FLOSSE Posse

I was just checking the program of the Open Education Conference, OpenEd 2009, with the tagline “Crossing the Chasm”.

I have two questions about the conference:

1) Why is the title “open education” and not “free and open education” or “libre education”?

Isn’t the “open education” in this particular case making references specifically to the idea of “free software” or “libre software”, when it is applied to educational content and new forms of learning? If yes, why not then using the word free or libre to make it clear? The use of the open (alone) gets even more confusing when we remember that “Open University” and “Open Distance Education” are established concepts in the field of education and do not have anything to do with the idea of “free / libre software”.

2) Why there aren’t any talks/presentations about language learning?

If the conference is about to cross chasms why don’t it talk about language learning? Learning languages is a critical for the “open education” movement – I’ll write about this a bit more later, when getting into the humanities.

A few days ago David Weinberger wrote a post, Transparency is the new objectivity. I agree that calling something “the new” is naïve but still the comparison of these two things really makes sense. The idea is also extremely relevant and important for open and free learning content.

In the case of open and free learning content the transparency means that the user of the content will know who and in what conditions and context the content was produced. If the content comes from a North American University or from a global publishing house one should “read” it differently than in a case of it coming from a Chinese University or from some individual living – let’s say – in Luumäki. The point is not who do you believe. The point is that you are aware of the possible different interests and intentions, even biases and misunderstandings among the content producers. You must be aware and able to read the cultural meaning in the content and follow the links to sources increasing the transparency.

So what we need to be able to “read the cultural meanings”?

We should study humanities: languages, history, religion, arts, and literature of different cultures. Only by understanding the secondary material increasing transparency (who, where, when) we can get a clue of whys. If we do not get the material because of a language barrier or do not understand the cultural-historical context where it was produced, it is pretty much useless.

So, to make the open education a global movement, the people producing “open content” should study languages, and people aiming to use the content should study languages.

With the languages comes the rest: history, religion, arts, and literature – all needed to do the interpretations.

Now I am out in Busuu.com to practice my Spanish.

Internet/WWW has made remixing everyman’s right. Same time Internet/WWW has brought the idea of remixing to other types of media than audio. When the original meaning of remix “is an alternative version of a song, different from the original version” (Wikipedia), today remix can be a mixture of video clips, text and images, several images, applications and widgets with content, etc.

In Internet/WWW everything can me mixed with everything by everyone. That is simply the nature of the medium. Seriously.

Already some time ago Heny Jenkins wrote an article
Learning by remixing. Jenkins writes how children have recently become much more producers of media than ever before. Today a majority of children make some media to the Web: write blogs, do digital images, videos, sounds, games. In all this activity remixing content from different sources plays an important role. When remembering that almost everything we teach today in schools – from the results of science to humanities – are results of lending and referring to, as well as appropriation and transformation of earlier works – we should actually encourage our children to remix. Do we?

Behind the expanding enthusiasm of creating is the enabling technology: the nature of Internet/WWW (it is made for remixing) and the nature of digital commodity. As a material “digital stuff” is so flexible that you can make out of it whatever you want. You can shape it, carve it, glue it, add in it, color it and add in it other pieces of digital stuff – remix it. And yes you may share it.

If the enabling technology has been the factor that opened the flow of creativity doesn’t it mean that being creative is pretty inborn quality of us humans?

Doesn’t all this means that our creativity has been blocked?

Why? By whom?

I am right now listening my 4-year old playing with her 5-year old friend in a room next to. They are on their way to Africa. They have some jewels with them to protect them in their trip. They also have magic juice to get similar kind of forces Pippi Longstocking has. The trip is long and sailing all they way to Africa can be hard. It is actually so long that now they decided to take some of the magic juice to have the skill of flying. When flying over the sea they see an island where is Moomins home. They stop by to say hello for them. Then it is time to continue the trip.

The play continues and evolves freely. Everything is possible. Free play is beautiful example of ultimate remixing.

In my daughter’s kindergarten children do play. I have the feeling that the whole place is build around the idea of free play. They actually have research groups and they do some progressive inquiry. This year they have investigated “change”. Still, if children are playing the way I just heard them playing in here, I am pretty sure the teachers will understand its value, connections to “change” and will not disturb them.

What happens when children go to school? Do they loose playing? Unfortunately, very often they do. When they do not play they hardly have a chance to remix.

Today I went to see a pretty absurd theater play that was another example of ultimate remixing. The play Sudenmorsian (The Wolf’s Bride) is written by Aino Kailas , Finnish – Estonian author who lived in the early 1900’s. The play is a mixture of 19-century “romanticism”, “call of the wild” (Jack London) with a werewolf and some Finno-Ugrian story-telling tradition with strong Estonian spice, resistance of civilization and religion, as well as emancipation of women. Already as such it is a quite a package. On top of this in this particular case the style of the performance was traditional Japanese noh – “a major form of classic Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the 14th century”.

What a remix.

How much do they have theater in schools?

Not much. And when they do, it is often far from a free play.

Please, bring free theater to schools. Let’s remix in a real world, too.

In the Media Lab Helsinki we are this week presenting and evaluating the Master thesis works of the spring graduates. Our two MA programs are relatively selective (we take about 20% of the applicants) and small (22 and 8 students). The small number of students makes it possible to have an event where our MA candidates are resenting and “defending” their thesis for evaluators and general public.

This is, of course, very time consuming and expensive. After the first day with seven presentations and following discussion I am sure that it is worth of the investment. It is “quality assurance”, but much more it is an event of sharing and caring. And why would sharing and caring be important in education? It pays off as quality. It is not only assuring quality: it itself produces quality results.

