It must have been in 2005 in Pretoria when I first time met Erik Möller, a Wikimedian, who is nowadays working full time for the Wikimedia Foundation. We were both invited to a conference in South Africa to talk about open source tools for teaching and learning. I don’t even remember what did I talk in there, but I remember Erik’s talk about Wikipedia, Mediawiki engine and the Wikimedia Foundation.
Erik’s talk in 2005 was nothing special in content wise, but his passion and love on Wikipedia and his confidence of its importance had a great impact on me. Earlier same year I was in India and got a change to listen and chat a bit with Jimmy Wales - the founder of Wikipedia (and an Internet celebrity). Jimmy is a great speaker. He also loves the Wikipedia project and of course knows how great it is. Probably the most interesting character of these Wikimedian folks is anyway their real commitment to the “community”. In South Africa Erik ran away from the conference to meet the local Wikimedians, whereas in India Jimmy sometimes looked busier to find WLAN and to chat (on IRC) with the online wikimedians than paying attention on the conference taking place around him.
I am just about leaving to Wikimania 2008 – the annual “conference” of the Wikimedians. It’s an interesting event. It’s a conference and gathering of different kind of people with one common interest - “free knowledge”. What makes it really interesting is that people coming there are not really “like-minded”, as it often is in scientific conferences. In Wikimania people really have very different backgrounds and ideas. There will be people from all the continents, most likely believers of all the major religions of the world, with different political ideas and ideologies, high school students and university professors, rich and not that rich. In that sense it is better than the United Nations. But like I said, the people coming to Wikimania share one common interest: “free knowledge”.
After Wikimedia I am traveling to Helsinki. The first half of the year I have been focusing on writing in sunny Northern California, and a bit of jumping between Bogota and Palo Alto. I am really thankful for all the people who made this possible. I am, anway, very happy to return the Eurolandia and Helsinki.
In Helsinki there are two upcoming events related to the idea of “free knowledge”. The Open Research Swarm of Finland is going to have a summer meet up on August 8th. The third Konfabulaari (my favourit confernce in Finland beside the ITK) of the University of Helsinki will take place on October 8th. Konfabulaari is an unconference focusing on social media in Universities. The Konfabulaari wiki is now open for you to build the program of the event. I’ll do my best to make it to both events. They are free and everyone is welcome.
In September - early October (Oct 1—Oct 4) I will make a short trip back to US, to attend the PDC08: Participatory Design Conference. I will present there my paper “Software as Hypothesis: Research-Based Design Methodology”. On November 12-13 I will be in Barcelona giving a talk at the UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning’s 5th International Seminar. These are confirmed.
Still, in Helsinki we are planning with colleagues from the Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics and Nokia Research Centre a seminar series with the theme “mobile Internet”. I am not yet sure about the exact dates, form or web presence of the events. This activity, like almost everything in a coming next two years in my work, is related to Aalto University. Aalto University is a new university uniting my University, the University of Art and Design Helsinki and the previously mentioned Universities under one roof. It’s very interesting to see what will come out when we have the science and engineering, business and management, and art and design, all in one place. A riot? A better world? We will see.
I got a link to this pretty neat web site explaining how educating girls pays off.
It made me thing how value is created. Open source and value creation was also one of the topics we we chating about with Jon “maddog” Hall last week in Bogotá.
Related to open source, open content and free culture people are often asking where do these people find time to do these things? The answer is pretty simple: they are saving time from doing something else. Many people are also paid to do it (I am partly and so is maddog), because people paying for it see that the value created is valuable for them, too (in most of the cases the value translates to euros and dollars, too).
How is value created? Value is created all the time with almost in all human activity. Actually, most things we do in our life create some value. So, we just do things and value is created. Different activities, however, creates different amounts of value.
Examples: Some people like to play air guitar, some like to write Wikipedia articles. Some people want to play football, while other want to spend all their time on paid work, only. Some want to watch TV, some play with their children. Some people want to party. Most of us do all these things in different quantities.
The key is that some activities create more value than others.
Eating a dinner with your family creates value - social value. In many cases it may create more social value than clicking around in Facebook. In some cases having a family dinner together is very expensive - you may actually loose more social value than what is created. In Leo Tolstoy’s words:
“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Sleeping creates value. If you are tired you can’t create value. Good parties create social value. Bad parties may get expensive in many ways.
Watching TV is very expensive behavior from the value creation point of view.
Working in open source, open content or free culture projects create a lot of value. It creates so much value that some people are scared. They shouldn’t. They can benefit from the value creation, too.
When more people will have more control on their time, more basic skills and understanding on how the world works they can join the global value creation party. That is the girl effect.
Last weekend I took part in at the Campus Party Colombia in Bogota. Campus Party is a combination of LAN-party, technology conference and a fair sponsored by Telefonica, the Spanish telecom.
I gave a talk about how to use New Media tools (blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, mobile phones) in learning and capacity building in self-organized and formal learning contexts.
When preparing my talk I asked from the organizers who will be in the audience. I didn’t get very good demographic profile. For some reason I assumed that the audience will be more general public and maybe educators. During the talk – actually a few minutes before – I realized that most people coming to the sessions were bloggers, hackers and other “native digitals”. So I felt a bit stupid to explain these people what is Wikipedia (although I think many of them were not aware of the other projects of the Wikimedians). In my talk I could have been, however, more theoretical and spend less time on explaining what kind of tools there are for sharing links, websites (wikis), point of views (blogs), micro-content (micro-blogs), and learning environments.
