http://teemuleinonen.fi/

Thank you Dicole Ltd for hosting the site for eight year.

“Backhannels and live participation tools are used e.g. in education, conferences and TV shows to increase the interactivity and participation of learners, participants and viewers. Research-wise the domain is scattered across different fields, such as HCI, CSCW and education. This workshop aims to draw together researchers, developers and practitioners in this area to consider (1) how to conduct high quality research and (2) how to make research with impact on the larger society.

To discuss and understand the phenomena we decided to organize a workshop at the European conference on Computer-suppoted cooperative work (ECSCW 2013) & European conference on Technology enhanced learning (EC-TEL 2013).

Time:
Submission deadline June 28, 2013
Workshop date September 21, 2013

Place:
Paphos, Cyprus

Web:
Call for participation

We invite position papers (max 5 pages, ESCSW format) in one (or more) of following categories:

• Examples and demos of prototypes, experiments and system descriptions of and for backchanneling and other forms of audience participation
• Research methods for analysis
• Case studies and empirical findings
• Exploration of new ideas

Workshop papers will be shared before the workshop among the participants, in order to map the content of these papers together before the workshop. During the workshop, we focus on two questions:

1. development of a joint design space with a set of rationales for why certain kind of features have been enabled in backchannels and participation tools and others not, and
2. methods for research (e.g. data collection, analysis, and theoretical underpinnings).

Photo by synestheticstrings / Wikimedia Commons.

The massive open online courses are seen by some as a disruptive innovation in education. For instance, Michael Barber and his fellow lobbyists of the Pearson recently published a booklet with a provocative title: An Avalanche is Coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead. In it the authors give advice for the university leaders:

“University leaders need to take control of their own destiny and seize the opportunities open to them through technology – Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for example – to provide broader, deeper and more exciting education.”

The advice is interesting. Broader, deeper and more exciting education with technology? Yes. With MOOCs? Not sure.

Most people agree that there is a lot of room to develop MOOC pedagogy. Distance courses have been organized for close to 300 years. Online learning over Internet (often called eLearning) is close to 20 years old. Neither, the distance courses over mail, radio, TV or the eLearning with Internet, have been great success stories. The main criticism has been that there is a lack of (human) interaction. Those MOOCs that are now emphasizing communities, peer evolution and group work tasks are trying to do get this right.

With the eLearning and most of the MOOCs there seems to be one major problem: poor understanding of the nature of the Web and how to use it most efficiently in teaching and learning.

The people promoting connectivist MOOC (also called cMOOCs) claim that the cMOOCs are a platform that “emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning“. Maybe.

These MOOC enthusiasts seems to believe that the opportunity itself will make people autonomous, creative and social and that every person have this character. I agree — partly. All people are creative, autonomy, and social. The challenge is that most of us have a life history that has shape us not to be creative, autonomous or even social.

The MOOC developers should pay a special attention to find ways to support human beings that do not have pre-existing, internal motivation to be creative, autonomous and/or social. In this task the traditional schools, colleagues and universities are, at least in average, doing much better job than the MOOCs. Not all of them, but many. The key in the case of the schools, colleagues and universities is to be a community: a social network where people respects and cares about each other and support each other in their attempt to be autonomous learners.

Many schools, colleagues and universities are also today magnificently using the Web to achieve these objectives. For instance, my university provides for the academic staff a service to find interesting contacts to study and works with, a blog service, a wiki platforms and mailing lists. Maybe a bit surprisingly we also have pretty classical order and discipline management that do not want to provide these services for students.

With the tools we can orchestrate learning on the Web. We can orchestrate learning but still keep it free for improvisation. That is why I call it orchestrated jazzy learning.

We can have a blog for the study project, ask students to share their essays and other creations on a wiki, ask students to share their projects online have discussion on a forum on urgent matters in the community, use Twitter and Facebook to share our work and to facilitate discussion with a wider audience. Depending on the direction people takes in the course, as some kind of jazz collective, and depending on the respond we get from our “audience” we improvise.

Why it is so difficult to have MOOCs that would work this way?

The difference is in the number of strong and weak links. In MOOCs there are thousands of weak links — links between the people participating in the course. In an orchestrated jazzy learning with the Web in a campus university there are many strong links (your class, your teachers, your department, your lab) and many weak links (practically everyone in the world who is interested in).

