What I would like to see in the educational ICT market in 2012, is an easy to use information and communication (ICT) device that comes with an easy to use Linux.

Why this could revolutionize the use of ICT in education?

In a couple of months the Apple iPad will demonstrate that a simple ICT device that is excellent to do a couple of things — web browsing, email, photos, watching video, listening to music, playing games and reading ebooks — is all a large majority of people need. I am pretty sure that with an addition of audio/video phones calls this is all what 90% of pupils and student need in school and university work. These features of course already exist in most PCs used in schools and universities. The point is that even if the features are there, PCs are by no means “excellent” in these. PCs with the Windows or some desktop Linux are just terrible what it comes to user experience.

Today the user experience with ICT devices is so poor that all clever teachers simply do not let ICT to disturb their classes. A good teacher understands that ICT tools of our time are causing too much cognitive load, disturbance and waste of time. Because of this it is better: 1) not to get ICT in classroom and leave use of them only to computer labs, were the situation is manageable; or 2) to ask pupils to use ICT only at home.

Why I think there are today great chances to design ICT device that comes with Linux that has an excellent user experience?

The five keywords of the answer are:

1. Mobile
2. Sugar
3. Maemo/Meego /Android
4. Touch screen UIs
5. Web/Firefox

(1) The mobile devices are today the primary ICT devices for the majority of people. This is not the case only in developing world but also among wealthy people. We are fast moving from the PC/Internet world to the mobile internet world. When this is happening, those people who come to the world of ICT with the mobile experience will expect no-hassle user experience from more “advantaged” uses, too: something that is activity centered and as straight forward as making a phone call. This is especially the case with most young people. They are not interested in to “pimp” their PCs or to fight against computer viruses. They are interested in to write a school paper (or a blog posts / wiki-page), to take part in a collaborative knowledge building, to draw, to take a picture or a video, to keep in touch with their friends. The ICT may help them in this or not. If it does they will love it.

(2) The Sugar — the Linux distribution originally designed for the One Laptop per Child project’s laptop — seems to be progressing very well. The basic idea in Sugar is great. Their list of principles are just right. For instance: activities – not applications, emphasizing learning through doing, facilitating sharing and collaboration, collaborative learning through rich-media experience, the culture of free software is a powerful culture for learning etc.

(3) Maemo / Meego are open source, Linux projects developing platform for mobile devices. I have tested several version of Maemo and the user experience of the latest one — with touch screen — is really good. It’s not as good as in iPhone but it is close. Also Android’s — another touch-screen Linux for mobile devices — has pretty good user experience (I have just tested my friends’ devices a couple of times).

(4) Touch screen is a must. Especially if the devices are expected to be used by masses, like it is in the case of education. Anyone who ever have tested iPhone with children under age of 5 know the power of touch screen. With iPhone children are able to draw, watch movies etc. in less than 15 minutes. This does not happen with Windows / Linux PCs and mouse or touch pad. Why is this? It is the natural and instant interaction only possible by touching objects. We have practiced touching things for more than 200 000 years. For school use the device should come with a QWERTY-keyboard, but all the selections should take place through touch screen. It’s time to say good bye for mouse. Some devices also already come with touch screen and QWERTY.

(5) Mobile device with touch screen, QWERY and Linux with great user experience are important. The most important thing, however, is to have a superior web browser: something that makes the reading and writing with the web-forms a pleasant experience. Browsing should be fast and you should be able to adjust the experience for you needs. In input you should not loose your blog post if the connection cuts etc. Simple things but not obvious. Have Mozilla Firefox – it works, it is open source.

The main message of the strategy document seems to be, that:

• In future Finland will be one of the world leading economies that is based on quality of education and educational system, and
• Education sector’s share of the total export will grow significantly by 2015.

I love when people set objectives that 1) are already reached, or 2) are so vague that one can not measure were they ever reached on not.

Finland definitely is an economy that is based on quality education. Keeping this state of affairs in the future, too, is of course a good thing and actually not that obvious, nevertheless.

In do not have anything against the second objective either, although writing that there should be a “significant growth” leaves a lot of space for people interested in to measure the return of investment. In this particular case the ROI is important because the strategy document is ending with a budget proposal with an investment of 4 million Euros for three years to reach the objectives. In most state budgets — even in Finland — 4 million Euros for three years is of course peanuts, but still I am wondering what we, the tax payers, will get with this.