The discussion following the talk and many discussions in the “campus” during the days were fruitful and interesting. Some observations.
Many people and cognitive tools in one place. The gatherings of people with their cognitive tools (computers) are really important. These are event, not only to share your (free) software, but also to strength social ties in a way that is never possible online. It is partly a matter of “bandwidth””– yes – but will we ever have the bandwidth existing in meetings in a real life? I doubt. The flexibility to formulate group saround some topic is also pretty unique in real-life events.
Role of media (and propaganda) in learning. The role of media in the development of Latin American societies has been discussed in many forums. I don’t want to get political with this topic, but can’t help to mention that if you want to watch news in English in Colombia it is very likely that the only free news channel offered with the satellite package is Fox New. E.g. they do not include BBC in the packages. I have lately spend a lot of time on thinking the role of mass media in education and coming up with a conclusion that more media, the better. If people can access all possible propaganda in the world, they will be confused about the contradictory messages and will find out about the topics themselves. So, if I would have a role in any national media policies, I would aim to provide one TV news channel that would rotate randomly all the different news channels. The channels in the rotation (with sub-titles) could be BBC World, CNN, Al Jazeera, CCTV, teleSUR, NDTV 24x7 and the local news channels in local languages. Actually, this kind of “world view news” could be an interesting website, one could use e.g. in TVs at schools and in media education. Who could write software that will take these satellite channels programming and make out of them a single stream?
Knowledge management in geographically distributed mega-organizations. In Campus Party I also met some people working for a huge organization with thousands of people around the world. These geographically distributed mega-organizations should be the once who will most benefit of the new media tools and applications. They will help people to share their work with their current colleagues, but also with their potential future colleagues. The matter is not only to have a cool “intranet”, but much more on designing and defining the social practices around it. Sharing documents is easy. Sharing knowledge is hard. Building knowledge is something we should aim to.
In our University back in Helsinki we have been building pretty neat tool, called Onni, for our organizational knowledge sharing and building. Onnis main building blocks are (1) people; (2) notes (with flat replies); (3) organizational taxonomy (schools, departments, projects, courses, etc); (4) interests (free folksonomy); and (5) groups (with notes and calendar). The official policy documents will be on a wiki so that anyone may edit them (and will hopefully also know who should and who should not edit them). Onni should be ready for public launch in September. Then we will have all the 2500 people in the system with their picture, profile, projects, interests and groups taking advantage of the system. Still the aim of Onni is not to replace all other tools used at the University. The research staff will still add their results to the official and public Research database, and e.g. study records, traveling and financial issues will be handled with other system. Important is that all the systems will work together. Information of the publications of each researchers will come with RSS to Onni, course information will come to Onni from the study record, etc.
Maybe in the Campus Party 2009 we could also have some kind of social networking site in the Onni way. All the participants could be in the system with their profiles, interests (folksonomy) and list of sessions they are planning to take part in. As the Campus Party is an event of several days some kind of “centralized news channel” could be useful, too – maybe a big screen with TV-kind of “latest Campus party news” every two hours (between the “official” news there could be the “world view news” rotation from satellite channels.
Thank you for all the people who made the Campus Party Colombia real: the Campuseros (people who were camping in the site), organizers, visitors, and sponsors. A special thanks from me goes to Carolina Botero, the boss of the blogs -track and Offray Luna, the coordinator of the Software Libre -track. Well done!
If you are interested in to see how it was in there, you may have a look of the Youtube channel or the Flickr -group.
Friends at the UNCIEF NYHQ, who have been developing also the MobilED audio wiki, just announced a prototype of solar powered communication hub than can be used to provide communications, education, connectivity and emergency support in places lacking electricity, Internet, telephone, radio and other connections. I think this is a great idea.
The communication hub is a suite case size luggage one can take to areas of emergency to set-up a temporary school and communication center. The suite case contains (James Bond-like) equipment for emergency and educational communications.
In a way, the solar powered communication hub is also an extension of UNICEF’s great “school in a box” initiative. School in a box is a kit of school supplies and materials such as exercise books, pencils, eraser and scissors for a teacher and up to 80 students (taught in double shift classes of 40). Each year UNICEF sends millions of these kits for teachers and children affected by emergencies whether natural disasters or man made. The school in a box is UNICEF’s standard response in emergencies.
The communication hub runs for 38 hours solar power array.
The core of the unit is a PC hardware running Linux with various network connections. With access to satellite (e.g. Worldspace) and mobile networks one can pull content, such as educational materials and news.
The kit comes with a projector and speakers for watching and listening educational content, and a webcam and microphone, for instance, to register children in disaster situations, and to communicate the situation in the site for the rest of the world.
With Linux-based radio-station software one can create radio programs and transmit them for the people with the FM transmitter (5 km), also coming with the kit.
The unit comes with “ultimate network connectivity” (something I have asked from the school laptop providers), including 50km WiFi range, GSM, GPRS and thuraya network connections. Different units can also share data (with the WiFi) and they can be used for making telephone calls between the kits.
In addition to these features I would definitely include to the kit a simple printer. The printer could be used to print school work sheets and reading materials and with it UNICEF could provide people with a piece of paper (ID) showing that they have been registered by UNICEF. In a case of emergency a simple piece of paper may save your life.
