Pilot Plan Discussion

Finally, it is time for Mobiled developers to finish some mobiled features, which have not yet been ready, such as MMS feature and some new physical phone lines. I hope they are ready for the pilot in February.

Planning the Mobiled pilot in Helsinki, I had a meeting with Teemu Leinonen discussing about Mobiled, my field study in Finnish schools and some Mobiled-related issues.

I suggested to conduct the pilot with the Arabian Comprehensive School because I had previously conducted a series of field work there and found that mobile learning could be interesting and useful for them. In addition to good ICT infrastructure and tools for teaching and learning activities, the school has already adopted ICT for many years. Most of the teachers are ICT-literate people. Some of them are active ICT users, while the others prefer to use non-ICT artefacts in their pedagogical activities. Teachers have been using computers, Internet, smart board, camera projector and online encyclopedia in combination with other creative conventional teaching methods. The students are also generally ICT-literate.

Despite of high ICT literacy among the teachers in the school, they have not yet used mobile phones for teaching and learning. Even though most students and teachers own and bring mobile phones to the school, they cannot use their mobile phones during classes. In the context of education, some teachers use mobile phones only to call or send messages to other teachers and also parents about student problems. One of the teachers enthusiastically said that the application of mobile phone as a teaching and learning tool would be challenging.

During the meeting, Teemu suggested that the pilot does not have to be the same with the previous ones. I agree with him, because each school in each country faces different challenges. I also think that we need to understand the school situations, problems, challenges and potentials before embarking on a pilot.

Having got some inspirations from other mobile learning projects, I think it is a good opportunity to try out the Mobiled outside the physical classrooms because I believe in the idea of mobile learning as a vehicle to support flexible and contextual learning. The African team has previously tried out Mobiled to enhance indoor classroom activities, so I think it would be interesting to try it out for outdoor activities, especially if the students have to listen, record and submit information from the field. One of the main challenges is to make the activities interactive for both the teachers and students.

Inspired by mobile learning projects in Sussex and Maryland, I suggested that students work on some tasks in groups or individually within a limited range of area, where they can retrieve information about their tasks from some posts. For some tasks, Teemu suggested that students can call Mobiled server and retrieve related information using some search terms given on each post. He further suggested that it would be interesting to try out some materials combining science and English in the form of multimedia.

For the group tasks, I suggested to create some collaborative tasks that require information retrieval from Mobiled to accomplish their tasks in the field. I am particularly interested to try out the Mobiled's capacity as Wikipedia. Since the capability of Mobiled to add information is still limited, I suggested the use of available mobile phone services and features for enhancing such activity.

At the end, the active involvement of the school headmaster and teachers is crucial for this pilot, so I plan to arrange a meeting with them and discuss about the feasibility of conducting the pilot in February.

Pilot plans - soon in Helsinki, Finland

It is planned that there will be school pilots conducted in Helsinki in February 2006.

I am very excited with the plans as we will try out updated version of Mobiled. Hopefully, I will see a significant improvement and better user experience of this mobile learning service through the pilots.

The Finnish schools normally have already got good ICT infrastructure and facilities, so I hope that these technical matters at the school would not be an issue in the pilot.

I am currently going through again the results from several field study that I conducted during spring and autumn 2006 at Arabian and Laajasalo Comprehensive School, which I believe would be useful for planning some pedagogical activities for the pilot.

A closer look at Finnish information society

Introduction
In the last few years, Finland has been awarded with a numerous prizes of excellence, such as “the most competitive economy”,“the least corrupt country”, “the home base of the most successful mobile phone company”,“the best readers of the world”,“the best students in maths in Europe” (Markkula, 2005). In addition to that, I personally watched the marketing campaign movie at the Foreign Ministry during the visit at their office on the 10th March 2006, which highlights Finland's best areas in Information Communication Technology (ICT), Economy, Research and Education. In this essay, I will describe some of my thoughts about Finland as an information society.