What I am seriously afraid is that in Finland we just do not have exportable education products and also designing them is very difficult.

I am not sure if we have the know-how to do it. Maybe, spending 4 million Euros to find out this makes sense. At least then we will know.

Anyway, lets try to stay positive and think what kind of education or education related products we could design, produce and export.

If we’ll have a look of the education export “mass market”, dominated by Universities in USA, Australia, UK and New Zealand, their main source of business come from international student expenditure on tuition fees and secondary benefits related to them: such as their spending on goods and services related to living in the country.

For these four English speaking countries the international students really are a “market” — a group of young minds interested in to get a degree, learn to speak English and to build an international, English speaking network.

In Finland, the Universities are basically all ran with the money coming from the tax payers. Universities are independent but the bills are paid by the tax payers. For students — both Finnish and international — there isn’t tuition fees. The great investment from the tax payers makes the University education expensive (also ineffective many ways) but same time by many measurement high quality. I do not have the numbers — I hope someone somewhere does — but the factual cost of an University degree in Finland is probably rather high if compared to cost/unit in other countries.

I am afraid that the “market” of international students, that would pay the tuition fee and the high living costs in Finland, is very small if not totally non-existing.

With the same price, one would pay in Finland, a student could go to country with native English speakers (and probably much better weather and more friendly people, too). It is also a safer investment for the student: if the education is not good, at least she will learn proper English and may build an international English speaking network.

Someone should naturally do a “market study”.

What is my worst case scenario is that we will introduce tuition fees and a stipend system that will not create any value for anyone.

If we will have tuition fees, for Finnish and students coming from ETA countries we, in practice, must arrange governmental stipend system. Then we must also guarantee that anyone — coming from whatever country — who can’t pay the fee, but is selected to the program, is not let down. We need another stipend system.

So, in the end of the day we may have a massive stipend system, or maybe two, that will provide stipends which will cover 95% of the tuition fees. Then we will have a new line of bureaucrats running the system and because of this we will actually have less money to be spend on teaching in the University.

When designing education export on the bases of international students paying tuition fees one should also think, would this change in the system increase or degrees the number of students interested in to come to study in Finland?

This is important, because we as a nation really need international students. We live from export industry and to sell the products we need people who know us and are able to work with us.

Most people educated in Finland will finally pay back their (free) education with real money — whatever they will stay in Finland or not. Most of them will do business with Finnish companies, travel here as tourists and tell their good memories about Finland for their friends.

Those who will stay and will pay taxes in here are worth of millions. Really. Children and young people are those who “spend” most of the tax payers money: as a child in Finland you are very expensive for the tax payers in the “free” kindergarten, free school, free health care and free dentist.

If you’ll get someone to move to Finland at the age of 20-25, is healthy, have basic education and speaks 2-3 languages she will simply jump almost straight to the stage of being “productive” and being only for a little time a “cost” for the nation, when studying in a “free” University.

I am afraid that if we’ll introduce tuition fees for the international students we simply will not have many of them anymore. Same time we may loose the reputation of being a nation with free education from primary education to higher education. This is often one of the few facts people internationally know about Finnish education. Can we afford to loose this?

The people who promote the tuition fees often say that free is dubious and people do not consider something to be valuable when they get it for free. If you ask people on a street in Helsinki, Jyväskylä or Pihtipudas, people will not agree with this. People value the “free education” probably more than anything else in this country. Just the news of having tuition fees, regardless of it having any practical impact to most people, will increase social inequality. People will use this to distinct them from each other. This will create more unstable society with more covetousness and fear and less social cohesion. Can we afford to loose this?

I understand that introducing tuition fees at any level of education, even in continuous education, summer schools and short courses is difficult when there are also University programs that do not collect fees. In a way the Universities are some kind of market disruptors.

I think that we can change this. Let’s make the factual price of the courses and degrees visible, but include in all communication about them a simple note:

“All students in XXX University / program XXX are currently fully funded (tuition/medical insurance and stipend)”.

Now everybody know that education is not free. We pay it. The tax payers pay it.

So, is there anything the Finnish Universities could export?

I think yes. The Universities could provide special degree programs (like MBAs) and continuous education programs that are separated from the “general programs”. These programs could be offered partly online and party in campus. The Finnish Universities could also have branch offices in some countries and start to provide education in there. I am not, however, sure how good business this would be, as I haven’t seen the great American or British Universities doing this.

