Last week at the Open Source for Education in Europe an ad-hoc group called "No e-Learning Patents!" was formed to start campaigning against any possible new European-wide software patent directive that would cover the patentability of software including also the area of e-learning and computer & network supported learning applications. The group "No e-Learning Patents!" […]
Author: Teemu Leinonen
Professor of New Media Design and Learning. Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture.
Back with a very good feeling from the NL, where the first Open source for Education in Europe conference took place. I got my hands full of little goodies to bring home. I picked up a few TheOpenCDs to bring home for Christmas, a Kubuntu installation Cd, and brochures produced by OSS Watch, which is […]
In Europe we have our own richness of different cultures, different monopolies and many forms of corruption. We also have the rather powerful pan European government – the European Commission – that is both regulating and supporting citizens and their businesses. To make your business successful around the continent you better do some lobbying in […]
A call for action on a common preemptive statement against possible European-wide software patents Europe is going to witness its first ever European wide conference on Open Source for Education. Very exiting, a lot of delegates have signed up, and prepared papers and presentations on local actions and programmes. (http://www.openconference.net/index.php?cf=3) The conference has allocated some […]
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ImaNote 0.5 released
Some months ago I wrote about Made – tool – a software under development in my team. Today we released the tool (v 0.5), but with a new name: ImaNote. It is not primary a “learning tool” but it is a “social software” and there are many ways to use it in learning, too. I […]
The Wikimedia community (e.g. Wikipedia, Mediawiki software and many more) is voting on Wikiversity idea. Wikiversity is a project “to build an electronic institution of learning that is relying on the wiki model”. The voting is made for making a decision on if the community should launch the project or not. I have rather contradictory […]
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State of finnish eLearning
I attended as an assisting organizer a conference entitled “eLearning & Corporate Competence” at Kalastajatorppa, a Hilton hotel in Helsinki. Attendees included high-profile people from the sector of eLearning in Finland, both providers and customers. I was asked by Juha-Matti Arola from KONE corporation to work on the interactivity part of the conference, especially the […]
I am not a great fan of “distance learning”. I have found out that it is very difficult – if not impossible – to build real group cohesion in a distance learning program. Now I am doing my best as a coordinator and a teacher in two different distance learning programs. Here are some notes […]
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Teachers’ online communities
Stephen Downes wrote a pretty hard critics on the European SchoolNet’s SchoolPlaza – “the unique collaborative environment where teachers sharing similar interests or teaching the same subject can meet, communicate and work together”. Stephen wrote: “the Flash interface is just awful; it took a long time to load (the photos never did finish loading) and […]
I carried out a lesson at the Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland, under a course held by Prof. Kirsimarja Blomqvist and Lassi Köppä. It was a journey from the elements of network society, new actors like pro-ams, through FLOSS and Open Content to bottom-up emerging technologies like blogs, wikis and information aggregation. I highlighted the […]
Teemu Leinonen 