There are, however, examples of building strong links online, too. Howard Rheingold’s Rheingold U is a good example of an online community with strong links too. The Rheingold U alumni have, for instance, co-authored the Peeragogy Handbook.

The General Assembly is another interesting startup with online classes and workshops in various locations. The service is matching great teachers and instructors with specific skills and people interested in to learn them. The classes are small and the courses are intensive (In 2001 I co-found a company called Co-Learnit.com that was in practice doing exactly the same).

Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation is also doing things differently. They have a curriculum with three large themes: innovate, build and lead. In their program building balanced network of strong and weak links is crucial. For instance in one of the courses students’ assignment is to get 100 followers on Twitter and get retweeted 10 times in a week.

MOOCs are not the disruptive innovation in education. The Web is the disruptive innovation in education. Some players in the educational field will be better in utilizing the Web than others. Some will have MOOCs, when others will build jazz collectives using the Web.

It is not only a matter of using the tools, the Web. It is also a new way of thinking about studying and work. The Web is challenging us to see that most innovative and productive organizations and people are no more managed by “order and discipline”. The organizations are becoming networks of autonomous, creative and social subjects. We should take advantage of it. The right place to exercise this is a school. The educational organizations must be the first to change. Or actually, you must be the first to change.

A couple of days ago Esko Kilpi wrote about emergence and self-organization with references to the Wired’s article The GitHub Generation: We’re All in Open Source Now and Sugata Mitra’s latest TED talk Build a School in the Cloud.

I started to think how would be a school that is primary operating according to the principles of free and open source software development communities. I didn’t think about online schools or even the possibility to extend some of the school operations to the “cloud”. I was thinking more school as we know it today: a place, most often a building, where people come to learn. I made a list.

(1) Free project spaces. The free and open source school must have a lot of free project space for anyone to take in use for any project they are interested in to work on. The space should have basic materials (pens, colors, paper, cardboard, partition walls, whiteboards, laptops etc.) for people to define spaces, to write, to draw, to hang up things, to save things etc. (You may compare this to all the online services we have to host open source code, mailing lists to communicate, GitHub etc.)

(2) Freedom to start and join projects. In these spaces any member of the school is free to start a study project and invite in it who ever they want to invite. The spaces are open so that people can see what other people are doing and anyone may join them for a short or a longer period of time. This is the case with visitors, too. Doors are open for people to come and see what’s going on and to join a project if they wish. Joining a project is the only way to become a member of the school.

(3) The school is a copyright / IP free zone. Anything seen in the project spaces can be copied to another project. In the school people may show whatever media for each other for whatever purpose without any copyright restrictions.

(4) Progressive inquiry. The purpose of the school is to help people to learn on things they are interested in to study and learn about. The progressive inquiry, relying on scientific method and critical thinking method, is the primary approach in the study work. The aim is to deepen everyone’s understanding on the things under study and also contribute to the commons.

(5) Flat organization. Students are free to study whatever they want, but because we know that sometime students may need advice to find topics that are truly meaningful, interesting and important there are two roles in the school: students and mentors. To become a mentor is a matter of merits. Mentors select mentors.

(6) Civic virtue, transparency and leadership. Civic virtue is expected from all the members of the school. The primary decisions making method is consensus. Decisions are expected to be based on on sense making after having all possible data in hand and listening of different point-of-views. If some people do not agree with the decisions they are free to forge the School by starting their own School. There is a leader.

Simple. Why we are not doing this? Or are we?

In the last ten years design thinking has been one of the most used buzzwords among technology and design circles. In my book Designing Learning Tools — Methodological Insights I also use the term. To be honest, one of the sections is titled “Design Thinking: Solving Wicked Problems in a Participatory Way“. Cool title, isn’t it?

Last week in San Francisco I visited Square, a company providing electronic payment services with smart phones. Currently their main product is the Square Register, a credit card reader you can attach in your phone or tablet and start accepting credits cards. With their product, also small merchants and individuals can take credit cards.