The design of the kit will be released under creative commons and the software used is open source.
How the distribution and use of the units will then take place?
In a case of emergency UNICEF is locating field workers in the actual place, to help children affected by the disaster. The idea is that they will travel to the place with the kit and will help the local people to set-up the school. The digital communication hubs will then be part of the emergency infrastructure, build to relief the people effected. This way it can be compared to attempts to provide clean water, food and shelter.
I believe that this kind of communication hub may have a huge impact to the situation of the people living in the middle of emergencies. For children and young people the best possible relief is to get back to the world of learning as soon as possible. It will also be a relief for the parents. I hope the digital school in a box and the communication hub can do exactly this.
The title is silly, but well… this is a blog anyway.
Comparing schools in Finland and in US is bit like comparing carrot to all the fruits. Carrots are good, but there are many great fruits, too. We also know that some fruits are just non-eatable, even poisonous. Anyway, in the following I will make some comparisons, which shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
To write about this was partly inspired by the Wall Street Journal article, What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?. Stephen Down, from whom I got the link, wrote already the main point:
“Smarter? Hardly. Just better educated”.
Right, the average in Finland is higher than the average in some other countries.
Some weeks ago I was visiting a school in Palo Alto, California. I was having the chance to observe some sessions of a science class running a study project on nanoscale science. The project was part of the nanosense project developing “curriculum units to help high school students understand science concepts that account for nanoscale phenomena”. So, in practice in those lessons, I was in, they were testing one unit designed in the project.
The school was a good public school. The science classroom was like science classes everywhere where there are resources to have laboratory space and equipment. Most high schools in Finland have these facilities, and so does most schools I have visit in number of countries. I may summarise that there aren’t many differences in the facilities.
The teachers, in the school I was visiting, were obviously highly educated, smart and reasonable people: all qualities that make a great educator. Also, the instructional and pedagogical strategies used in the class were similar to those used in Finland. Students were doing study work with a connections to real life, and this way anchoring the science in their own everyday experiences. I would say that in the pedagogy there isn’t any great differences, either, except that this kind of project-based learning is probably even more common in the US than in Finnish schools.
Where I see differences is the more general “school culture”. The Wall Street Journal article was also pointing out these differences. These issues are very little related to anything that is taking place inside classrooms. They are much more, well cultura, structural and organizational. These are things that are probably making the Finnish schools and the American schools different. I’ll try to list here some concrete examples.
In Finland, at least in some high schools, teachers of different study subject are working together to have integrated project where students are studying some large topic from several perspectives. This is not common, but I think (and hope) that it is a growing trend in Finnish high schools. Teachers in the school in California told that collaboration with teachers of other subjects would be great but hard to arrange. The curriculum and lesson plans seem to be so tight that there is very little space to plan and implement things differently. Even in the class I was visiting they were testing a “unit”, something that could be then maybe replicated in other schools. Why is this? Is this some kind of attempt to have Taylorism in schools?
In Finland students have a lot of freedom of expression. The youth culture is rather integrated to the curriculum than isolated from is. This kind of openness brings the topics current in youth cultures under consideration among adults, too. A funny example of this comes from some years back when we were organizing European conference in a high school in Järvenpää, Finland. One of the ideas in the conference was to bring the participants in a middle of a school in a normal school day. The pupils didn’t know (and obviously didn’t care) that there were visitors. All the lessons took place just like in a normal day when the actual conference took place in the auditorium of the school. When I then arrived to the lobby of the school (it is a beautiful, new school building with a large round lobby in the middle) at 9:30 AM with a group of educational researchers around Europe there was a rock band in the middle playing Soundgarden’s - Black Hole Sun. It was not a show organized for us. The pupils playing in the band were actually in their music class. Some of my Italian collagues were a bit afraid to follow me.
In Finland students also work with rather large “units”, like “History of American Rock Music” (not really, but they could).
Like everywhere, also in Finland teachers are naturally preparing their students to the national exams, know as the abitur exam. The beauty of the exam is that it is actually asking students to write relatively long essays. The exams take 4-8 days (6 hours per day) depending on how many exams in what study subjects you’ll take. To make your students to write good essays you better teach and study the topics on holistic way. Here is an example of essay question in the science exam (just translated it from a document available online – all the old exam questions are online):
“How cells are producing enzymes? In your essay explain the structure of enzymes, their tasks and function in the cells”.
Another example of a question from history and social science exam:
“Here is an image of William Roberts’ painting of women during the World War II. Analyze the role of women during the World War II by using the image as a starting point. Analyze the War’s influence on women’s role and status in a society in the Western world. You may write your essay also from the perspective of the history of Finland.”
The idea behind the Finnish high school exams is simple, and actually based on very classical (American) management “truth”: you get what you measure. If you measure route learning and route memory that’s what teachers will teach in schools. If you’ll stress understanding the big picture, general knowledge and higher-level concepts, that is what the people in the system will try to do.
There is another simple “management truth” we may use when thinking about education. I think I heard this the first time in context of architecture. It goes like this. When a customer is asking for more, better, faster and cheaper, the architects’ standard answer is: there are three factors of which you may choose only two. These are “good”, “fast”, and “cheap”. So your building can be either:
Good and finnished fast, but this becomes expensive
Good and cheap but will take very long to build
Cheap and made fast, but not very good
In Finland the educational system, as it is today, was build slowly. It is still strongly relying on the work of Uno Cygnaeus ( 1810-1888 ) who was influenced by the early European “constructivist” Pestalozzi ( 1746–1827 ) and Froebel ( 1782 –1852 ). The idea that children learn the best when they areactive and build things was not really invented by John Dewey or Piaget – they only were able to present the idea in a language of positivist science, when the earlier thinkers thought themselves as “pedagogues” or educational philosophers.
