movement were started. People simply started to do things. The Free software people made software and wanted to share it with their friends. Some other people started to write free encylopedia or publish University course content online. They just did it because they could.

What are people doing in the field of Open Education?

Many things. For instance, the Peer 2 Peer Univeristy and the Wikiversity are crassroot open education projects organizing self-organizing learning online. The idea is to bring people together to teach and to learn from each other. Simple.

Similar kind of initiatives are started here and there: from Indian to Brazil, From South Africa to Finland. I find these much more interesting that the discussion on content-driven “open education”. The content is there – now it is the time to use it. That is education.

Peer 2 Peer University 2010 from P2P University on Vimeo.

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.

I am nowadays dealing almost daily with academic administration of the soon starting Aalto University. I am kindly asked to comment plans of having new ICT system, how to have ICT enhancing teaching and learning, tenure track, research assessment exercise etc. All these are important and event to some extent pretty interesting stuff.

When dealing with these things, there are three proverbs I keep on repeating in my little head. These are:

1) Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

2) Don’t fall into the Not Invented Here syndrome (NIH).

3) Don’t be the fire chief who keeps on telling for the volunteer firefighters that their did their job, but technically wrong. (I think this is very Finnish proverb / joke and does not make much sense in English)

With the Aalto University – merger between the Helsinki School of Economics, the University of Art and Design Helsinki and the Helsinki University of Technology – one of the key preparatory activities was an extensive, international research assessment of all the units of the three Schools.

The results from my unit – Media Lab Helsinki – were in a nutshell, as follows (straight quotations from the evaluation report):

“Scientific Quality of the Unit’s Research – Numerical Rating (1‐5): 4 Very Good International Level”
“Scientific Impact of the Unit’s Research – Numerical Rating (1‐5): 4 Very Good International Level”
“Societal Impact of the Unit’s Research – Numerical Rating (1‐5): 5 Outstanding International Level”
“Research Environment at the Unit of Assessment – Numerical Rating (1‐5): 4 Very Good International Level”
“Future Potential of the Unit of Assessment – Numerical Rating (1‐5): 5 Outstanding”

You may guess that we were pretty proud about the results. Regardless of the great results from the assessment, I am seriously worried whatever these results will ever translate to any constructive actions.

I am afraid that when things will be “reorganized” we may loose the flexibility and freedom causing the good results. We will throw out the baby with the bath water.

For instance, the new tenure track system may not recognize the existing expertise in the unit and those who (1) made the great results and (2) are holding the “outstanding future potential” will have hard time to find a place. In a worst-case scenario these people will reclaim the results of the research assessment and move to some other University or research institution. I have some friends in US with this experience.

With the new ICT systems – for internal communication and to enhance teaching and learning – I am afraid of the not invented here syndrome (NIH).

For instance, when selecting intranet/extranet solutions we should be well informed, educated and strategic. This means, that we a honest with the fact that the software engineers are not necessary the best people to design communication systems, such as intranet solutions. They of course know how the bits move in there, but are not – seriously – very good with people, those poor things who will end-up using the system.

In my unit, in last 15 years, we have designed and implemented hundreds of intra/extra/social media systems. The Onni intranet system, developed in-house in cooperation with some people from the School of Design, is definitely one of the best intra/extra/social media systems in the “market” (Socialtext is pretty good, too). Why wouldn’t we use the Onni in the whole Aalto University? Because it is not made by the software engineers of the Helsinki University of Technology but some weird art and design people? I am afraid. To demonstrate that I am not myself falling it to the NIH, I am open to accept Socialtext, as the intra/extra/social media system of the new Aalto University. Please no Confluence Wiki (it’s a wiki, not an intra/extra/social media!).

Finally. The fire chief. In our unit we have many flexible practices that help us to do our job very well: to do (high quality) research and to run our MA and doctoral programs. Sometime the procedures are not exactly according to the rules and guidelines of the University. We do things in a way that may look strange for someone who is not that deep in our operation. In most of the cases there is a practical reason to do things the way we do them. Often the reason is just “common sense”, to save time, effort and nerves or to be focused and not to do things that are not necessary. The results count, right?

Summa summarum: We need autonomy and freedom – not only in the University’s relation in its funders – but also internally in the University, in the unit’s relations to the academic administration.