What else we could export? Education management consulting, teachers, architecture, software, technology?

Probably yes, but if there is a demand for these services, why I do not see Finnish companies offering almost any of these products?

Maybe using 4 million Euros to help potential companies to develop these products and to start to export them is a good strategy.

Picture by by uzzran.

In January Risto E.J. Penttilä, the director of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA – policy and pro-market think-tank financed by the Finnish business community – was promoting the idea “to spread the benefits of the Finnish primary school system across the globe”.

Penttilä’s idea is to start-up a network of Finnish International Schools around the world that would loosely follow the Finnish school curriculum (an alternative to the IB system). The teachers would be mainly Finnish but the language of teaching would be English. According to Penttilä the Finnish International Schools would be like “IKEA of schools” with unified design, functionality and curriculum and run by a foundation of private social enterprise.

Penttilä calls for action and someone to conduct a feasibility study. That is a great idea.

Results from my small survey among friends in Bogota and Bangalore gave promising results. People — most of them with children — considered the idea feasible. However, people were concern could they actually afford the school with teachers who are paid Finnish salaries. A relevant question.

Picture by by jpellgen

Two disclaimers: 1) What it comes to immigration to Finland, I think we should carry our responsibility of the global refugee problem as a wealthy nation, and provide more refuges and new place to live. We should welcome to Finland more people in need of help. We should be like the other Nordic countries. 2) I do not consider students in the University community to be primary customers, but understand that in some situations it doesn’t harm if they are considered and treated as customers. In most situations and context in a daily life at the University one should not treat students as customers, but as colleagues (members of the University community) and hmm… students. Unfortunately the ability to recognize the different contexts is rare. This is also why it is important that the management of the University is in the hands of the Academics — in hands of those who get it.

Update: check the comment for a 3rd disclaimer.

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.

Standard RSS readers lack the features for following and supporting learning activities which cross the borders of different Web 2.0 applications.

I have been “teaching”/ “mentoring” / “coordinating” (also with Hans) several open online courses. The idea of an open online course is to provide online learning experiences to anyone interested in to join the course. In open courses people often use pretty standard Web 2.0 tools (wikis, blogs, micro-blogging) to “deliver” content, to present reflections on the content (e.g. learning diaries), to share their learning exercises and to discuss about the course related issues.

If the group of participants is more than 20 it easily becomes very difficult for the participants to follow the process.

Can we help that with a better tool? I think we can. Please have a look of Hans presentation “Current state of EduFeedr project” on Slideshare. If you like it, please contact Hans and contribute. EduFeedr is (will be, when ready) Open Source.

I have been Mac user for more than 15 years. I am not a “fan” but very satisfied customer – even relatively big customer. I do not like the close ecosystem approach of the Apple, but highly appreciate their design thinking behind the products.

In the demo yesterday Steve Job explained that iPad tablet should do a better job than a smart phone or laptop computer in some specific areas. This is definitely a right way to design a product like this: to think some important things and make a product that is really good at doing them. This sounds simple.

Job’s list of important things in which iPad is really good at was:

• web browsing,
• email,
• photos,
• watching video,
• listening to music,
• playing games and
• reading ebooks.

Now we may ask: what students need from their ICT device at school?

In 90% of cases this is it: web browsing with the ability to submit things online (including longer texts, such as blog posts), email, photos, watching videos, listening audio, playing games and reading books. In addition to this, students need a simple real-time communication channel with their peers, teachers and parents: a chat or phone. I assume, in the iPad there soon will be an application for audio/video call with add-on video camera. This is definitely something needed. On the other hand, I think students will anyway have their mobile phones, too for chating and calling.

I see in the iPad some similarities to the “ultimate network connectivity school device” I wrote about some time ago: a touch screen and “limited features”. That’s what we need in schools – well designed, simple and elegant tools that are non-distractive.

Why the simplicity is so important in school? Learning is a cognitive process. All extra cognitive load put on the use of tools is out from the learning. The technology used should never take the main role from the actual learning situation.

In a way this is the case with all human activity. That is also why Apple have took over smart phone market and have made internet mobile.

Often Apple is considered to be a “high-end” technology, but actually their competence is in their ability to design for the “masses”, the people. This is why they should have at least 50% of the school ICT-device market (actually I think this is already the case in some parts of the world, like in UK).

Some one just sent me a link to another example of simplicity and respect of human cognition. Do not make me think – I just want to “consume” my magazine!