On top of the good, cheap or fast factors there si still one factor we “customers” must take very seriously. The questions is: How is the architect offering the service? Is he any good?
Tagging, social bookmarking, Digging, Twittering and the seemingly never-ending list of social network sites offer a great resource of inspiration to dream about for people who work with education and technologies. We offer a workshop where you can do just that!
SIRTEL’08 stands for Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning. This workshop will take place now for the second time (in ECTEL08 ), and we modified the call to accommodate more “serious fun”, instead of only focusing on academic papers of on-going work.
This year we especially invite System demos, Hands-on proposals and Pecha Kucha talks! Hands-on proposals, for example, can be just a 1-pager to describe how your idea of something like Amazon.com would work for learning purposes. Or what would be the Flickr of learning resources? Then, in the workshop, you will be able to lead a short brainstorming session on this. We hope that this kind of exercise will make us all think what can Social Information Retrieval offer for educational context, and how can it help learners to learn better.
IMPORTANT DATES
- Submission: June 29
- Results Notification: August 3
- Camera Ready Submission: August 31, 2008
- Workshop date: September 17, 2008
- Main conference dates: September 18-19, 2008
With Hans, we just checked our database of our notes and provided for the participants some “pass”, “fail” or “complementary work required” statements. The statements are now in the participants page.
March 3rd, the day starting the course, there were 72 registered participants. According to our book keeping 15 participants made all the assignments during the 10 weeks project. 5 participants should still do some complementary work to make it passed. The 20 participants who did (or almost did) complete the whole course should be really proud of their work. Congratulations!
Some of the assignments were found by some participants relatively demanding and our estimation of 4-6 hours of study work per week was probably underestimation. We do not have exact numbers on this but I think the actual workload was something like double.
Probably the greatest results and satisfaction for me comes from the fact that some people are already working on to organize the course again. Also Estonians are working on to localize the course and do it in their own Wikiversity in Estonian.
I am using some materials from the experiment in one research paper I am working on. I hope it will a bit open the idea of Wikiversity for “academics”, too. I think for many - including myself - the “wiki-way” of teaching and learning may at first look almost dangerous, or at least hard to handle.
My experience is that it is not necessary that different, at all. In a Wikiversity course you may have people who are motivated to study (you may call them students - I prefer calling them participants in the case or Wikiversity), readings, assignments, class discussions, evaluation and feedback. Most likely you will also face complains, demands and plagiarism. We are, anyway, human, even on a wiki.
I think the best way to get a hint of the course and how it was organized is to read the course blog of the facilitators written by Hans and me. From the archives of the blog you will find our comments and notes that were written during the process. In the sidebar of the blog there are also links to all the 20 participants that made it (or almost made it). Having a look of their blogs will give you an idea of the course from their perspective.
From some part, I agree with the interpretations presented in the study. My final conclusions would anyway be somehow different. Here are some quotations from the conclusions of the study:
“We find that children who won a voucher spent significantly less time watching television and doing homework. Moreover, the effect on homework appears to have had real consequences for school performance. We find evidence indicating that children who won a voucher had lower school grades. Parents reported that these children had a significantly lower expectation of going to college. Finally, we also find suggestive evidence that winning a voucher is associated with negative behavioral outcomes.”
“These findings indicate that providing home computers to low-income children in Romania led them to experience worse outcomes.”
“…our analysis brings out the important role of parents in shaping the impact of home computer use on child and adolescent outcomes. We find that in families where mothers stay at home and where parents have rules regarding computer use, the negative effects of winning a voucher are greatly reduced. Thus, our findings suggest caution regarding the broader impact of home computers on child outcomes. They also raise questions about the usefulness of recent large-scale efforts to increase computer access for disadvantaged children around the world without paying sufficient attention to how parental oversight affects a child’s computer use.”
I agree with the conclusion that using computers efficiently for educational purposes children needs adults. Actually, children can not constructively achieve any higher-level cognitive skills just on their own, or with peer-support.
I wouldn’t, however, ask for “parental oversight” or promote “mothers at home” to achieve the badly needed adult guidance. There are other options, too. I wonder if the researchers have ever heard about teachers - those professional educators who work with children?
One simple solution to guarantee adult supervision is simply to keep the computers (laptops) inside schools, use them mainly in there and let children to take them at home only when there is study work to be done with them.
My conclusions: Everybody planning to dump PCs/laptops to the hands of the children should probably step back and think about teachers.
The questions is: how teachers will be capable to supervise the use of computers in education.
Finally, I think the OLPCs XO with the Sugar is probably the best educational PC in the market. Not because it would be great, but because it is least disturbing technology.
Sugar is not a tool for playing computer games or for watching Britney videos from Youtube. The Sugar is actually full of pretty serious educational stuff, although lacking tools for collaborative knowledge building. These tools can be there one day.
Following this, I am shocked - if it is true what is widely reported - that many Ministries of Education around the world have asked to have Windows in the XO, and have said that they will have them only when they run Windows.