Their second product, the Square Wallet, however, is definitely more interesting one. With the wallet app, running in your phone in your pocket you can pay just by saying your name. After saying you name in the checkout your name and photo appear on a screen of the cashier and he may confirm the sale. The data comes from the server based on the location information. Smart. No showing your phone, no scanning, no NFC, no RFID. Nothing. The technology works in the background. You keep your head up, say your name and you have paid.

I asked the people in Square how do they feel if I define them as “design company”. They didn’t object. It is, naturally, a real software engineering house but design thinking seems to be the driving force behind their product development. The vision is not to provide credit card readers or payment solutions but to improve the user experience and interaction in a situation of making payments. When you approach the matter of paying someone from the point of view of a service and an experience you can design products like the Square Wallet.

This blog is not about payment systems or customer experiences. From the Square example, however, we may gain some insights to learning and education, too.

Design thinking is discussed in the context of education, too. The Design Thinking for Education by Riverdale Country School and IDEO is a great resource.

In the iTEC project we (my research group) have also brought design thinking to classrooms by promoting teachers to carry on design activities with their pupils. Right now we are prototyping a design toolkit with a group of teachers. The aim of the toolkit is to help teachers to design learning activities. The kit with the title “Designing Learning Activities — a Workshop Toolkit for Teachers” will be published in a couple of months.

This is all good, but I am still wondering are we really able to catch the essence of design thinking in these? Should we still step back and think one more time what is learning and education really about? How people could raise their head up, say their name and learn? How would be a learning experience designed primary on this principle?

Children taking part in the Muuvit–program all have a little booklet where they mark all the events, 10 minutes, of “moving” regardless what type of movement it is. From the booklets the activity points are then put to the online system that will keep track of the whole school class’ points. The activity points are then used on a poster that looks like a board game. With the poster children do an adventure around Europe. Moving on the board opens new learning materials on a web site. The material varies from arithmetic to geography and environment.

I like how Muuvit is combining tangible objects and digital tools. Being tangible is important for children. Tangibility and physical movement go hand in hand. Also there is research on the relation between physical healthiness and ability to learn. They do correlate and there seems to be causality, too. However, I have a hypothesis that the relation is not linear, but rather a normal distribution. In practice, this means that if you do a lot of sports it starts to reduce your ability to learn [Grin]. Think about it. It would explain many things.

I also like Muuvit because it is not about sports but about moving and free playing. From the learning point of view moving in a form of a free play is better than taking part in some sports with objectives, training and couching. Free play develops imagination and when practiced in a group it requires social skills. I think this is exactly what we need.

Also this week, another Finnish start-up released a beautiful and simple iPhone app to track your physical movement per day. The app is called the Moves App and tracks number of steps, kilometers walked, cycled, moved by driving your car or by public transportation. It puts all your moving on a map and shows you the kilometers walked and ran.

I haven’t tested it yet, but it sounds perfect for me and I believe for many others, too. I am not a Quantified-self freak. I am not interested in to know every possible piece of quantitative data about my life. But what I am interested in, although, is my health. I would like to track my movements, such as walking to the tram stop etc., that have an effect to my health. I am not interested in to track my training. I actually hate to go jogging and do it only because I know that it is good for me. Having a tool telling me I did it! is enough.

There are many sport / movement tracking / recording products but I am afraid that they are primary designed for sport enthusiast by sport enthusiast. I am not one of them and not planning to become one. I need sport technology when I am scuba diving but I am not into “training” with tools. Actually I am not into training at all. The Moves App looks very suitable tracking tool for a lazy mover like me.

I think that the people of the Moovit and the Moves App should meet. Maybe we can have a walk around Töölönlahti?

PS. In my research group we are also looking how to visually combine students’ objective and subjective well-being indicators with their learning performance so that it would help them to take actions to improve their learning and well-being. Results coming later this year.

One of the reasons why I enjoy working in the learning environments research group — and in the School of Arts, Design and Architecture — is the possibility to design and build prototypes.

In our academic practice we aim, no only to study and do research on learning environments and learning tools but also to build new artifacts (prototypes, models etc,). The artifacts that are designed during the design research are a crucial part of the research results. The way the artifacts are forms part of the research argumentation.

I have above updated slide set presenting our research group. From it you’ll get an overview of the research projects we are currently involved in and some examples of the prototypes. Things are done by people — they are presented, too.

