The Power of Images
I finally got myself reading the book The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam (and actually like it very much). Made me also question why I, a usually very visual person, use visualization so rarely with things not related to graphic design, what I still sometimes do.
The books message in many parts is: the power of visualization can be very strong and you can explain even more complex matters in a more simply way by using very basic drawings.
Well, lately when I was searching for a specific place in an unfamiliar city where I was supposed to have a meeting in next 10 minutes, I really got a lesson with this.
I was in a hurry, missing the start. At the street, I found a person who I could ask a way to where I was going. This person actually did know the place, but his English was a bit hard to decipher (or maybe it was just my ears in that rush). I just couldn’t understand everything he was saying; his explanation was long, fast, filled with names unfamiliar to me.
Then, as I spent my trip to the city reading the book, I remembered that I had my iPad with me (of course it could’ve been paper and pen). I took it out and asked him to draw the directions. Anyone can draw lines right? So he did.
With this map that you see up there, I found it. Yes it’s a very simple drawing, and not too good looking either, but it really did the trick better than those 100 words that I just couldn’t grasp.
Material vs. Digital
Yesterday when I went out to the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, I was silently in my mind enjoying the fact that there would be a big Virgin Megastore in the mall. Cool albums, books etc. to skim through and buy.
When I got there, I started noticing a certain behavior in me getting stronger that I’ve lately also seen with my oh so wonderful joy of “shopping paperbacks in the airport” experience.
Every time I found something that I wanted to buy, some album or a great book, same thought came to my mind: “I can get this online, with same amount or less money, and can thus take it with me wherever I go. I don’t need to buy this, concrete thing”.
I can have my books synced with my iPad, Samsung Galaxy and my Macbook Pro (and what might come after these later) in a much more agile form; my songs in my laptop, iPod, cell or just in the cloud in Spotify. And I don’t have add extra weight when traveling.
I think it goes without saying that my buying experience is slightly ruined. I still love going to the bookstore and feel the books in my hands, but most of the time, I don’t feel like buying them in paper anymore. And also, if for example a brick for a book, “Steve Jobs”, is something like 40 € in paper and 13 $ in an Amazon Kindle version which I can take with me wherever I go, I don’t have to ponder a long which one I’ll take.
But this makes me wonder:
- In the future, if my ‘disease’ spreads wider, how’s it going to be with Christmas presents? Dull e-gift cards for everyone, or what? Everyone just sitting with their mobile devices around the Christmas tree, downloading their gifts?
- What happens to the satisfying shopping experience in a real store?
- And most importantly: What happens to the “I bought this record/book back in 2011″ thing when you have them all in digital form? With Kindle, I can’t anymore do the thing I do with my paper books: write the time and place where I bought them to the first page.
Pay for Research Results
The emerging business model of today in the Internet appears to be “free”. When designing for example social media services, the easy access and the basic free model get the people in. Or at least it won’t scare them away so easily. Think about your actions, if you have an interesting site, service or product what happens to your interests when the tick mark of “Pay 9,95 € / month” appears?
What about research articles online? I was searching for some articles about heuristics in instructional design and technology and also found a couple of interesting ones. I won’t be reading them, as I won’t be paying for them.
I just wonder how many situations like this are out there, where a lot of good research gets forgotten and hidden away because of poor usability of the web sites that distribute them and because of stupid business models which prevent people of even skimming them through.
At the same time we get to read comments on how often articles get read merely by their journal reviewers and maybe the author’s mother. Unfortunate, maybe, but I guess with models like this, they are asking for it.
6.12. I had the pleasure to attend the Finnish Independence Day reception in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
I was happy to hear how the Ambassador also addressed Finnish education in his speech and what publicity it has got for example in the Newsweek and other media.
As I’m now working with the Finnish education sector, it has clearly had a boost of confidence because of this attention, which in my eyes is a good thing. Things like Future Learning Finland programmes has been established and universities and other institutions are building many kinds of joint initiatives.