I can’t help to think that this is a result of two things in the ministries: (1) lack of education and (2) corruption. It’s a sad world.
This is a note to remember to come back to the topic at some point. So, do not expect anything very elaborated. I’ll still start with a quotation from Foucault (Michel Foucault from Wikiquote):
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.
I feel that there is an ideological divide in the Open Educational Resources community. I see that there are two major Parties. I call them (1) content-people and (2) human-people.
The content-people believe that Open Educational Resources should primary be some kind of independent “courses” people study. Studying the OER courses will then lead to enlightenment. This approach can be compared to reading a religious text leading to deep religious belief and certainty.
The content-people are relying on non-questioning epistemology and to social philosophy of “equality of opportunity”. These two things are very much interconnected.
The non-questioning epistemology leads to action where people are aiming to create non-bias OERs that are representing universal truth. When you hold the universal truth it is fair to offer everyone an equal opportunity to access the truth. Take a course and the test: you made it!
The human-people see that the Open Educational Resources should primary be only reference materials that are used in a human-centered teaching and learning process. The OERs are never “courses” and one should never “take them”.
The human-people’s hold social epistemology where different interpretations of the world and the truth are in a continuous conflict. To promote equality people should be empowered to be active subjects in the process of defining the “truth” of their time. Because of this providing people with an access to the OERs is not enough. One must empower people to create their own OERs, modify them, break them, dishonor them. I call this intervention.
I also see some kind of difference in the two parties’ way of seeing tradition.
Same time when the content-people believe on universal truth, they do not give a lot of weight to tradition. At least I haven’t heard about any great OER projects focusing on classical philosophy or national epics.
The human-people who are more or less critical on everything are still more open to build on tradition and native wisdom. The fact that someone before found some content valuable is seen as a sign of the content’s high quality.
This is a blog, so I can’t help to make more conceptual pairs, which can be or then not, related to the OER Parties:
North America - (New) Europe, Catholic - Protestant, Federal - Networked, Religious - Secular, Material - Spiritual.
Heh. Which Party you belong to? Which Party I belong to?
I got very positive replies from the Ministry. Artcihoke wrote about the idea online, while I was waiting to make the big news. Then something happened and nothing happened anymore. The last note I got from the National Board of Education was that their lawyers are considering if this is possible. Blah. End of story? Not yet.
This week some friends back in Finland started an online campaign with an aim to promote more project-oriented approach in education, so that students could study several study subjects by doing research on some theme. A theme could be for instance presidential election in USA or Baltic Sea. While doing the projects on themes student could cover studies related to several subjects, such as social sciences, history, math/statistics, biology etc.
To put forward this kind of thinking my friends wrote a manifesto, set up an online petition and opened a wiki for people to discuss about the topic. Next fall they are going to hand the manifesto and the petition for the National Board of Education. Good.
In the wiki site set for people to discuss about the idea, the first post was asking could someone add the current The National Core Curricula to the wiki. The answer was that you would find a link to the site of the National Board of Education where they have the documents. Good. Good enough? I don’t think so.
Links to documents are great. If you are, however, planning to change some document it is definitely better to have it on a wiki. So, I took the document and posted it to the wiki. Now the National Core Curriculum for Basic Education 2004 is on a wiki. You will find the wiki version of the document from here:
Feel free to edit and comment it in the discussion pages.
So here we are, finally. I could have done this a year and half ago. Why I didn’t? I didn’t do it because there wasn’t a community interested in to work with the documents. Now there are at least 20 people who already wrote the petition and are at some level interested in the topic. I know that the people in the Board of Education and the Ministry of Education are also interested in this. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as we are kind of paying them to be interested in this. Let see if this will now get any reactions from them.
You may wonder what is the status of the National Core Curricula document and how is it created in the first place?
The document is equivalent to “national curriculum” in many other countries. It is prepared by a group of experts in a frequency of 5-10 years. The document is basically defining what students in different grades should master. The current practice is that in the national level we only have this document to “guide” the work taking place in schools. Each school is then free and obligated to formulate their own curriculum and make it public in their website. In a way the National body is only giving the ends. The means are then decided in the school level. Then again the National and local educational authorities are following that things are going fine in the local level.
I think this works very well. Also the National Core Curricula document itself is really good document. I do not have any complains about it. Except one, which is not really about the content but about the process.
I think discussion on renewing and updating it should be continuous - something we do every day, not only in every 5-10 years. A wiki is a great place for this. I still think we need experts and the Ministry who will have the final word – these things should not be decided on a wiki-war. Still, the process pf preparing a document that is effecting us all, through our children, should be as transparent and open as possible.
My brother is today defending his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Tampere in Finland. Because I am now in Northern California I am not able to attend the public defense of the dissertation. I got, however, the actual book on my screen and printer. Thanks to open publishing.
The University of Tampere is also my academic “home”. I studied there in the early 1990s. When I finally finished my thesis at the Faculty of Education, they did not have in place any way to publish thesis online. Because my thesis was about international education politics, I thought that someone somewhere could find it interesting and put it online under my homepage. Because my thesis discussed the education policy of the Government of Zambia, I shamelessly sent one or two emails to the University libraries in Zambia, just to inform them that this kind of work is out there and I am happy if they will add it in their collections.
Things at the University of Tampere are today different. The Tampere University Press is publishing all Master thesis and Ph.D. dissertations online as PDF files if the writer gives a permission to do it. I assume most people do.