Here is a video with some of the demos this year.

The most famous (new media) demo is the one made by Douglas Engelbart and his team in 1968. In the demo he is showing his research groups latest results – a computer system called NLS or the “oN-Line System”. If you are interested in design and development of New Media, WWW, internet, groupware, computer supported collaboration / work / learning etc. you should take the time to check out the demo available in Google video.

I have had the honor of meeting Dr Engelbart a couple of times. Once I asked him what was the reason to do the demo – a rather non-conventional way at that time to present research results? Engelbart told me that basically the demo was done to demonstrate such results that were very difficult to explain in any other way. Think about it. What kind of research paper you could write about the NLS? Scenarios, user stories, descriptions of interaction, UMLs, screen shots? Uhh… please, no thanks!

I love demos! Show me.

Then there is this joke. A new media designer, who died and is then having a meeting with Saint Peter at the gateway to the heaven. Saint Peter is on a good mood and tells the new media designer that she may herself decide whatever she wants to go to the Heaven or to the Hell. The designer is happy about the chance and asks Saint Peter: – “Would it be anyhow possible to take a look how the Heaven and the Hell are? I have no idea how life in these places are”.

Saint Peter: – “Sure, no problem, I can give you a demo of both of them”.

First Saint Peter is showing the Heaven where angel-kind of figures are floating in a garden, singing hymns and smiling composedly to each other. The designer is nodding her head:

- “Looks nice and peaceful”.

Then Saint Peter is showing the Hell. The Hell is full of cool people eating good food, sipping nice wines, having chat, laughing and dancing. The designer: – Hmm… to be honest the life in the Hell is much more that kind of life I am use to. Actually, I wouldn’t mind to spend my eternal life this way.”
Saint Peter: – “Are you sure – the choice is all yours: Heaven or Hell?

Designer: – “I am really sorry Saint Peter, but to be honest the Hell definitely looks better for me. I’ll choose the Hell”.

Saint Peter opens the floor hatch on what the designer has been standing on. The designer falls down to the Hell where harried souls are screaming in pain. Flames are everywhere. While falling down the designer yells up for the Saint Peter: – “What is this? This is not the Hell you were showing me!”

Saint Peter:- “Hey, it was a DEMO!”

Almost exactly three years a go I wrote on this blog about the raise of New Kind of Conferences (July 11, 2006) and recently Teemu Arina, one of the original Flosse Posse people (actually he found this site), have a new project focusing on use of social technologies to run better events. I really hope Bantora will be successful. It is needed.

I like conferences and I like traveling, although I try to minimize it nowadays (they say they need me at home and office, too. That is nice). For me conferences are – first of all – places for Bohmian Dialogue in a wider philosophical meaning, not as a dogmatic technique. David Bohm writes:

“‘Dialogue’ comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means ‘the word’, or in our case we would think of the ‘meaning of the word’. And dia means ‘through’ – it doesn’t mean ‘two’. A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of dialogue is present. The picture or image that this derivation suggests is stream of meaning following through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which may emerge some new understanding. It’s something new, which may not have been the starting point at all. It’s something creative. And this shared meaning is the ‘glue’ or ‘cement’ that holds people and societies together.”(Bohm 1996)

I do not go conferences to “access knowledge”, to network or to make new contacts. All this happens in there, too, but that is a side effect of the dialogue. I go conferences to dip into the “stream of meaning”, to “emerge some new understanding”, to be part of “something creative”.

6:38 AM May 28th (the time stamp must be some “Twitter”time-zone) I found myself sitting in a huge lecture room that was 10 meters from another lecture room where people were giving talks about research methods. I was supposed to follow the talks from a video projection broadcasted from one full lecture room to another. The situation was absurd. I had travel 4 hours to come and sit in a lecture room watching video from room next to.

The very same day my colleagues were organizing another conference back in Helsinki with the title Emerging Media Practices and Environments. This conference took place in a TV-studio and a video from three cameras with live directing was streamed online. When I noticed this on my laptop, I just couldn’t help taking my earphones and start to follow the other conference, taking place 400 kilometers from the lecture room I was sitting in.

