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.

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.