Playing with the database that covers all the Master thesis since 1991 is fun. You may search with different words and get an idea how popular they have been in last 17 years among the students of the University of Tampere. Some examples: action research: 39 hits, television: 58, Internet: 145, Radio: 36, Mobile phone: 31, artificial intelligence: 7, wiki*: 2, blog*: 5, society 103, equality: 31, “progressive inquiry”: 6, Second Life: 0, Habbo Hotel: 1 etc.
With the open access we often focus mainly to the open access journals. This is of course important, however, I think it is also very important to bring Master and Ph.D. thesis online. The practice also carries pedagogical value in University teaching: it is very different to write your thesis exclusively for your professor, than when knowing that it will be out there for people to read and comment.
There are many open source tool to publish and maintain this kind of online libraries, but it looks that the de facto open source standard tool is the DSpace. When checking the DSpace, I also found a Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) maintained by the University of Southampton, UK. Looks interesting, but actually it is not exactly a repository of open access content. At least I found from there in less than 5 minutes links to repositories, which do not provide access to the full text, but only to the metadata.
I wonder could there be some open APIs to make the open theses even more easily accessible and movable from one place to another? Would it be possible to mash-up the register in any website so that one could seamlessly search these databases from a single search? What about the Google Scholar or Science Commons?
The full title of my brother’s dissertation in English is “Scientific Thinking and Weeds of Philosophy. The Identity of Philosophy as a problem of Finnish Philosophy and the Conceptions of Philosophy in the Output of Eino Kaila and Erik Ahlman”. The actual book is in Finnish, but there is an English Summary. From the Summary:
“The study deals with the development and characteristics of academic philosophy in Finland. It brings forth new results and critical viewpoints in constructing and estimating the history, identity and characteristics of Finnish academic philosophy.”
Last weekend I took part in the RecentChangesCamp - a three day open space conference for people interested in wikis and related topics.
I met some new and old wiki-people, which some of them I may soon start to call my friends. I saw several interesting demos and had some quite nice discussions about wikis in education, wikis in informal, nonformal and formal learning.
I am today more convinced than ever, that wikis are soon taking over in classrooms around the world. More and more teachers are starting to see the wiki-platform as the fastest and the most comprehensive web technology to support collaboration in and outside their classroom. When some teachers have made something successful with a classroom wiki, others will follow. At some point use of a wiki will becomes more a norm than an exception. I think, sooner than we think, a wiki in a classroom will be as common appliance as paper and pen: if there isn’t one everything else you try to do in the classroom becomes pretty useless.
This is good news for the whole “e-learning field”. When these children will grow-up and enter to higher levels of education they simply will demand wikis in their classes. Only area that is left for the “learning management systems” (still remember the term?) will probably be distance (training) courses and corporate training. Wiki-way of doing things simply represents many values that are important in teaching and learning. For instance the issue of vandalism, and the ways to take care of it, is … well, you know … pretty educational.
If you are a teachers you may simply go to the wikispaces.com and start a wiki for your class. It is worth of it. Why I am promoting Wikispaces and not some other wiki hosting service? Wikispaces-service is already working closely with educators. For K-12 education use it is completely free and free of advertising. Their wiki is easy to use with a simple interface and pretty good discussion tool. There are some things I would like to be different in the Wikispaces. At least, two things: (1) In the discussion tool there could be an option to use some knowledge types. (2) In education the matter of language of instruction is extremely important. To make Wikispaces more useful in the non-english speaking world the user interface elements should be translated. Teaches do not want to spend time to translate for their students the widgets like “Join this Space” or “Recent changes”. Time spend to this is out of the actual things one should do in a classroom.
Wikihow is not a new project, but for some reason I have been ignoring it for some time. Also it is not something that people would widely discuss or make references to when talking about “open educational resource” (OER). I think the reason why I have ignored it, is simply the issue that the self-help / how-to manual culture have been very strange for me. It is still strange for me, but when now reflecting the idea of having “a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual”, I see that it is actually close to something I consider to be the most valuable genre of open educational resources. I am even kind of ready to claim that the Wikihow is THE most valuable collection of Open Educational Resource we have today online. For instance, comparing Wikihow to something like MIT Open Courseware may sound silly, but if you are honest what kind of information is globally more valuable: manual explaining how to fix your bicycle or Physics I: Classical Mechanics? Both are great and important, but if you think about their value for us all - about 6 billion people - I am pretty sure fixing bikes will win the classical mechanics. So, if there is anyone interested in to translate and localize OERs to other languages and cultures, maybe you should have a look of the Wikihow, too.
Writing new how-to manuals on topics relevant for people living in challenging conditions would be a great project. For instance how to get a job probably works pretty well everywhere in the world, but why not encouraging or even paying for someone to write such articles as “how to use TransMilenio in Bogotá” or “how to have a garden in urban slum”. Before you say: “why don’t you do it”, let me explain that I actually did, but it looks that the Wikihow does not support Unicode, and I failed when starting a title where there is á -character. I am not going to write an article with the title Use Transmilenio in Bogot, because I do not know a place called “Bogot”. Uhh… Anyway, Wikihow is a great OER site.
From the Wikihow comes also very interesting new Mediawiki extension. It’s called
Import free images. It “allows users to import properly licensed photos directly into their wiki from flickr”. With the extension you can have in your Mediawiki installation a search that will find you e.g. images that are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license and import those you’ll find useful in your own Mediawiki installation. This kind of things, that are making the free content to move from one service to another are really important to reach the world where free content is truly reusable.