But there are also challenges with this “Finnish education for all”. Not necessarily challenges that might arise from different cultures in other countries, but between the universal idea about what is education and learning about, how you assess it and manage it, which differs from organization to another.
It is a different thing to know something, to understand something and to be able to do something. From blog post to post and conference to another I hear people stating that education should change and we need more and more 21st Century Skill development and methods that support this, instead of merely learning the substance.
But how is this going on, are we getting there? Where is there, and who decides?
Many authors and researchers state that when introducing new ideas or processes into an organization, the need for change management is inevitable. This is normal, I think, but many times overlooked. In the same way education still seems to be a matter of “I feel like it”, examples like:
- “I feel that this is the best way of learning”
- “This theory works the best” or
- “I don’t need no theories!”
Can there ever be consensus about learning, in any level? Can something that worked in the learning process in one context, be recreated in another situation, time and place? How possible is it and should even be?
In the ever increasing global environment things like
- organizational culture (i.e. educational institution’s culture)
- assessment culture
- used technology (in many levels)
- history of the faculty
- faculty job descriptions
- faculty relationships
- individual perceptions of what is learning
- community perceptions of what people should learn
- instructor perception of what should be learned
- instructor perception of what is effective learning (based or not based on research, which is or is not valid)
- the specific time when the learning process takes place in all of those people’s lives who can affect the learning process (e.g. very important thing if you think about the more social ways of learning)
- [put your own here]
have an effect in the learning situation. This builds to be a mountain of variables which, in a certain time and place, can alter the outcome of even the brightest learning methods and the educational technology.
An idea I’d like to spread when “exporting” Finnish (or any other) education in the world: Education, whatever that might be, isn’t merely a block of something that can be taken from one of the contexts it has been applied and thrown to some other place without iterating it with someone who is inside the new context. The questions of course is, how much tweaking changes the thing to something else?
There’s a couple of interesting articles worth reading and reflecting in The Guardian about Finnish education (one should also read the comments section in these):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/nov/21/finland-education-immigrant-children
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/09/finland-values-teaching
One can reflect what the comments tell about culture, attitudes and why education can succeed and can not.
Research for Action – Do We Need a Reminder?
“In a field that lack objective standards of achievement, no learning can take place. If we cannot judge whether an action has led forward or backward, if we have no criteria for evaluating the relation between effort and achievement, there is nothing to prevent us from making the wrong conclusions and to encourage the wrong work habits. Realistic fact-finding and evaluation is a prerequisite for any learning. Social research should be one of the top priorities for the practical job of improving intergroup relations.”
“…research leading to social action. Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.”
“Psychology, sociology and cultural anthropology … without the help of the other neither will be able to proceed very far.”
“We need the reconnaissance to show us whether we move in the right direction and with what sped we move. Socially, it does not suffice that university organizations produce new scientific insight. It will be necessary to install fact-finding procedure, social eyes and ears, right into social action bodies.”
“The atmosphere of objectivity, the readiness by the faculty to discuss openly their mistakes, far from endangering their position, seemed to lead to an enhancement of appreciation and to bring about that mood of relaxed objectivity…”
“…when I heard the delegates and teams of delegates from various towns present their plans for city workshops and a number of other projects to go into realization immediately, I could not help but feel that the close integration of action, training and research holds tremendous possibilities for the field of intergroup relations.”
“A second threat to social science comes from “groups in power”. These people can be found in management on any level, among labor leaders, among politicians, some branches of the government… Somehow or other they all seem to be possessed by the fear that they could not do what they want to do if they, and others, would really know the facts. — …it would be most unhealthy if the findings of the Gallup Poll automatically would determine policy… We will have to recognize the difference between fact finding and policy setting…”
“No one working in the field of intergroup relations can be blind to the fact that we live today in one world.”