With this post I am happy to present three relatively new prototypes made in the research group. These are ReFlex, Square One and Cardboard Hospital.

ReFlex is a tool for learners to record 60-second audio-visual clips of their personal learning experiences, to store them on a timeline and to share them with teachers, peers and parents. All recordings by one learner are stored on a personal timeline and are accessible for later review. In addition to the present, learners may also create “time capsule” recordings for the future. Time capsules can only be opened when their set date is reached, and can be used as statements of learning objectives. From the entire pool of recordings, learners can mark important clips by highlighting them. The best way to get an idea of it is to try it. ReFlex is a web app and available in: http://reflex.aalto.fi

Square One is a single task dedicated learning devices designed for group work in schools. The idea is that school children could build their own device in a Fab Lab kind of facilities. In the Square One there are three kind of devices: (1) one dedicated for writing, (2) one for drawing and (3) one central piece for searching and for assembling presentations out of the content created by the learners. The central piece is a two-sided tablet, one side is dedicated for searching and the other side for assembling. The central piece comes with cameras, microphones and speakers. The writing and drawing tools are dedicated only for these tasks. You write or draw and then you send your creation to the central piece. We are currently doing the software and hardware design and looking for the components. There is a more complete description of the Square One (or Square 1) in the LEAD-project blog.

Cardboard Hospital is model for prototyping workshop, service design and co-design. The model was tested this spring in our Media Center Lume. In the workshops, patients, hospital staff and architects were creating ideas for the future hospital environment through physical 1:1 prototyping. The Cardboard hospital worked as a media rich learning environment for stakeholders (architects, patients, medical doctor and nurses) to discuss, negotiate, to transfer and to design new spatial, organization and process solutions. This is is presented in the video above.

This post was originally published in the blog of the Learning Environments research group.

In the following I’ll try to illustrate my thoughts on the matter with some late examples from my practice as a teacher.

Earlier this year I wrote an article to the Towards peer production 
in public services: cases from Finland book about p2p learning, media used in it and on the question who should we consider to be our peer. In it I define different kind of media for peer-to-peer learning and discuss their potential, different implication for learning. Different media enables different practices.

Online media, when used to distribute learning materials, to exchange ideas and links with blogs, micro-blogs, discussion forums, social bookmaking and social network services are powerful tools for learning. In the MOOC implementations I haven’t so far seen that students would have been guided to do research together in a small group with an aim to present their results for their peers. I am sure that with smart design one could implement this with the existing tools. However, it would require a lot of planning and coordination. The tools and services (blogs, wikis, microblogs) simply do not support very well small group collaboration.

In a university classroom I have tried to get students to do their own research. This autumn term, in the Media Lab Helsinki, I have been teaching the Introduction to Media Art and Culture course with Marita Liulia. It is an annual introductory course for all the students of the department. Our objective is to engage students to do self-driven collaborative knowledge building. The course is an introductory course, 3 study credits (3 x 27 hours study workload), three weeks of intensive studying. The time dedicated for this is scarce. This means that it is not possible to present or discuss all important media art and media culture phenomena in the course. Only lecturing on the themes of the course would actually be silly and would only give a poor overview of the topics.

Because of this we have organized the course a bit differently. In the course we have three sections and two major assignments. During the first week I concentrated on media culture and communication studies while in the second week, led by Marita, the focus is on Media Art. We aim to provide students with tips on where to grab on and to study interesting things independently more. Therefore, during the course students also study in small groups some media culture concepts and media artists. The results of the teams are presented in the third week. The aim is to guide students to find and evaluate information from existing sources.

When students are doing their assignments, the idea is to have activities that are close to those introduced as self-organizing learning environment (SOLE) by Sugata Mitra. The first assignment is to study a concept; theory or phenomena related to media studies. It can be something like transmedia storytelling, Jürgen Habermas public sphere or Google’e PageRank. In their research students may use whatever sources: web sites, Wikipedia, on- and offline libraries, articles, books etc. They are expected to find the sources themselves. The results of research are then presented for all.

