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.

Creative communities and innovation

EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) is a programme of activities funded by the European Commission, the aim of which is to explore the potential of social innovation as a driver for technological and production innovation, in view of sustainability.

At UIAH, we had the EMUDE seminar held on the 10th February 2006.

Professor Ezio Manzini, from Faculty of Design, Milan Polytechnic explained that in the Emude project, they worked together with eight design schools in Europe to study creative communities of present societies in Europe and act together with these communities to develop technological and system innovation. In his opionion, creative communities consists of people who are active and cooperative, auto-organize and practical, with high degree of initiative and entrepreneurship. Their consortium aims to reinforce present creative communities and implement its capabilities to maximum.

The EMUDE project sounds inspiring, however, it was not clearly explained the sustainability of the project. I hope that this project wil not end only on some conference or research papers and individual's portfolios.

Manzini's presentation was supported by “Overview on Promising Cases and Scenarios” by Anna Meroni and François Jegou from Milan Polytechnic. Anna Meroni presented a sample of cases in Milan, Italia, where they studied and worked with elderly communities to create public vegetable gardens in the busy city of Milan for the pensioners, housewife and unemployed people who do not have their own garden space. They have been employing user-centered and ethnographic approaches to understand the stakeholders and contexts.

Public garden owned by communities itself has been already common in some places in Europe. In this particular case, it is not clearly mentioned that Orti del Parco Nord (Parco Nord vegetables garden) has already been a public garden or it has just started to be a public garden during this project. However, from this case sample, I learnt that the EMUDE project is not only a matter of creating a brand new solution, but it often recycle and re-engineer the existing solutions and then use and adapt them creatively in a new context or in other geographical areas. In my opinion, ability to use different sources of inspirations to translate them into innovative and useful solutions is so called innovative creativity, which is crucial for the design process as well as for the communities of practices.

François Jegou explained that from their research, they concluded 6 ways of doing, 5 personas and 30 evolved solutions.
There are many interesting design ideas to build the communities evolving from the the design process, however, it was not mentioned, which design ideas are really implemented in the real world and what kind of feedbacks they got from the people they studied. I think it is important to present the stage of implementation of the ideas in the real world, otherwise, those great ideas will only be academic research ideas.

In the seminar, there were several Finnish organisations presenting their activities and what kind of roles they have for the communities. It was very interesting to see the real examples how communities could help certain segments of people in different ways. Some of them started very small, but they developed significantly during the last few years. The followings are the organizations that presented their community projects during the seminar: TYÖ & TOIMINTA ry, ORANSSI ry, and KANAVA ry.

Harri Niukkanen from TYÖ and TOIMINTA ry explained that the aims of the organization were to give opportunities for long-term unemployed, disabled and immigrants and to support local economics and sustainable development in means of re-using and recycling.

Oranssy ry started in 1980 started in 1980 when there was lack of reasonable priced housing. The organization targets young people in their mission. They aims to help people to get low-cost housing in Helsinki.

Kanava ry is a communities to help young Somalian imigrants who live in Finland to be able to adapt and integrate in the Finnish society well. They have a lot of education and sport programs. Sometime they send young Somalians living in Finland to go to Somalia so they can learn about their culture as well as appreciate their life in Finland.

After coffee break, John Thackara from Doors of Perception, presented “Innovation and Design in Complex World”. In his presentation, John Tackara mentioned that the EMUDE project should give back to people capacity to resolve their problems within network of their own relationship. There are several things to consider in selecting valuable design problems, which include: vision, strategy, project, creative communities and platforms. During the process, the committee chose ten general themes which they worked on it through Opportunity Map, where people and projects were identified, linked and combined.

The selected projects should have the following factors: scalability, success potentials, meaningful question and tangible benefits. The design and development team should consists of multidisciplinary stakeholders with various tasks that compliment each other. It was not clearly explained that the design concepts resulted in the project met the needs and answer the real problems of the people in the community. The use of advanced technology was showed in the concept
design and it is not clearly mentioned if the projection of the realization of the project.

Kari-Hans Kommonen from Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki gave his presentation on “The Right to Design in a Digital World” . Kari-Hans aimed to answer three main questions in his presentation, which are:
1. Is it important to design?
2. Is there any relationship between the world become digital and rights to design?
3. What should we strive before?

He tried to answer those questions thoroughly from philosophical point of views. Starting from what design is, he then explained evolutionary framework for design. In his point of view, everyday life were design activities and everyone was a designer. Furthermore, he explained about digitalization process, where there was a transformation from electronic devices into multipurpose digital computer that loose their identify and definition. As an example, camera used to have one purpose to take a picture, but nowadays camera is part of a mobile phone. Within a mobile phone itself, there are also different applications that used to be an individual electronic devices.