The Rising of Home-based e-Learning

Going to school everyday has widely become a norm for getting an education, especially a basic education. Although homeschooling has become more and more popular, the mindset of most people about schooling is still about physical existence and learning activities inside the school building. Especially in Asia, it is often unacceptable if the children only stay and study from home.

I recently read an interesting article about the plan of many schools in Singapore to organize e-learning activities should the Influenza A (H1N1) outbreak worsens.

This is a superb initiative considering the possibilities of having your kids infected to the H1N1 virus from their friends or teachers during their time at theschool. With this scheme, no children will be left behind in their learning activities whether they are sick or well.

My concern is the readiness of the children, teachers, parents and school system to handle with this matter. Although several schools have already employed ICT in their learning activities and the general ICT literacy level has been increasing these days, there are still a lot of stakeholders involved, who might not have got their hands comfortable yet with e-Learning system and ideas.

I presume those schools will take into consideration the system that they are going to use, the methods of delivering the lessons, the activities to engage students in learning, the ICT literacy of the students, teachers and especially parents, who will be sitting next to their children and helping them in their learning process day-to-day.

Happy Lunar New Year

The lunar new year is the most important holiday in Chinese calender. This celebration is shared among many nations in Asia, such as Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Taiwanese etc.



Not only in Asian cities, but also in many cities around the globe, the Chinese community with the local government arrange a local celebration of the holiday.

Yesterday, we had a quite big Chinese new year event in Lasipalatsi, Helsinki. There were many stalls and attractions related to Chinese culture. The event was not only attracted to Chinese community, but also to Helsinki community in general. It was so crowded that you would not miss the atmosphere of a Chinese market in Asia.

We saw a lot of interesting performances, such as dragon and lion dances. Everyone was so enthusiastic to watch and document the cultural performances. They tried hard to catch the best moments with their digital cameras and videos. Some people may forget to bring their cameras or videos, so they took their camera phones from their pockets and tried to take as much as pictures and videos from that event. What a jungle of devices above your heads.

Camera phones may not give the most satisfactory image or video results, but the devices help people to catch interesting moments that may happen unexpectedly in their daily life. It is more often that people forget their digital camera or video than their mobile phone.

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.

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.

RFID and mobile technology in learning

We have got numerous and various examples of social softwares, groupwares, mobile and digital television medias already available in front of us. Some have been used for learning while others only for fun. I do not think that we should add by creating another similar one, instead we should consider combine or hybrid them into a new one.

Designing a mobile learning system that incorporates RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology, social software and digital television for both formal and informal learning sounds very challenging.

The use of RFID and mobile technology has opened up different possibilities how to make business better and life easier and more comfortable. The potentials for learning are certainly there. Yet, they just need to be investigated further.

In Tokyo, people can use their “wallet phone”, an RFID-enabled mobile phone, as a train pass, as their money to make a transaction, as a means to get updated information and discount coupons from the “bookmarked” local stores in the neighborhood.

In Korea, people have a possibility to read a book in a futuristic apartment without flipping it from a large screen equipped with RFID.

RFID and mobile technology has also been investigated for edutainment in the Museum of Natural History in Denmark.

Nokia has launched its first product that supports Near Field Communication (NFC), an emerging RFID technology, which was claimed to be the first in the world, in 2004. There are nowadays more RFID phone product lines being launched. This fact certainly contributes to a greater worldwide opportunity of new media learning.

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.

From game to learning

I recently attended an interesting workshop on Cambrian Game. 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.

The game has a lot of potentials in supporting educational process. Some learning activities that can potentially be developed further using this game include “mind mapping”, “idea generation” and “data gathering/collection” activities.