Even though our students are highly motivated and interested in the topics of the course, it is difficult to design assignments so that there would be meaningful knowledge building. In groups there are always students who take the assignments more seriously and those who simply try to do as little as possible. I understand very well those students who do as little as possible when the assignment is not something he or she is internally interested in to study. Still I do not believe in extrinsic motivation. I believe, however, that we may help people to find their intrinsic motivation. To guide students to really deepen their understanding on the topics under study we give them the following guidelines:

(1) Make the assignment challenging for you
Set yourself and the group research question.
Ask what you want to know more about the concept.
Start from your own level.

(2) Make it personal
Think how do you feel about the topics you are studying.
Think are there any connections to your own work or life.

(3) Be critical
Check your sources: two sources are better than one. Primary is better than later.
Pay extra attention to criticism made by other.

(4) Make connections and references
Try to find connections to other concepts, disciplines, traditions and people.
Remember references.

Someone should do an experiment: an online course that would include in it some real study assignments, peer-to-peer learning and peer evaluation. It probably would not be massive but it would be interesting. I would like to see what kind of groupware / social software student groups would like to use in their study work? How would the groups preset their finding for others? How would they evaluate each other.

Maybe I’ll do the experiment. Let’s see.

iPad with on display keyboard. Photo by matt buchanan / Wikimedia Commons

In Finland the discussion on tablets in schools has reach a new level. It looks like a real hype. Principals, heads of school districts and library directors are feverishly trying to find out cash from their budgets to acquire some of these devices to be used in education.

Those who praise tablets usability in learning have dominated the discussion. There have been some critical comments, like the one made by a City of Helsinki’s early-childhood learning expert saying that there is scientific evidence that walking in a forest is good for learning and to replace that with tablets is very hard.

I have been testing and studying tablets for two year now. I have not myself tried them in a classroom teaching but have studied several cases and think that I have a relatively good picture of the usage.

Tablets are great media devices. They are good for reading, for watching videos, for listen music and other audio. They are also extremely easy to use for taking photos, shooting videos and for doing audio recordings. They are more exciting than any other information and communication technology for playing games. There are tens of good and interesting click-drag-and-drop-drill-and-practice educational games. Children really get excited about them and may also learn something by playing these games.

So why not tablets in schools?

I really do not have any scientific evidence to back this (this is all my intuitions based on my limited understanding of human cognitions) but I think writing and drawing are the most important (meta-)skills in all kind of learning.

What I know for sure is that with tablets writing and drawing is very difficult — mostly painful experience. With the virtual keyboard you may write short messages. Writing a blog post like this is impossible even for an experienced keyboard / tablet writer. Drawing with your fingers is fun, but if you really need to sketch, draw a diagram or a map that is not possible with finger paints. To draw you need a sharper tool and precision grip.

Giving up writing and precision grip is like going backwards in a human evolution. Is that what we really want to do in schools?

So how tablets could be better?

We should have much better virtual keyboards. Or we should have a proper keyboard in a tablet in a way that it is always available for use (does this sound like a laptop?). Microsoft surface is an interesting proposal to this direction. Whatever virtual or mechanical, a tablet for learning should be a powerful writing tool.

Blanche Grambs at work. Photo by Bofinger / Wikimedia Commons

In addition to the keyboard we should have a drawing pad that resemble closely paper and can be used with sticks, paintbrush etc. – practically with everything you may want to hold in your hand. Like the keyboard, the paper-like drawing pad should always be available with the tablet.

I know that there are other people promoting same things and even designing and developing things along these lines. To make sure that it will happen, in the research group we have started to design our own (experimental) prototypes of devices, too. Let’s see how it will be.

The Learning Environments research group (LeGroup) at the Media Lab Helsinki of the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture is looking for doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers interested in to work in several new research projects starting in Autumn 2012.

For the doctoral students position(s) there is still a week to prepare your application materials. The applications should arrive no later than on August 14th 2012. You will find the official call text and instructions from the Aalto University web site. Please read it carefully and prepare your application.

If you are interested in to the postdoctoral researcher post(s) , please send an email to Teemu Leinonen with a (1) cover letter, (2) CV, (3) design portfolio and (4) a statement of your research interests.

Further information
Associate Professor Teemu Leinonen
e-mail: teemu.leinonen@aalto.fi
tel. +358 50 351 6796
www.aalto.fi/en
http://taik.aalto.fi/en/
https://reseda.taik.fi/Taik/jsp/taik/Index.jsp?lang_global=en&