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.

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

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.

MoDe Workshop

I participated in the MoDe (Mobiling and Designing) workshop, which was conducted by the team from Initiative Information Studies, University of Tokyo lead by Professor Shin Mizukoshi at Media Lab on the 20th March 2006.

MoDe project is an experimental project to investigate a new type of media research linking analytical humanities and social scientific research to creative experimental research in fields such as media literacy, information design and media art. This project includes efforts to nurture public media literacy on mobile media, as well as the development and implementation of practical programs (educational materials, curricula, workshop) in order to reinvigorate public communication.

This research group has been developing their own framework of methodology that is called “media probe”, which combines activities, such as information design, workshop program, media literacy program and ethnographic research. Starting from designing media, they have been experimenting new ways of media communication based on critical views to the current mode of media. They design a new media and gave it to the users to be tested. The new media aims to provoke user reaction so that they may express themselves through that media. After a period of time, they gather the traces of the users' activities left in these medias. Redesign media based on the information from the probes and iterate the next cycle are the next steps of the design process.

In this workshop, they particularly introduce the Cambrian game. Cambrian was a combination of old and new methods. Renga, which is considered as an old method, is an old Japanese series of poetries, which link as inspiration of emergence and whose space focused in sessions. The new method that they use is blogging.

In Cambrian game, renga was used as inspiration to share interesting digital images to the the community. The game allows players to submit their own "leaf" in form of pictures, images, music/sounds, movies, commentaries to a virtual tree using their mobile devices or PC. The players can link a new leaf to any inspiring leaf. A leaf can trigger some leaves which will grow the tree explosively.

Playing Cambrian game has a lot of similarities with blogging. The game encourages individual to share their personal thoughts, memories and favorites in public spaces, in particular using their mobile devices.

From learning point of view, I think the game has a lot of potentials in supporting the process of idea generation, mind mapping, data gathering, etc.

Moreover, the game can be used as means to start communication in the community. People start to get to know each other by playing the Cambrian game. In one of their workshop, the research groups extended the format of file sharing from digital pictures to movies and music. Combined with other technology, such as QR-code and RFID, further interaction and sharing information techniques can be developed further.