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

I find it amazing, that almost a quarter million people are committed to the mission of the Foundation, in a level that they were willing to give money for it. Interesting thing with the Foundation is also that there isn’t memberships, like in most NGOs, but an annual fundraiser. Because of this the Foundation has to deserve its existence every year in the eyes of the public.

This puts a lot of pressure on everyone working with the Foundation: from the paid staff to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers (I am a volunteer). We should all be aware about our mission and to think hard how we can achieve it.

“The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.” (Mission statement from the Wikimedia Foundation)

For me the key words in the mission are “empower and engage people”, “around the world”, “educational content”, “globally”, “multilingual”, “free of charge” and “in perpetuity”. Huh!

The people involved in the Wikimedia movement must be self-critical. The fact that Wikipedia is today relatively good source of education content in 20 European languages, Japanese, Chinese and Korean does not mean that it would be already “around the world” or “global” (if you want to know more about the Wikimedia’s global reach you may check the statistics yourself from the brilliant stat.wikimedia.org –site at: http://stats.wikimedia.org).

It is reasonable to say that we are not even close to achieve the mission. The mater is, however, well recognized by the Foundation and actually it is right now developing a five-year (2010-2015) strategic plan for the Wikimedia movement. You may participate to the process in here: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/

I think that the Wikimedia movement, and the Foundation supporting it, should aim to have exponential growth. Only with a strong growth it may reach its mission: be truly global movement.

Why Wikimedia then should be a global movement?

I think that the world greatest challenges of the next hundred years — from poverty to climate change and humanitarian disasters — can be solved only with education. We know that the current educational system(s), the formal school education, is not the solution. It simply do not scale. In a global scale, systems based on schools will not produce “educated people”. We need systems that are better in scaling.

Is Wikimedia able to scale? I think it holds the potential to scale.

Still, it would mean that next coming years the number of people donating for the Foundation, should be in millions and the Governments’ should include Wikimedia in their multilateral development cooperation “payroll”. I think it would payoff.

In the Wikimania 2009 Erik Möller, the Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, gave a talk promoting the objective “to make Wikimedia a 300 Million People Movement By 2020“. In the presentation there are many great and practical ideas for scaling. Check out the great presentation (video) and the slides.

Holy Trinity of New Media (modification of Negroponte 1995)

The roots of the concept “new media” can be located to the late 1980’s and early 1990’s emergence of digital and computerized media products, such as CD-ROMs and WWW-sites. The reason to call these products “new media” was to distinct them from such “old” media products as television and radio programs, feature films, recorded music, news papers, magazines, printed books etc. The new digital technology made it possible to explore new forms of media that are interactive, networked, social and also able to emulate and remix all existing media formats and technologies.

In his book Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte (1995) describes how we are entering to the era of convergence. He describes how the traditional printing, telecommunication and computer industries will converge. A book publishers must take in use new computing technologies to distribute their products for readers through communication networks, the operators of telecommunication networks must think about content and computing, and the computer industry should look to the direction of content and telecommunication industries.

I have called the convergence of the three and the emergence of the new the “Holly Trinity of New Media”. In my version of the picture (above) in the crossing point, in the middle, there is the “core” of new media. The printing, telecommunication and computing I have named to be simply “media”, “networked communication” and “computing”. The reason for this is to have focus rather to the essence of the phenomena and less to the industries merging in and from them.

Negroponte was right or influential or both. The old media has worked hard to get to the middle. What Negroponte didn’t see very clear was the emergence of new formats, services, project and companies right in the “core of the new media”. The companies found in the middle — today already many of them huge corporations — have from large part “spoiled” some parts of the traditional businesses operating in the old bubbles or in the crossing points of them. New media companies and projects, such as Google, Amazon, PayPal, Yahoo, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Facebook and thousands of smaller “new media” companies and projects have shown that there really is something new in “new media”. These companies and projects are not looking for convergence, but rather emergence. They have shown that moving to the center is difficult – easier is to born in there. Interesting is also to see how the “new media” are today expanding from the center to the three “old” areas and especially in the crossing points of them. Google is working hard to get a bite of mobile phone business, Amazon is producing e-book readers, Wikipedia offers printed version of its articles and so on.

