Mind Map Trend in Asia

Ten years ago, I learnt about Mind Map during a psycholinguistics course. Asking students to associate the colour of red with anything relevant coming up to their minds, Dr. Mulyani Djojomihardjo, demonstrated a Mind Mapping technique. It was quite interesting to recall that students who used to be silent and passive became curious and actively engaged in the class discussion. At the end, we were all astonished to learn that we could associate the colour with different interpretations. Since then, I have used Mind Maps to generate, organize and visualize my work and research ideas.

Several years ago, I co-designed a board game that use keywords to facilitate design communication among multidisciplinary players. We applied Pair Mind Mapping to generate a set of keyword seeds with potentials users during the development stage. It was interesting to find out that even though we gave the same keyword seeds, each pair produced a different set of keywords. In a Card Sorting session, we categorized the generated keywords and eventually chose some keywords for the board game. We learnt that Mind Mapping was powerful in generating creative ideas.

Today, Mind Mapping seems to become the latest trend in Asia, including Singapore. During the month of September, Tony Buzan, one of the Mind Mapping gurus, will come to Singapore and lead a series of Mind Mapping seminars at SIM University. It is also announced that Tony Buzan will introduce his new Mind Mapping software called iMindMap. It is good to know that the professional community in Asia starts to be interested in Mind Mapping and see how the information technology has become a tool to facilitate the use of Mind Map for professionals.

It is also encouraging to hear that Mind Mapping has started to be introduced widely in many parts of Indonesia through a number of teacher training and student development programs.

Thanks to Victoria Tio and her work as the source of inspiration for this writing.

Visa Wave: Coming to Singapore

A new contactless credit card offers a convenience of use and an alternative cashless payment to consumers in Singapore. While the current offering may appeal to a limited segment, there is still a room for improvement in the verification mechanism and leverage the appeal of the contactless credit card to other segments.

Last Thursday, United Overseas Bank (UOB) of Singapore launched the first contactless Visa Wave Credit Card in Singapore. Following the trial success in Malaysia and Taiwan during the first quarter of 2007, the launch of UOB One Card in Singapore is not surprising. Susan Williams, the Director of Stakeholder Communications Visa International Asia Pacific, shared with RFID Asia that as the end of March 2007, there are a total of 8.1 million Visa Wave cards issued by the banks in Malaysia, while in Taiwan the number is more staggering: 23.9 million cards, with more than 2,970 merchant locations that accept Visa Wave cards

Similar to the other contactless credit cards like Master Card PayPass and AmEx Express Pay, the UOB One Card only allows a small value of transaction without card holder's signature in about 300 island-wide retail outlets. UOB One Card holders can wave their cards on a reader terminal to pay for a purchase and expect the EMV-based payment system, a payment system built for chip-based transaction, to process a transaction and print a receipt within 4-6 seconds, without any card handover. Based on the study commissioned by Visa, this process is much faster than a signature-based card payment that takes an average of 25 seconds or a cash transaction that takes an average of 14 seconds.

The convenience of such contactless payment is not without a catch. Compared to non-contactless credit cards that require signature authorization or pin numbers from authorized card holders for each transaction, contactless credit card, such as UOB One Card, imposes no verification for any transaction up to $100. There is virtually no verification system in place to make sure that a person making contactless credit card payment is actually the authorized card owner. It will be easier for an unauthorized person who can get access to such contactless credit card to misuse the card. The owner of such contactless credit card can risk $100 multiplied by the number of transactions before the card reported as missing, stolen or misused in such scenario.

During the CommunicAsia 2007 in Singapore, we interviewed a few visitors about Visa Wave. The ages of the interview participants were all above 40. All of the interviewed participants said that they were excited to know about the coming of a new contactless payment technology, but they were still reluctant to use a contactless payment system. The feeling of uncertainty was the main reason of their hesitance, for example: they were still unsure whether they would be double-charged or triple-charged for waving a card several times.

The feeling of uncertainty for the consumers in Singapore is not without a grounded reason. In 1999, the consumers in Singapore saw a total of 400,000 Singapore dollars wrongly debited from their bank accounts through a crash in the country's cashless point-of-sale system. This experience has affected the adoption of any new cashless system in Singapore.

Targeting young professionals (23-34 years old), the launch of UOB One Card is a significant step for Singapore towards a cashless society, a vision backed by the Singapore Government since 1999. Compared to the current cashless payment system using magnetic strip cards, the UOB One cards will introduce a relatively new interaction style in cashless payment for the consumers in Singapore. Consumers and merchants alike using the contactless credit card system may expect a significant portion of learning and teething problems in the upcoming days and months ahead. In addition, UOB One Card may not also be as popular as its predecessors in Taiwan and Malaysia because the credit card will only be appealing to a small segment in the Singapore's aging society.