Finland as an information Society
The penetration of technologies, such as mobile phones and Internet, has ranked high in Finland. According to the statistics in December 2004, almost 94% of the households have broadband connection and 30% of them are in use. Among the Internet users within EU, Finns are among the active ones. 61% of 15-74 age group had their own email addresses and 63% of them use their email daily (Nurmela, 2004). People get access to PCs and Internet either from home, workplaces or public access point. Mobile phone subscribers in Finland reach to 87 per 100 inhabitants in Finland at the end of 2002 and by November 2003, 92% of those aged 15-74 had a personal mobile phones and 74% of the population send the text messages weekly (Tuoma, 2004).

Over the last decades, Finland, the seventh largest country with 5.2 million people, has developed from a traditional society into an information society. As the information society, Information Communication Technology (ICT) has played a significant role in improving productivity and changing the way of life of Finns in the terms of production, work, education, distribution channels and habit. Citizens are required to have a high level of ICT literacy and the ability to use and interact with different ICT systems and devices (Fagernäs 2005).

Bank sector is an example how ICT is used in the Finnish public sector. People do not need to queue to pay the bills as most of the bank transaction can be done on-line, for example: Nordea Bank. Even at the Nordea Bank office, it is common that customers are provided with PCs connected to the Internet so they can conduct self-service transaction on the spot.

Not only bank sector, but almost all organizations in Finland have their websites. The websites provide any kind of information and sometimes also online services. In most of Finnish universities, for instance, one can register for a course, take an on-line course, have an on-line learning environment, send inquiry on-line and get their academic credits. In the public library, such as Helsinki Public Library, the citizen can search for a book, read electronic books and journal, borrow and renew books.

ICT has also played a significant role in Finnish education. Instead of being used as an office administrative tool, during my field study at Laajasalo and Arabia comprehensive schools, I observed that the computer and Internet have become a part of everyday learning tools in assisting teachers and students in their educational activities.

The extensive interaction with ICT has formed a unique way of thinking in the Finnish society. The Finnish people is more comfortable to communicate by e-mail regardless their social status. Based on my observation and experience living and having social interactions in several countries in Europe and Asia, the e-mail communication in Finland mostly has the same power as any other ways of communication. Finnish people are usually good in e-mail communication. Furthermore, the ICT literacy of Finnish people is quite high, in a sense, that they face no significant difficulties in accessing and using on-line services or other public services.

ICT has also changed the role of tasks in several some work areas such as customer service. The role of customer service officers in some industries has mainly changed from answering customers' enquiries into the responsibility to guide customers accessing information available on a website.

ICT has also played an important role in empowering the citizens to participate actively in media. A weblog, a web-based publication media, is getting popular in Finland. Individuals and organizations in Finland start to use blogs to publish and share digital information. Many university lecturers, for instance at the Media Lab and ePedagogy department of the University of Art and Design, start to use blog as a media of communication among the students and teachers. Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper organization in Finland, has now several blog sections. The blog sections can give some opportunities for their readers to comment on their editorials. Blog has opened an opportunity for the society to express their thought publicly.

Beside the computer and Internet, mobile technology also plays an important role in the Finnish information society. Finland is the home of Nokia, one of the biggest and most successful mobile phone company. People from different age groups in Finland use the mobile technology extensively.

They use mobile telephone to carry on various activities from personal communication, entertainment as well as public service usages. Mobile phone is more than a “call and messaging” device, especially for young generation. The multimedia phones have opened up the possibility to use mobile phones as a camera, a video, a music player, etc. There have been many mobile ICT games, applications and services developed using mobile technology.

Helsinki City Transport is a concrete example where mobile technology is being used in daily public services to cater for ticket purchasing services. Using mobile phones, the passengers can buy a bus ticket shortly before getting into the bus. They can simply dial a certain number and receive an SMS containing an electronic code that they can show to the bus driver within a certain period of time as their bus ticket.