An interesting trend in new media in 2010 is that everything that finally got to be bites (digital) will start to become atoms (physical) again. The physical computing and tangible interfaces is a good example of this trend. Services offering physical replicates of digital models are another examples of the bites becoming atoms. Several avant-garde Media Art pieces have predict this development already a decade ago. For instance, the Mixed Reality Pong by Kiia Kallio (2001) is an example of the first one and the Dump your Trash ! by Blank & Jeron (1999) where one can order any web site sculpted on marble or granite, is an example of the later.

The title of my professorship is “new media design and learning”. For more than 15 years I have practiced new media design with specialization to collaborative learning tools that could be today called social software or social media tools and services. For me new media has always been social media – a process of collaborative meaning making in a peer- and use production.

Still, daily “new media” keep on surprising me. The new forms and practices of new media designed and emerging in different areas of human life from family to work, from leisure to consuming, from children to elder people, from activism to politics keep us busy. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

PS. The song you ain’t seen nothing yet is actually some kind of pre-historical piece of new media: a smart repacking of several song of the Who. The remix video on YouTube is also a cool new media piece. “Thank you for watching”

We have a video stream and the videos of the talks will be online in the conference site for a later use.

Threaded backchannel is in Qaiku.

Symposium Program.

The first keynote is given by Yrjö Engeström. His topic is “The Educational Value of Learning by Cheating” – and he is not joking.

Engeström is most well known as one of the founders of (Scandinavian) activity theory.

The first lecture – New Media and Digital Culture – is part of a common study program for students of the Aalto University’s three schools (Science and Technology, TKK, Economics, HSE, Art and Design, TaiK). The title of the course is “Media in Change” (Median murros) and the aim is to present different point of views to the topic.

The first lecture is online (the right way) as a Flash video one can embed. Here:

The slides of the lecture are here:

The other lecture is part of a course with a similar idea: different point of views to a common theme. In this lecture series the common theme is sustainable development.

From this lecture series there are already some great lectures online. Unfortunately they are put online the wrong way – as Windows Media. Here is a link to the video from my lecture:

Part 1

Part 2

Preparing and giving a lecture of 1,5 hours is not something I do everyday. In my school (art and design) and department (Media Lab) we have a very few this kind of “lecture series”. We do stuff. This is of course possible because we have relatively small groups in the classes, although they have been growing rapidly in last two or three years with more students and less faculty. The class sizes in the two other schools – science and engineering and economics – are much bigger, often hundreds of students in one lecture series.

What I am worried about is what will happen to our quality education (awarded several times) if the 1.5 hours lectures will become the facto standard in the new Aalto University?

In a worst-case scenario we will decrees the average class sizes (in the whole Aalto University) to level that does not have any real effect on the quality of education but will look better in the Annual Report. In our school we will have more students and in the two other schools less students, but nobody will benefit.

If you are interested in to get some idea of the Learning Society –lecture, there is a great blog post about it. It is critical but fair post. Here is the link:

The learning society didn’t really take off (have a look of my comments in the end of the post, too)

If you didn’t know already, Spotify (Check the Wikipedia article) is a software and service to search music, to do playlists and to stream music. There are also social recommendations with “artists you may like” –list and you may have the music available offline. Spotify runs on Win, Mac and Linux. There is also iPhone application.

How Spotify works in practice: You’ll write “Sibelius” to search field and it gives you a list of 235 albums of Sibelius’ music with 3772 tracks. Then you may sort the results e.g. by popularity, track, artist, time and album. Everything is linked together: you’ll click the album name and you’ll get all the tracks of that album.

Probably the greatest feature of Spotify is shareable links. You can make a link to a single track or playlist and share them. Here are examples:

Vadim Repin – Sibelius : Violin Concerto in D minor Op.47 : I Allegro moderato:
http://open.spotify.com/track/5vmPFB8qwZYrabPEqzXlkH

Teemu’s playlist:
http://open.spotify.com/user/teemu.leinonen/playlist/6d3RFTMGtmu2KLyXqC0xaa

Spotify is today a music service. I assume they are looking for video content, too.

How Spotify could be used for teaching and learning?

The same way it is used for music, except the content should be small “tracks” for learning: lectures, interviews of scientists and researchers. From these one could then make “playlists” and simply send them for students or use them in a lecture by brining interesting people as voices or vide clips in to the classes.

SpotifyU could be fully free, no advertisement service, run with content donations from the world leading scientists and teachers. To start-up, just have some of the Hans Rosling’s video lectures in small clips in Spotify – something like his famous TED talks – and you will have a movement.