To make the distance participation even more rich my clever colleagues were also having live reporting on Qaiku – a service I have described to be the IRC for middle age people (some people see it as Twitter-copy, though it is much more copying from Jaiku, that actually has very little common with Twitter). If you are interested in to see the reporting and discussion, here is an example. So, there I was watching high quality MP4 video stream and chatting with my colleagues about the presentations and asking presenters questions via Qaiku. It was a great experience with the “spirit of dialogue” in place.

So, is it time to say goodbye for conferences taking place in the real world? Couldn’t we just stream video presentations online and have same side-chat? Or even better, why don’t we all record presentations beforehand, post them on our own blogs and then have a chat session. Actually people are already doing this – watching online lectures together. I really like it.

So, why do we still organize conferences? – you may ask.

I ask: Did you read the beginning of this post?

In the beginning of this post I tried to explain, that the important thing is not the form of the conference – online, offline, in real world, in Second Life – but the spirit of the conference. The spirit of dialogue can be present or not.

Still, naturally certain forms support more dialogue than other. Psychologies and designers talk about affordances and patterns. These we should recognize and follow. Affordances and patterns for dialogue.

I am right now in Monterey, California attending the New Media Consortium’s conference starting tomorrow. It looks very promising. The organizers have made many great design decisions to enhance dialogue. In addition to the traditional tags, blogs and tweets the conference program on a paper is a notebook with ToDo-lists reminding people to do the online reporting and commenting of the sessions. Brilliant idea!

In the ITK 09 Antti Hautamäki launched the term “bio-pedagogy” (in Finnish; biologinen pedagogiikka). Bio-pedagogy is learning with straight manipulation of the human biology and cognitive enhancement with chemicals, artificial stimulation, genetics etc. All drugs and medication with an effect to our neural system and neurotransmitter is not “bio-pedagogy”.

Nootropics are nothing new. Taking nootropics is not bio-pedagogy. When it is organized and planned it becomes bio-pedagogy. When taking the smart drugs becomes the central strategy used for learning purposes we may call it pedagogy.

What about all other kind of “drugs” and stimulants? What about coffee and tea?

I drink coffee. Sometimes I even take painkillers and melatonin. Coffee I definitely drink to learn. Not to be more awake, but to talk with people (lets go for coffee), but also to have a break alone – to think, to slow-down. When I share and think and think and share I learn – slowly. Painkiller and melatonin I take to fix things (I know some sports and meditation would do the same job – sometimes I am just lazy).

The small pieces in the Web are difficult to boost. I can make my brain to work faster but does it have any effect on the small pieces in the Web? Yes, it may make me blog and twitter faster, but does these “fast rants” have any real impact to the intelligence of the Web? I doubt.

Like human learning, also changes to the intelligence of the Web require time. Ideas in the Web take time to mature, to become thoughtful. Here are some new small pieces to the Web to help it:

These slides are from the Estonian e-learning conference, some weeks ago. A great even, too. there is also video from my talk. I also talk in it about the new Aalto University.

Last week I also made some comments about the Finnish Information Society for the Finnish National Broadcasting Company. The radio program is in Finnish.

It’s like children playing with melting water in a sunny spring day. They dick little tracks to help the spring.

We will soon be part of a new University in Finland, called Aalto University.

“Aalto University is created through a merger between the Helsinki School of Economics, the University of Art and Design Helsinki and the Helsinki University of Technology.”

The name Aalto is making references to Alvar and Aino Aalto, a Finnish architect and designer couple. Actually, people keep on forgetting Aino in here, though she was definitely a better designers (maybe even a better architect) than her husband.

For many years I have had on my wall of my office a print of a telegram Alvar Aalto sent in 1958 for the Dean of MIT’s School of Humanities and Social Science, John Burchard.

The main point of the short message is that he is not willing to write about the philosophy of his architecture but rather think that his pieces of work are able to do the job better than any words. Finally, he is willing to make a strong and bold statement:

“… the enemy number one today is modern formalism, non traditional, where inhuman elements are dominating. True architecture, the real thing, is only where man stands in center.”

The telegram is available in the MIT’s online archives.

Now when building the new University we should listen carefully Alvar (and Aino) and their attitude. Maybe even learn something from them. My main points:

• Should we do art, design and media or philosophy of art?
• Should we put people in the center?

If you ask me, my opinion is that the right answer to the first questions is that we should do both. Answer to the second question? We should – always.