Mobile Caching

One late afternoon, I went to a public administration office in Helsinki and found out that the office has moved to a new address unfamiliar to me. Realising that I only had a very short time to find the new place before the office closed, I took a few pictures of the moving announcement and the map of the new location using my mobile phone camera. To save time, I immediately left the old office and started to walk around and ask people nearby .


The first several people I asked were familiar with the street, but had no clue about the exact location. I remembered that I have taken the map of the new location using my mobile phone, so I started to show the pictures to the next several people I met on the street using my mobile phone.

A lady immediately recognized the building and gave me a direction. "A good start", I thought. After thanking the lady, I walked toward the direction provided and asked another lady with the map from my mobile phone. Looking at the map, she pointed out that the building was located somewhere across the street block. After thanking her, I rushed to cross the street and went around the block where I found a nice young man walking towards me. I told him about the information from the previous two ladies while showing him the map. He directly pointed out the building I was looking for and suggested me to go inside, because the office is located somewhere in the building. Thankfully, I found the new office before it closed that afternoon.

My camera phone has helped me to store and retrieve in-situ information within seconds. It has also become a means of sharing information. The process of knowledge sharing became smoother with the presence of simple visual information. This visual information presented by mobile phone is similar to the context scenarios in Pair Writing. By sharing a chunk of incomplete information, each passerby has helped me to incrementally build and share a new knowledge about the location in a very short time, which would have not been possible without the help of my mobile phone.

Queueing and Civilization

In a very competitive environment like Singapore, queueing is a custom, rather than a guarantee. As a part of the society, I also have to bear with this custom. Queueing for trains, tickets, dining, groceries, taxis and even for newspapers.

Sometimes, the time spent for queueing is even longer than the time for acquiring the actual goods and services.

A correspondent sent a letter to TODAY newspaper sharing her experience of queueing for the newspaper at Toa Payoh MRT station. She observed that the people behaved so ungraciously and inconsiderate to others when they queued up.

I was also once queueing for newspaper in the station. I came early in the morning around 7.a.m. before the TODAY's newspaper distributor came. The queue was already long when I arrived. Luckily, I still got the paper for that day. The distribution of the papers lasted less than 15 minutes and so did the queue.


Instead of coming to the station early in the morning without a guarantee to get a newspaper, now I go to the TODAY's website and read the paper online. The paper is already published online at 6.a.m. There is no need for me to rush and waste my time in queue without any guarantee to get the paper. By reading the paper online, I can also know the news, special offers and events earlier than the people who queue.

I wonder if those people queueing at the stations know about the possibilities of reading Today online. It would have saved them a lot of time and energy.

In the Singapore information society, the telecommunication infrastructure is good. The cost of having an Internet connection is quite low. However, the gap of Internet literacy is still wide. In addition, the custom of reading is also difficult to be changed. Reading a newspaper on "paper" is still preferable than reading the electronic version.

People in Singapore still prefer to queue for newspaper rather than accessing it from the Internet. After all, queueing is a part of Singapore civilization. Yet, I am still waiting for the time when TODAY is available on my mobile phone.

Mobile RFID 2.0

This week, I met diverse key people from universities and industries in Singapore and Malaysia. We discussed about Mobile RFID 2.0 and some other mobile technology projects.

Mobile and wireless technology is indeed emerging in Asia at the moment.

There have been some fruitful discussions with stakeholders for various Mobile RFID 2.0 applications, business cases, community development, including their socio-technological impacts for stakeholders.

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.

ICT for tertiary education in Indonesia

Graduates who can utilise their knowledge and contribute to their community is the result of a successful education. The success requires a combination of several factors, such as active and positive participation from educational staff and students, the organisational maturity of educational institution and the practice of suitable educational methodologies.

In some highly-populated developing countries, such as Indonesia, tertiary, undergraduate and postgraduate education may become an exclusive, and often expensive experience for many people. Public educational institutions, which are usually subsidized by government, often fail to accommodate all prospective students due to insufficient capacity. In addition, the alternative of enrolling in a private educational institution is often hampered by high tuition fees.

From the stand point of educational organisations, the ratio of educational staff to students is often very low, due to the stagnant growth in the number of educational staff. This condition often results in more tasks and responsibilities for the educational staff and less opportunities to update and improve their skills and knowledge.

In Indonesia, the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in Universitas terbuka (Open University) has opened up some potential educational opportunities, such as:
● Acquiring, updating and improving skills and knowledge while earning a living
● Distance education
● Cooperation with some other educational institutions
● Multidisciplinary knowledge sharing and building

In developing countries, such as Indonesia, the main prohibitive factors for this approach include the followings:
● Lack of sufficient infrastructure
● Low quality educational materials
● Untrained human resources

Mobile Learning (m-Learning)

For the past few years, during my work in the field of mobile learning (m-Learning), people frequently asked about the meaning of mobile learning, how it is different from the usual educational practices and also its comparison with e-learning.

The answer has never been simple.

