FLOSSE Posse

In the Media Lab Helsinki, two times a year, we bring out our researchers and students from the offices, studios and classrooms to show what they’ve been busy with. This year the Spring Demo Day took place May 20th in the Lume TV-studio, with more than 200 people dropping in to see the demo presentations and demo stands.

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!”

During the last 15 years I must have attend close to 200 conferences (more than 10 conferences per year). The variety of them is remarkable: from international governmental organization’s massive gatherings of thousands of delegates, like UN’s WSIS to small, free, open space conference’s, like the Recent Changes Camp.

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!

Last week I went to the Interactive Technology in Education 2009 (ITK) – conference. It really is a remarkable event that has took place in Finland already for 20 years: in a country of 5 million people, more than 1500 education technology experts get together every year for three days to share. My first time in ITK was probably in 1995.

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.