Another example is the use of mobile services for laundry payment. At HOAS apartments, the public laundry services use telecommunication services to carry on their activities. The laundry services are automatically charged to mobile phone billing to ease the laundry payment, after dialing a certain phone number and activating a laundry machine.

In summary, ICT has become a significant part of the Finns' way of life. As with any technology, there should be any positive and negative impacts. During my limited observation, I can only reflect some positive impacts of the ICT on the Finnish society. However, a further reflection is still needed to assess the negative impacts of ICT. The readiness of the Finnish society in responding to the challenges resulted from the current use of ICT will determine whether ICT could become a part of the long-term way of life for Finns.

References

• Data from Juha Nurmela, Statistics Finland, March 2004.


• Markkula, Markku. (2005). How to Get on the Top of PISA Tower...and other enigmas of lifelong learning in engineering education in ICT Cluster Finland Review 2005.


• Fagernäs, Leif. (2005). ICT–Essential Tool for the Future in ICT Cluster Finland Review 2005.


• Tuomi, Ilka. (2004). Broadband Status. http://www.meaningprocessing.com/personalPages/
  tuomi/
  articles/FinlandBB.pdf. Accessed 15th May 2006.

Habbohotel, behind the scene

We had the opportunity to meet Sampo Karjalainen, the Chief Creative Officer of Sulake Oy and the original finder of Habbohotel, who visited UIAH on the 7 March 2006 to give an interesting presentation about Habbo Hotel, one of the most popular Internet virtual game in the world.

He explained that Habbohotel.com” was originally a Finnish online game, but it had been developing into a well-known online international hotel chains game. The game is the main product of Sulake Oy (Finland), which has been used by over 200.000 users in 17 countries in the world and translated into several languages. In his talk, Sampo shared to the audience the history, business strategy, design and development process of Habbo Hotel.

The original main target audience of the Habbo Hotel was Nordic youngsters from 13 to 16 years old, but their research indicated that the game is currently played by anyone from various ages and background both on computer-based as well as on mobile media.

Habbo Hotel game was designed to be different from any other online games. The game was designed as a social and casual game, which could easily be accessed and played by any ordinary people. It was expected that the game could be a means for self-expression and social orientation. Habbohotel is an open-ended game where each user can create and have their own goals. To play Habbo Hotel, each user need to have a user account, which one can get it easily for free from the Habbo Hotel website. Unless they want to buy something, such as rooms, furnitures, drinks or join any hotel clubs, this game is free. The players do not need to pay for anything. There are a lot of possibilities how users can interact with others by sending messages, chatting, treating others as well as building a personal relationship with anyone within the hotel spaces privately or publicly. As he said, the game emphasized on the self-expression, creativity and participation of the users.

Even though, playing Habbo Hotel on the mobile device is is getting popular, the common problems especially faced by youngsters are the cost of the fancy multimedia mobile telecommunication devices, data traffic cost, and Internet availability on the mobile devices.

Several issues that I have been thinking during the presentations are:

Habbo Hotel was originally developed based only game designers' ideas, based on some assumption on what it would be good for young people in Nordic countries. I was wondering if the company has done any specific user studies, testings and evaluation in different countries. They only mentioned that they conducted several playability testings. What about the interfaces or interactions in each hotel in each countries? I hope they have made some ethnographic studies in each country before they build their hotels there.

For Habbo mobile, Sampo said that the company has actually started exploring their innovative and creative mobile game concepts since 2000 before the technology was ready in the market. There have been a lot of challenges that the company has faced during the time until it launched its mobile product recently. I guess one of the success and sustainability factors of Sulake, more or less, were influenced by a supportive business environment in Finland, where small business can created, nurtured and developed with support from research, government institutions and bigger industrial organisations; by the maturity of the technology and by the willingness of the company to look at their competitors and change their own strategy to follow what their competitors do in order to survive.