During the Internet boom era, people started to talk about e-Learning. e-Learning is a process of learning, which is not limited to physical places, due to the possibility of having virtual presence. Tutors and students could be present in different physical places while participating in a learning process. Learning materials are usually available in the forms of electronic documents and multimedia.

Nonetheless, e-Learning has never been a hit in developing countries, mostly due to the limited infrastructure for accessing the Internet.

Mobile learning is about to change this state of affairs.

Most people in any part of the world regardless of age, socio-economical status and background are the loyal users of mobile technology, in particular mobile phones. It is often more convenient for people in developing countries, such as Indonesia, to access mobile features than the Internet through fixed and often costly infrastructure.

In mobile learning, mobility is a key aspect. Learning activities are no longer limited to physical classroom interaction. With a high degree of mobility, mobile learning process is more apparent as some socio-cultural activities than a learning process based on text-books and experts (teachers, lecturers or tutors).

Consequently, mobile interaction should support learning activities that are more contextual than the usual classroom or e-Learning practices.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools, such as mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and tablet PCs, should play an important role in a framework that supports learning activities. For example, the use of Push-to-talk (PTT) service could make group communication in learning easier.

With all the mobile learning potentials in the horizon, it is difficult to ignore that mobile telecommunication service cost and mobile usability remain the main barriers of mobile learning.

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.

Video Conference with Taganrog State University

On 24th April 2006, I participated as an observant in a video conference course conducted at Media Lab, UIAH.
The course is a joint project among Taganrog State University of Radio Engineering in Rusia, University of Tampere, University of Art and Design Helsinki and University of Helsinki in Finland. This course is coordinated by Professor Tapio Varis, Gavan Titley, Peter McGrory and Ksenia Avetisova. The main target audience of the course are students from the Linguistic Department of Taganrog State University. Most of the tutors come from several Finnish universities mentioned above.

Today, we had Heikki Maenpaa and Professor Tapio Varis shared their experience how ICT could be used to build communication and facilitate the sharing knowledge and learning process at an international level. They gave an example, how they had used Skype, a real-time web-based ICT application, to introduce Finnish music and songs to Japanese national television audience.

Nowadays, there are many alternatives how teacher can easily pick any tools or use any services available from Internet and use them right away to enhance their teaching activities. However, a common understanding among stakeholders about the goals, philosophy, understanding, literacy about the new tools is necessary before starting to use them, especially in facilitating international collaborative learning process. Teachers and students need to have same passion and speak same language are a couple of important things to be considered in a multicultural distance learning. In addition to that, Heikki emphasized that teachers needed to have creativity to carry out this kind of learning process. Creativity should come from the heart, not a money-oriented matter.

During the lecture, I observed that awareness of using ICT to enhance learning and cultural sharing is different from each country and each person. For example: during the question and answer session, only one out of thirteen student in Taganrog University knows about Skype and other Instant Messaging services. Surprisingly, in Japan, the audience in the television station, were amazed when Tapio in Finland and Heikki in Japan conducted Skype video conference, played music and sang a song together.

The lecture was very interesting. The students in Taganrog University seemed to have a lot of fun, although there were some technical problems there. The electricity was dead and they could not connect the computer to LCD projector and beam the lecture on the wall. With a very small computer in the middle, the students carefully listened to the lecture in a half-circle sitting position. They followed the lecture very seriously. In most of the time, they did not spontaneously ask any questions except they were given a chance by the moderators or speakers. The quality of sound was quite good, but there were difficulties in seeing the faces of the students during the lecture.

Relate this experience to my own research work in ICT for developing countries, such as Indonesia, international collaborative video-conferencing lecture seems to be an good alternative for the teachers and students to expand the horizon and experience new ways of learning. Currently, there are a lot of Indonesians, who wants to pursue their further study abroad, however only few get the opportunity to to time and financial restrictions. Similar video conference technique may be not affordable for most educational institutions, yet using current web-based application, such as Skype and Instant Messaginging, can be more cost-effective and efficient. We only need to know and decide wisely, which tools are appropriate, effective and efficient in facilitating different ways of learning. Teachers and students need to grow their awareness the potentials of the tools and services for learning as well as their literacy in operating them.

Intercultural aspects in ICT

This year, ITK conference 2006 has its first English program. There were not many English presentations in the conference, however, as a foreigner who are not yet speaking Finnish, it is a good opportunity for me to understand what is going on in the field of educational ICT in Finland.

One interesting presentation was given by Byoma Tamrakar entitled “Guidelines for Intercultural Competence”. She discussed about some aspects of intercultural competence. Intercultural competence enables someone to act effectively and appropriately in cultural, ethnic, race, gender and age diversities. One of important aspects of intercultural competence is ability to understand the context. This requires sufficient knowledge and suitable motivation. She gave several interesting examples about cultural competencies, for example differences how Finnish or European people and Asian people remind their colleagues when they make a mistake.

When reflecting to my own research, intercultural aspects should not be neglected when developing any ICT applications and services, particularly if the applications and services will be deployed a multicultural environment.