Categories
Aalto University Book Collaboration Design educational tool General Wikipedia

Learning Society

My first book in Finnish was published last week by the PS Publishing House. We have some plans to have translations, at first in Spanish and at some point in English. The English title could be: Learning Society — What is good for children is good for all. As you know, if you are reading […]

Categories
Aalto University Conferences Cumulus Design

Cumulus: “to be, or not to be”

I have been serving the last three years in the Executive Board of the Cumulus Association — the leading global association of art and design education and research. We have over 350 Member institutions in 63 countries. The Executive Board is elected by the Members. When I decided to stand as a candidate in 2019, […]

Categories
Aalto University Design educational tool Open Source Social Software

Metaverse: What it could (and should) be?

Metaverse is a concept primary used in tech and media industries but also by journalists. It is fair to say that nobody really knows what it is or how it will be. For many, metaverse is the second coming of the Second Life (2003), a 3D virtual world with avatars to hangout and talk with […]

Categories
Collaboration Design educational tool Open Source Sharing economy Social Software Wikimedia Wikiversity

We need a Signal School — to be prepared for future crises

In May 2020, two Finnish teachers started to taught 23 Finnish children living in the Al-Hawl refugee camp. From their homes in Finland, every schooldays at 9 AM teachers sent text, image and audio messages to their students’ mobile phones — school assignments of the day. In the camp children were having a daily schedule […]

Categories
Conferences Design educational tool Sharing economy

Online conferences sucks

It’s been now a year and a half of online conferences. In the beginning they were exciting. Great — less traveling! I have participated several that have bee very well organised. For instance, I was closely following how the Participatory Design conference (PDC 2010) was organised. The PDC’s Handbook for Meaningful and Engaged Conversations is […]

Categories
Aalto University Collaboration Design educational tool Social Software

Who chooses the tools for teaching? You or your IT department?

“- – if we put before the mind’s eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly desks placed in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as little moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just space enough to hold books, pencils and paper, and add a […]

Categories
General

Decisions, emotions or bad luck?

I admit, I like the famous Wayne Gretzky cliché quote “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been”.  I, however, just noticed that I have always phrased it a bit differently — and never have used it seriously. My version is:  “Don’t skate where the puck is, skate where the puck […]

Categories
Aalto University Collaboration Design General

Wellbeing of a university community and its members during remote working

I wrote some weeks ago a Twitter Thread related to the story by the University of Helsinki, telling that university stu­dents’ well­be­ing con­tin­ues to de­cline. To keep this in my own files I copied the tweets to this blog. I made some minor edits, too. In the fully remote mode we are not able to […]

Categories
Design educational tool General

E-learning for Dogs

This week at the Helsinki airport two coronavirus sniffer dogs started to work. More dogs are trained to detect Covid. The dogs are trained to detect the virus by sniffing samples taken by swiping skin with a wipe. The test wipe is then dropped into a cup, a dog will sniff the sample and signal […]

Categories
Aalto University Collaboration Design educational tool Open Source Social Software Wikimedia

Open source / FLOSS tool for online collaboration

Aalto Media Lab students are awesome. Now they have collected a list of open source / FLOSS tools for online collaboration during the pandemic. The original file is in the Wikimedia’s etherpad. I don’t want to share the link to that collaboratively editable file, but I copied here the content as it was on Tuesday […]