When talking with wiki-people they often say that they are editing wikis because they feel that they learn while doing it. Several studies have also reported learning to be the main motivation of open source developers to contribute and participate in open source projects.
Editing wiki is always informal learning, but hardly random. Most of the people are also aware of the learning side while editing: You recognize that you are learning while editing, because you are spending you cognitive surplus to do research, to think and formulate words, sentences, images or whatever media. Same time you are also engaged to community of other editors who are giving you feedback and comments. You may of course use your time for watching TV, which will also result as “learning”. The challenge of learning by watching TV is that in this case you are more often much more unsure what did you learn, if anything. Because of this you hardly ever found watching TV motivating, similar way as doing other thing where you are more aware of your learning. When editing wiki you are steering the activity. When watching TV – whatever how “educational” the program is – someone is trying to steer you.
Often I hear wiki-people saying that just editing wiki is the only right way to learn with wikis. According to them one should not formulize learning in anyways. They claim that if there is form it is not anymore a self-organized wiki-way of doing this.
I highly appreciate the “philosophy” of wiki-way. There is, however, now more and more interest to think how we could use wikis in a bit more formalized way. My solution is to move from the totally open and informal way of learning to the direction of “non-formal” learning - something that is between totally informal and formal learning.
The difference between informal and non-formal learning is that when informal is something that happens all the time, non-formal is intentional and organized, but still informal in many ways. An open space conference is a great example of non-formal learning situation: everybody are free to come, to speak or just listen, wear shorts or a suit. It is informal but with some form - shared interest and objectives, time and space - and rules to make it useful.
The move from informal to non-formal in wiki-learning is somehow reflecting the old discussion about networks vs. groups in learning. I strongly believe that there is a third way, beyond the network and group learning.
Any examples of this kind of activity in wikis?
Yes. With a group of 22 people we actively worked together for ten weeks in a Wikiveristy course/class called Composing free and open online educational resources. The form - including weekly program and assignments - was pretty much given by me. I made the first outline of the program, I selected most of the course reading, and designed the assignments. As it was in a wik a few other people also edited it - very few. More form to the process we have gave with Hans, my co-facilitator, by writing facilitators’ course blog and once in a while by commenting participants’ assignment posts in their blogs.
It’s been a lot of fun, but also a lot of work for all the participants. The drop-out
rate, from 70 to 20 in ten weeks, probably tells about it. So, how is this representing the “third way” beyond networks are groups?
With these people we got together as a network of people, through various connections. From the network of people we formed an open group to get some things done. Our objective was simply to learn together about open educational resources. Soon we may again “disappear” to the network, be in touch if we want to, and maybe one day again form another non-formal group when there is something we want to do together.
*) My “third way” concept does not have anything to do with the “Third Way” -political philosophy of Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair.
The next issue of eLearning Papers, a series by the elearningeuropa.info-portal, focuses on Open Educational Resources (OER). The eLearning Papers looks for articles on OER and their use in education at all levels, taking into account the aspects of global development and Web 2.0.
The contributions should focus on one or more of the following themes:
* Lessons learned and best practices of OER projects, tools and initiatives
* New findings, facts and figures of OER development and usage
* Discussion and position papers on how the OER movement can be supported
* Pedagogical innovations and OER, does OER make any difference?
* Transferability and usability of OER
* OER as a way to create and support sustainable development
* Business models around OER
The deadline for article submission is 30 June 2008.
The latest news from the OLPC world are no news. So, the OLPC is now more or less officially and primary a laptop project - not an education project. Why I am not surprised?
I think publicly traded technology companies suddenly making add-value for the children of the developing world instead of their shareholders would have been not only news, it would have been a revolution. Don’t you think?
I like when things are simple, fair and transparent. I do not have anything against business, companies or making money. Business is simple. You design a product or service people want and can afford. Many companies are good in this.
Let’s think for a moment about OLPC’s XO as a product.
I think the main problem of the XO is that it is a PC, a personal computer with very limited connectivity. I think people do not want PCs. The time of PCs is simply over. The ecosystem of hardware and software providers needs PCs much more than the people. The same simple problem is the main problem with all the low-cost ultraportables, now offered for education. They are potentially great for the software business ecosystem but not necessary so good for the education and learning ecosystem. They are PCs!
Still, what it comes to the PC / software industry, I think OLPC’s XO made some brave moves to the right direction. With its’ Sugar interface (Linux GUI) users are not using programs or software but performing activities, such as chatting with someone, browsing web with someone etc. This approach fits well to education and learning world, where people are not interested in to “run software” (or to be run by a software). In education people are interested in to do things. Actually, I think this is not only an issue of computing for education and learning. I think the whole computer usage is moving from the “doing things with software” to the direction of simply “doing things”.
This kind activity centered computing is not exactly new idea, either. All ready the Xerox Star (1981) was based on the idea. In the Xerox Start there were objects you were working with. Clicking an object would simply open it in an appropriate application without user even knowing what software she is using. As a user you were never launching any software. Also mobile phones have always been activity centered: to make a phone call or to send a message you make a phone call or send a message. You do not start an application to do these operations. Apple computers’ OS have always been balancing between the activity and application paradigms. With the iPhone’s OS they have obviously moved some degree more to the direction of activities, however, no with the SDK they took another step back to the software ecosystem. I wonder was it because of the pressure from the Apple software developers.