—-
Doesn’t this all sound too familiar? No, it wasn’t written by some contemporary author. It could have been though. It was written in 1946 by Kurt Lewin. So, how much has changed since, and what’s the speed and impact of that change?
References:
http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Courses/ILT/ILT0003/ActionResearchandMinortyProblems.pdf
Cultivating Conative Domain Through Gaming
During my studies I’ve began to see more and more things that games could teach us, if we just opened our eyes and start using them. In a way I think this is already a bit nuisance to me as I can’t play a round of GoW without thinking “Oh, this could be a nice way of tutoring something, why haven’t they tried something like this in the educational sector?” But yes, we all have our burdens to carry.
Here’s a couple of slightly unfinished thoughts and questions that have been lingering in my mind, which I let loose so that I can once again play games without thinking of them too deeply all the time. Would be great to hear comments or if someone knows any research on these topics.
About Goals and Objectives
The other day I took a couple of hours to reflect about the similarities and differences between goals and objectives. This started a chain of thoughts to old video games that I had played, and I started to wonder how games use goals and objectives.
Often we people have goals, but at the same time the difficulty to create objectives to take us towards them. And with some games it seems to be the other way around; you forget the goal of the game when you are just dealing with the ever increasing objectives.
For example the goal in the game Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare is to find a cure for your family who have turned into zombies – and in the same time get rid of the zombies in the neighborhood. The objectives vary from protecting the villagers from the zombies with a blood lust to searching some important items for nuns. Some of the objectives take the main character closer to his goal, which ultimately is, saving his family, and some don’t. I guess that’s also how life is, right?
So, what I wonder is, how much games will, can or could teach us to use goals and objectives in our own lives? Could they actually work as an analogy which to use in training one’s conative domain (if interested, see also William G. Huitt’s overview on conative domain PDF)?
Simply in English, could we learn from them, intentionally or unintentionally, to set better goals and objectives that work for us in our own lives and make it more efficient and also more stress-free as we would know what we’re actually doing?
Perseverance = Entrepreneurial spirit
Sometimes you have to admire how the characters in the video games just keep on going. For example in the new Gears of War 3 series where a handful of people are [again] saving humanity [again] from the aliens. Their ultimate goals, to save the world, is hilariously and constantly filled with new objectives which make the goal always seem to run away from them. But they still carry on, grunting, but still.
Of course video games aren’t the first media to introduce these mythical journeys where one has to exceed time after time (Lord of the Rings is a good example of this kind of a long journey with a faraway goal and several objectives between it and the starting point), but video games is the first medium to let us be so much in charge, to be the actor, and decide do how we want to play the game and do we want to play it till the end.
In the end, like in life general, isn’t it very much about perseverance? To always rise up after some inevitable fall and to try another alternative route to excel, just like in the games? Some times you have to “respawn”, but the point is actually in carrying on and always trying another tactic to move closer to your goal.
My New Learning Environment
Today I started at my new job at Tampere University of Applied Sciences as a key account manager. And I feel more than happy about it. Here’s why.
Lately I’ve been in the midst of many international and national (Finnish) level discussions about learning environments, what is teaching, the teacher’s role in the future, how social media can support learning and how learning actually happens. And often than many times I feel the discussion about these is very mixed, based many times in feelings (of technological hype) and not on actual research and observations of our times.
We are in a paradigm shift from the industrial age to a knowledge age and network society. This I hope, we all already have agreed upon and can move on and stop repeating it. Currently others are going forwards with great and not so great new ideas and methods, and others still think that this is a trend that will pass and thus do nothing. I don’t want to contribute to this importan discussion as a know-it-all, but as a person who really tries to understand the forces behind the true complexity of human learning in a new kind of world.