Sharing in the case of education (and science) of course means that everyone’s work will help other people working in a same field, doing studies or research from some topic close. Seminars, presentations, conferences, journals, coffee breaks, lunches and dinners …and final thesis presentations are all there for one reason: to share.

To be honest, what it comes to “web publishing” we are not “very good” in it in the Media Lab. For instance we do not webcast the final thesis presentations. One may claim this to be a paradox and totally contradicted to the idea of “sharing”. I don’t think so.

I have some pedagogical reasons to keep some discussions – if not private – open only for people who care to come over physically (the events are open for public). The request of physical present is related to caring. By being present you physically communicate that you care. You show with the most powerful methods of communication – presence and touch (we shake hands, hug, some people even kiss each other) – that you care, that you are part of the community.

Now one may ask what about people who can’t come? What about people who live outside Helsinki? Why they can’t participate from distance – via Internet?

The problems related to communicate the caring is one reason. The other reason is respect of people’s sensitiveness and limitations. Some people are simply not great “public speakers” or may be afraid of “large audiences” or “recordings of their performances”. Some other people may suffer from stuttering, speech defects, or have problems with language in general. Especially when our community is multi-cultural and most people are communicating with a foreign language this is a real issue. Keeping events open but limited for people who care to come we respect the people and their diversity.

Among the people who care to come over physically we may assume that they will get enough contextual information to make a right interpretation about the people’s “weaknesses”.

The caring aspect of education is not discussed that much. The “emotional intelligence” and “emotional learning” are not new ideas. From some part these are related to caring. Showing caring of someone is always emotional. It means that there is a connection that makes it a community.

Caring in quality education is manifested as tough but fair critique and praises when deserved. Neither of them – critique or praises – should attack the person. The value of the person is not questioned. It is untouchable. It is sacred.

“You gotta love everybody, make ‘em feel good about themselves”

The Finnish Wikiversity – called in Finnish “Wikiopisto” – was just given its own domain under the http://www.wikiversity.org. The Finnish Wikiversity is now the tenth “official” Wikiversity in the world. You can now found us from here http://fi.wikiversity.org.

In Finland, having your “own university” feels right now so good. Why?

We are in a middle of a University reform, that is basically changing everything in our current higher education system. The website of the Finnish Ministry of Education writes about the reform:

The Finnish Universities Act is under reform. The draft law will further extend the autonomy of universities by giving them an independent legal personality, either as public corporations or as foundations under private law. At the same time, the universities’ management and decision-making system will be reformed.

The Government is planning to submit its proposal for a new Universities Act to Parliament in the spring of 2009. If passed, the new law will replace the Universities Act of 1997.

The network of universities and institutions for higher education is also changing. For example universities of Joensuu and Kuopio have formed the University of Eastern Finland whereas the Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics and University of Art and Design have together founded Aalto University. This will increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Objectives and key impacts

The reform will facilitate operation in an international environment. Its purpose is for universities to be better able to:

• react to changes in the operational environment
• diversify their funding base
• compete for international research funding
• cooperate with foreign universities and research institutes
• allocate resources to top-level research and their strategic focus areas
• ensure the quality and effectiveness of their research and teaching
• strengthen their role within the system of innovation

Wikiversity is not a research university – at least not today. Still from the objective and main key impacts of the Finnish University reform, I would like to point out a few things in which the Wikiversity has a huge potential to do very well. These are:

• react to changes in the operational environment
• diversify its funding base
• cooperate with foreign universities and research institutes
• ensure the quality and effectiveness of its “teaching” (or learning taking place in there)
• strengthen its role in innovation

So, let’s have our “own University”. Please, start editing!

And if you are interested in to know, I am not against the university reform. I am reformist.

I also think, that it is a great privilege to be part of the reform. It’s going to be interesting to see if we will succeed. We are serious and doing our best.

If we will fail, I think I can always do something else. Like write HTML. There is always place for quality HTML 2.0 – I am really good in it.

In a global scale, I see that Wikiversity can be a great change agent in online learning. It may – and should – have also some impact to the “old university” system. Well, this is already another story that was reported before.

First Monday is probably the first openly accessible, peer-reviewed journal on the Internet. Since its start in 1996 I have been a reader of the journal. In the First Monday’s archives there are several articles that really have shaped my thinking on the Internet and the Web.

The current volume (Volume 14, Number 2 – 2 February 2009) that was just published comes with an article I wrote with my colleagues, Tere Vadén and Juha Suoranta.

I would love to hear your comments on the article on this blog or somewhere else. Let me know, thanks!

The article is here:

Learning in and with an open wiki project: Wikiversity’s potential in global capacity building

Abstract

There is a chance that Wikiversity will become the Internet’s free university just as Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia on the Internet. The building of an educational entity demands considering a number of philosophical and practical questions such as pedagogy and organization. In this paper we will address some of these, starting by introducing several earlier approaches and ideas related to wikis’ potential for education. We continue by presenting three commonly used metaphors of learning: acquisition, participation and knowledge creation. Then we will present the main principles of two existing alternative educational approaches: free adult education and free school movement. To test these educational approaches and practices on Wikiversity and increase our understanding of the possibilities of this initiative, in the spring of 2008 we implemented an experimental course in Wikiversity. We conclude with several recommendations essentially advocating for Wikiversity and the use of wikis in education. However, more than just presenting our opinions, as authors we aim to make an educated — traditionally and in the wiki way — contribution to the international discussion about the future of education for all in the digital era.