So, what would then be a better approach to design a device for school and educational use, if the PC / software model is not the right one? My answer is a web browser with all possible input and output methods, with ultimate network connectivity. Inside the web browser you can run all the application and content you need in education. With all possible input and output methods I mean microphone, video/still image camera, keyboard, drawing pad, touch screen, handwriting recognition, and voice recognition with text to speech and voice to text. The ultimate connectivity means that the device is able to operate in all the available wireless networks from Bluetooth to GSM to EDGE to 3G to WiFi. Actually the connectivity is the key. I think in OLPC’s XO – as in all the low cost school laptops – the poor connectivity (WiFi) is the main problem. People need to be connected - always.
So, here we have the hardware and software specification.
For the user the only visible “software” should be simply the web browser. Everything else should run in a background without user paying any attention of the applications that are actually working behind the scene. To explain this I made a mock-up of the UI.
Right, it is simply a web browser with some things you can do with the device. The options fit in a one line under the broswer window. An important feature is an universal search in the end of the row. That is the only way to call your “stuff” from the device. No file management, no folders, no files.
At the moment the devices that are closes to this kind of functionality are the iPhone and the Nokia N810 – also called Internet tablet. The advantage of the iPhone is that it comes with the WiFi and GSM/EDGE (at some point 3G). Nokia Internet tablets do not have any mobile network connection except over Blutooth and separate mobile phone. This makes using the device simply too clumsy and complicate for school and educational use. Students need to get online always, wherever they are, seamlessly.
Now you are probably asking how pupils, parents or schools will pay for the mobile carriers the costs of data traffic in mobile networks? A good thing in the case of schools is that in most countries schools are primary ran by the governments who also controlling the frequencies where the mobile carriers are operating their networks. The governments could simply provide the license for those operators who are making the best deal of flat rate for educational / school use of their mobile networks. I think the governments have all the aces in their hand. The challenge is that in a very few country the ministries responsible for telecommunication (frequencies) and ministries running schools hardly talk together - not to mention structural corruption taking place even in the most democratic nations of the world, in a form of lobbying politicians and government officials.
A good media report is such that whatever opinion you hold about the topic, you’ll find the report supporting your point of view. I think the Dutch documentary “The Truth According To Wikipedia” does exactly this.
In the video Ndesanjo Macha makes some excellent remarks being same time amused, cynical, despairing and hopeful. If you are busy - as you probably are - just jump to those parts where he is talking. You may learn something.
In Andrew Keens’ comments - which I have found in most cases rather unsophisticated, both in form and content - there is one point I agree with. A lot of activity online is nowadays extremely egocentric. I think this is partly a result of the online culture moving from the “IRC / newsgroup / discussion board internet” to the “blog internet”. In the blog internet it is always me talking to you - not us having a conversation. The absurdity of this is that same time Mr. Keen is worried that with the new internet people do not anymore follow authorities telling them the truth.
Like always the issue is not that simple. The possibility to write a blog, and this way report about topic you find interesting is important. I think the egocentrism in the blogs is simply representing our egocentric culture. The blogs are just as egocentric as we are.
What it comes to the Wikipedia, I see it much more to be part of the “old old internet”, “IRC / newsgroup / discussion board internet”, the place where you do things together and the common objective is more important than the personalities doing it.
After saying this, here are the slides from my talk in the Helsinki Media Conference about two weeks ago. I was talking right after Andrew Keen’s another rant, where he, for instance, called bloggers and citizen journalists monkeys. This is a great example of the form and content of his talk.
I don’t know why in the slideshare version some pictures are missing and there is just a frame. You may imaging to the frame the Wikipedia ball.
My point, however, in the talk was that among small cultures, like in Finland, free knowledge is extremely important and one of the backbones of peaceful and wellbeing societies. When people have access to media, when they have a voice and they can participate they can learn and change the world they are living in. Lack of media (now in the meaning of a space where we may have a discourse), results as lack of education, results as many things that suck.
Many things in Finland do not suck at all. We do not have a lot of poverty, very little abuse, no civil conflict since 1918, and last time we were in a war more than 50 years ago. We are doing pretty well. These are the good times and the future looks bright.
What we should remember is that what we have today in Finland is all build on one kind of free knowledge and some people’s willingness to “save” Finnish language. The first publishers in Finland were not interested in to make money but to give a voice for the people in their own language. This all took place something like 150 years ago when most of the Finnish people were still living in cabins without chimneys or windows (and now I talk about the transparent thing in a wall, not an operating system). These poor, “simple”, non-educated people were seen as valuable sources of knowledge with their poems, songs, traditions and wisdom. All this is still the foundation of the Finnish culture, art and science.
For instance, many people – especially in the English-speaking world – find it strange that in Finland we publish scientific journals in Finnish (with the population of 5 million). It doesn’t look very “economical”, especially when all the scientists are able to read and write in English, too. Publishing in Finnish, however, makes it possible to teach science in schools in Finnish and that is where the new scientists are growing. Later in their life many of them will also learn to communicate in English. So, if we want to have science in Finland we must do it in Finnish.
FLOSSE Posse is a group blog consisting of members
of Free and Open Source Software Association (VOPE) from Finland.
We will carry out reportage of FLOSS and Open
Content in Education. Our email address is "flosse at dicole dot org".
