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? 