But why am I so happy? Because of my love of learning. And I have a new learning environment. I’m currently also studying my Master’s in Instructional Design and Technology in Open University Malaysia through a fully online programme where participants are around the world, from Malaysia to Swaziland and of course Finland (that’s me). We are using open social media environments like Google+, other G-Apps, forums, but more importantly, a learning framework which is based on characteristics I believe to help people in actual learning of complex things, not just remembering disconnected facts.
Addition to my studies, the environment where my work takes place, supports applying the learned straight away. It also goes the other way around; my social learning process helping me with the challenges I face in my work. And I can see and participate in how the education evolves globally.
These combined are my learning environment. Like I’ve said before, a learning environment is not just some technological platform, or a class or some course, but the whole system where you make your learning to happen.
This is why we should stop thinking the term “learning environment” too narrow ways, or stop using it overall. It doesn’t mean that places for the so-called ‘intentional learning’, e.g. educational institutions don’t have their place anymore. They have, but the whole learning system that can help us grow as persons is much more.
Isn’t this just too simple? 
Google+ – A Big Buzz About Nothing?
I don’t usually write those kinds of “social media posts” where I ponder what some services might or might not do for us, but now that I’ve been using Google+ in a couple of authentic e-learning cases, I have to reflect it a little bit.
Everyone is currently discussing and writing about what happens between Google+ and Facebook, often going to the level of which one is better, who will dominate and yadda yadda yadda. This isn’t one of those posts.
When I started to experiment with Google+, still that time in its beta, I also thought a bit “So are they trying to swallow the market share from Facebook, or what is this?”
Now I don’t actually care too much about that. Through the eyes of authentic e-learning theory supported by open social media technologies, Google is really building something potentially remarkable with affordance we are just beginning to undersand, and also, at least I, is beginning to adore. And for me, that is way more interesting than just mere commercial dominance for the digital consumer souls. Here’s why.
I’ve been experimenting with Google+ & other Google Apps in my Master of Instructional Design & Technology studies and in an online collaborative teacher training programme. These both programmes have their backgrounds in authentic e-learning and social learning theories, and are using open social media services instead of just services clearly defined as VLEs (Virtual learning environments) e.g. Moodle or Blackboard Learning System. Although these are also in use, still have their place and are not totally forgotten.
I’m not sure if I can be explicit enough to describe what potential, or like I already stated affordance, lies in Google+ and using it in the authentic learning context, but there indeed is a huge one. But we also need to better understand and internalize the pedagogy needed for these service to live up to their potential.
As without people and the right kind of learning process to guide their way, these tools achieve nothing or at least much less. Using some of the older models of teaching, where teacher is the center of excellence, cripples the use of these tools and using them becomes just something cosmetic, not something revolutionizing.
Here’s some of the affordances of Google+, Google Apps & their integration that I feel are really worth mentioning after using them in learning.
You have the so called social layer, people interacting more informally, in this case supported by Google+. I feel many people don’t truly understand how important the informal interaction layer actually is. It helps the people to become a group, or a team. This is crucial in social learning process to start to happen.
Creating Circles of specific people, like your learning group or class, helps you easily post topics that may interest just them, or ask for help from those in your team. In a way these are very simple things, but psychologically, very important. It shifts the learning and the responsibility more to the learners, perfects their collaboration and stimulates their creativity when they are working together.
Hangout with extras, more advanced version of Hangout feature in Google+ which is still a bit under construction, is finally something you can use for collaborative video conferencing, to share your screen & write documents together in or from Google Docs (you can even start new ones straight from the Hangout). So everything’s in the same place. The usability of Hangout is simple enough and overall works quite well. If this feature evolves further, it could be a good alternative to challenge Adobe Connect and others.
These are just a couple of interesting features I feel are worth mentioning in this time when Google+ has been publicly open only a short period of time. Of course there are still gaps with Google’s attempt to integrate, well, just about everything. For example Blogger is a bit stiff and I’ve had to deal with many frustrated people trying to get its registration process to work seamlessly. But clearly, they are building an interesting ecosystem of services which can definitely be used together with suitable learning process.
