Category: Social Software

Tarmo Toikkanen, a colleague from our Learning Environments research group, just got from a press some copies of the book he co-authored with Eija Kalliala. The book is published by Finn Lectura publishing house. With Tarmo we discussed that the book could actually be the world’s first book ever that is focusing primary on social […]

The word “design” can be understood as both a noun and a verb. As a noun design is the end-product: “the design”. When used as a verb (to design) it refers to process of thinking, problem solving and communicating. Because of the growing impact of social media in our life we should redefine the term […]

Tagging, social bookmarking, Digging, Twittering and the seemingly never-ending list of social network sites offer a great resource of inspiration to dream about for people who work with education and technologies. We offer a workshop where you can do just that! SIRTEL’08 stands for Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning. This workshop will take […]

On Sept 18 the SIRTEL workshop takes place, it stands for Social Information Retrieval (SIR) for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). It’s gonna be “Serious Fun”! Let me just outline why: Recommender systems and social navigation, methods of SIR, have been around since the popularisation of WWW, that’s some 15-20 years now. The idea is to […]

I am very proud of our students. They are creative, hard working and willing to learn. You can locate them to the three dimensions of attitudes towards learning, but in most cases they are able to stay in the middle road. This semester I was co-coordinating and co-teaching New media and the third sector – […]

In the field of e-learning we often talk about Communities of Practice (CoP) and networks of users, but do we really leverage on them in practical terms? There are plenty a resource available on the Web, both in terms of digital learning content and human resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors) that can be used […]

In June I am going to the Microlearning conference in Innsbruck. I promised to give a talk with the title “Emerging Microcontent Environments”. First I thought to talk mainly about the MobilED project, but after rethinking the theme of the conference I decided to talk about the following things, too, at least, maybe … For […]

It must have been in 2004 in Manchester UK when I first time saw a demo of the FlashMeeting. Thank you Friedrich Scheuermann for the invitation and Peter Scott for the demo. FlashMeeting is a videoconference software that works on a Flash player. This means that in 90% of the web browsers you can use […]

I decided to write another post with comments to the comments we got to the Beyond blogs and wikis: I want better tools for dialogical teaching, learning and research -post. Thank you all! Leigh: Web feeds (RSS etc.) are good, whatever you are interested in to follow blogs, wikis, discussion forums, image/video sharing sites, etc. […]

I have claimed in several occasions that blogs and wikis are not (very) good tools for knowledge building, progressive inquiry learning or other sophisticated social constructivist learning methods and models. Blogs and wikis are not (very) good tools for knowledge building because they are not designed for that. Using blogs and wikis for knowledge building […]