Professor of New Media Design and Learning. Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture.
I was browsing Dr. Gerry Stahl’s new book, called Group Cognition – Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge. Pretty bold title – isn’t it? From the title and the size of the book (521 pages) you could expect that there must be something about blogs and wikis and how these tools have been used in […]
If I remember correct design theoretician Victor Papanek writes in his groundbreaking book Design for the Real World that “I feel that ideas are plentiful and cheap” (1971). Papanek was not only a designers and design theoretician. He was an educator. In all his works he seems to emphasize practice and practicing. We all are […]
This week’s buzz has been the press release by Blackboard Inc. that announced, well, that Blackboard actually has invented e-learning or at least, the virtual learning environments. S.Downes gives a good run down on the blog postings on the issue out there. Like many have noted and protested against, there is plethora of cases of […]
I am happy to report that version 0.6 of LeMill – a web community and engine for finding, authoring and sharing open/free/libre learning resources – has been released. LeMill is Open Source and Free Software. What is there for you? If you feel comfortable to install server software and host websites you may download LeMill […]
I must report this, because in two earlier posts I have criticized the One Laptop Per Child / 100$ school laptop project. It now looks that the Indian Ministry of Education has said a clear “thanks, but no thanks” for the 100$ laptop. The Indian National Newspaper The Hindu reports that the Education Secretary Sudeep […]
In the Calibrate project, where we are developing LeMill – a system for collaborative authoring of open learning resources – we wrote a paper presenting our design of three online learning object templates. The Demonstration of LO template prototypes -document is in our LeMill development sever. We would love to hear your comments and suggestions. […]
After being many years very connected with information and communication (ICT) network, I still sometime get surprised by the speed of the network. And now I am not talking about the “bandwidth” only, but the combination of social networks and ICT. Here is an example: I follow Stephen Downes’ OLDaily. This week I noticed that […]
I just noticed that my blogging activity is pretty seasonal. In July Finland is closed. Almost everybody disappears to their summerhouses and saunas by the lakes. I work during the summer, but as there are no students and very little staff around I seem to have more time to write these small thoughts. Christmas is […]
John Thackara presents the power laws of innovation. I will hang out the “Thackara’s laws” to the wall of my research group’s working space. I am sure the world would be much better place if the people working with “educational systems”, “learning/teaching/educational technologies”, “computer supported collaborative learning” and “knowledge management” – for an example – […]
There is a growing trend to organize events that are breaking the established and rather rigid form of conferences. People are tired, both to listen and to give presentations with slides in a dark conference room(s). Also, only very few of us are really good speakers with charisma and interesting things to show. I guess […]
Teemu Leinonen