And this what is happening is very important: When we have something where we have the social layer to easily interact and communicate with other people, the ease to create, collaborate and share, streamlined usability and learner centered approach from the get-go (as these are our own profiles through which we do things), we are a huge step forwards of a true 21st century learning environment, to use globally.
The learning environment isn’t just some class or the organizational VLE anymore, but everywhere you can find something to learn. The mental learning environment isn’t “on” only when you sleep in the class or interact with a learning management system. It’s where you create it.
Learning in the Age of Devices
Recently I grabbed a Sept/Oct 2011 issue of Connected World magazine as they had an interesting main article by Bethanie Hestermann on “Learning in the age of devices – Cool Tools for School“.
I still often feel that the discussion with e-learning and using information and communications technology (also social media) in education hasn’t been taken to the next level and it’s still mostly on how great it is that we have some devices to play with. Not too many reflect what this really asks from us, from the whole education system (from the management, leaders, teachers, pedagogy, everything). The shift isn’t just technological, even more, it is about us as humans and how we could learn the best in the changing world.
I was glad to read that, although a magazine writing more about technological things, CW mostly addressed this topic very nicely. They wrote about how the role of the teacher should be turned more into a facilitator, how new [worldwide] learning communities are emerging and how learning is changing more and more ubiquitous, i.e. the classroom isn’t the king anymore.
Although, I have a couple of things to add. Even if we are giving individual devices (for example PDAs or smart phones) to the students to use in the classes, we also have to change the pedagogy, how we teach. The devices are alone just devices. Like books are just books.
The new paradigm of Networked Society asks for systemic thinking and creativity, not just the ability to answer right to teacher’s right or wrong questions. So to introduce new devices and to use them merely as polling devices for teacher’s questions to see who knows the correct answer and who doesn’t, isn’t anything new, creative nor too effective.
Using devices with social media applications for collaborative knowledge construction and facilitated learning experience are one of the most important goals we should begin to explore more deeply. Like stated in the CW’s article, facilitation is very important in this kind of pedagogy, but few know what real facilitation really takes. To facilitate is to help the learner to learn more efficiently and to construct his/her understanding in a deeper level.
Facilitation doesn’t mean we give answers to students, like some teachers thinking with traditional way of teaching do, but we help them to build the understanding on the topic and ease their way towards their goals. Deep learning doesn’t happen with just reading a book about a topic and answering some right/wrong answers. It happens with getting to know the topic from different angles, reflecting it with other people (face-to-face or online) and applying it to something or building something totally new from it.
We have long known that people don’t learn by just remembering. Just think about your own best learning experiences. That’s why we need to bring what people think is learning to a whole new level.
So if the topic about the future of learning interests you, pic up the issue on your favorite device (although I have to confess, I read it in paper ).
I had to change it back
Ok, it was an experiment gone wrong.
A while ago I changed my blog from English to Finnish instead of writing it just in English. I thought that in that way I could contribute to the discussion on Finnish forums on the topics of learning, communities and using social media to support these areas.
I noticed that I can’t do it anymore. I just have too many people around the world who can’t read Finnish.
I also experienced this the other way around. I’m currently continuing my ["formal"] studies with starting a Master’s programme in Instructional Design and Technology. It is entirely distant learning programme with an online community. I can’t wait to start! I went to check the participants and found one blog from the Web. I believe it was in Malaysia. Of course it got me reflecting how I was then feeling about not being able to read her blog because it’s wasn’t in English.
English is in a way our savior for global communication. In some unknown parallel universe it could’ve been some other language, who knows, but it doesn’t actually matter. What does matter, is that now we really are able to communicate with people around the world and we need to use that possibility.
So, if there’s any Finns out there who find it hard to read English [if you are reading the studies about our great schooling system, there shouldn't be, right?], try harder. I’m through writing in Finnish as my aim is in the global scale.
