TeamUp is a new media reflection tool for teachers and students to form teams based on students’ interests, and for students to record 1 minute audio updates about their teamwork progress, challenges and planned next steps.

In the spirit of participatory design, and as result of the merging of the iTEC work packages WP2 and WP3, we redesigned our iTEC website. The new URL is http://itec.aalto.fi (old URL redirects). The new site acts as the place for teachers and students across Europe to interact with the iTEC project from scenario development to prototype and pilot design.

The page directly calls for teachers and students to participate, and includes news, scenarios (provided by Futurelab), information on participatory design workshops, descriptions of our prototypes, learning stories and learning activities. The page is still under development and growing as the project is going on. To keep the design process even more transparent and open for teachers and students, we are planning to publish summaries of Focus Group sessions, as well as design challenges and opportunities in the near future.

Meemoo is an HTML5 framework for hackable creative web applications. On a technical level, it does two main things:

1. defines how a module sends and receives data (each module is a web page)
2. provides a visual framework for arranging and connecting the modules into a graph, or app

Meemoo is a toolmaker for a new kind of creative web application. Apps and their output can be shared at the speed of the web. People can change the functionality of an app without coding skills. People can modify or write new modules with basic web coding skills.

My hope is that these features will encourage more people to play with web programming.

Meemoo project page | blog | demo

Active discussions towards the end of the meeting.

We just concluded a seminar and a general “knowledge sharing meeting” between the Learning + Technology research group (LeTech) of the School of Science and the Learning Environments research group (LeGroup) of the School of Art, Design and Architecture (that is us). The meeting was organized by Jukka Purma (thank you!) and held at the newly opened Media Factory premises.

The agenda of the meeting was to present and discuss the projects that the two groups are currently involved with, and to show works by other people that the group members find promising and inspiring.

We also have a common project with the groups. In the Interoperability and Social Media in Computer Science Learning Environments, R&D project we are aiming to change how people learn programming, in the Aalto University and beyond, from small children to people already working in the field.

Here a brief overview of the projects that were presented and discussed today. During the morning session, inspiring projects by others were presented.

Jukka Purma reflected about his experiences of participating in the Machine Learning Stanford Open Course, I spoke about my involvement with the Howard Rheingold University (HRU) alumni community, Teemu Koskinen showed us what gets him excited about Code Academy, and Sonja Krogius illustrated killer features of the Khan Academy.

In the afternoon session we shared projects that are under development in the research groups.

The Learning Environments research group featured Forrest Oliphant’s Master Thesis project Meemoo, Teemu Leinonen presented the design process applied for our work in the iTEC project, Jukka Purma demoed TeamUp and illustratively explained the software’s teaming algorithm.

Making use of the tables.

The Learning Environments and Technology research group included a presentation of the highly promising improvement plans for the interoperability of programming exercise systems and its user interface (Teemu Koskinen, Sonja Krogius), Tapio Auvinen presented his Rubyric prototype that supports the assessment work of teaching assistants, Teemu Sirkiä presented UUhistle, a project about visually and interactively exploring the execution-time behavior of computer programs, and Ari Korhonen and Ville Karavirta presented an overview of the OpenDSA research initiative.

Conclusively, it was exciting to learn about the similarities and differences in the projects and approaches and I am looking forward to our next meeting in Spring 2012 at the Otaniemi campus!

The iTEC -project is moving forward with testing in school and new cycles of scenario creation and design work. The annual review of the project went fine. The reviews are important: they are quality control but also an opportunity to learn. We past the “control” and learned a lot.

The formal results of the iTEC project’s first year are available in the project website. We think the Report on Design Prototypes and Design Challenges for Education is worth of reading.

We have, however, some new and exciting projects going on and coming up. Some are small, some are large.

With the Learning + Technology Group at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering we have started a project studying, developing and designing online learning tools and social media for computer science learning. The group has developed many great software tools serving computer science studies and has interesting educational practices of teaching computer science. In the research project we are now looking possibilities of integrating the services, motivational questions of students and coherent design of all this.

Another national project we are involved in is called (in English) Open Networks for Learning. In it we support production of open educational resources by training teachers and other experts, creating and supporting networks and services and this way strengthening active citizenship and democracy. For this project we are, for instance, maintaining, supporting and training people to use LeMill, Wikimedia -services, and Creative Commons Finland -services. The project does not include a lot of research per se but provides as possibilities to bridge research and practice.

A third national project is service design project with the Pirkanmaa Hospital District renewing their organization to focus on value created for patients and to prepare the way for a construction of a new wing in the hospital building. In the project we are applying some learning theories and participatory design methods, as well as considering the role of new media (online, an in hospital) services and devices in the hands of the patients and hospital professionals. The first research publication (in press) from the research project is titled Games as Design Medium —
Utilizing Game Boards for Design Enquiry with Cancer Patients by Juha Kronqvist et al.

Our colleges in the Tallinn University are getting together an interesting consortium of European top research groups in the field of mobile learning. With them we are right now preparing a research and project plan with several companies to start a new project in mid 2012.

We also have ongoing discussions with library operating bookmobiles: to study and redesign the service by introducing new media tools (tablets, projections, touch screens/tables, RFID etc.) and services in their offering. The possibilities to implement new kind of media education, youth work etc. with bookmobiles are huge. It is a great opportunity to do people-centric and participatory design research.

In addition to the European research in 2012 we are interested in to take part in the national Learning Solutions program by Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Let’s seen.

One more thing: As part of the Aalto on Waves we organized a Future of Learning study project with graduate students coming from the fields of art and design, engineering and technology and economics. We may expect interesting results.

Based on advanced pedagogical scenarios, which were created by the project partners at Futurelab, participatory design workshops were organized with teachers across Europe. By analyzing the summaries of the participatory design workshops, first design challenges and design opportunities were identified. Both, challenges and opportunities, informed the design of learning stories and learning activities that were tested in the cycle 1 pre-pilot tests. Also three prototypes were ideated, from which one was developed into a working prototype.

The working prototype is called TeamUp, a tool for teachers to quickly form teams of learners that are based on the interests of the learners. TeamUp also includes a newsflash recording feature, that encourages the teams of learners to reflect on what they did, what they will do and the issues they may have encountered during their project work in form of a one minute audio recording. These audio recordings are intended to be shared with the other learners of a class, to enable them to quickly catch up on the work of other teams. See more information on TeamUp.

The second prototype is called ‘ReFlex – My learning case’. It is an early design of a tool for learners to document and annotate their personal learning case, using digital video. As in the TeamUP prototype, 60 seconds recording time limits the time spent on review and assessment.

The third prototype is called Plate, an early design of a tool for viewing, sharing and publishing digital media within a group, a classroom, a school or to the entire online world. Plates is designed to make the learning activity of sharing files more feasible in school.

Yesterday, we submitted the official report of the project and are now finalizing the TeamUp prototype with instructions for teachers who will participate in the cycle 1 one full-scale pilots starting in mid-September. We are excited to learn about how our design work supports teachers in the classrooms!

For cycle 2, we are planning to improve the existing prototypes, and understand further design challenges and opportunities to design additional prototypes that can support advanced pedagogical scenarios in schools with technology. For more information on the current iTEC activities of the Learning Environments Research Group visit our iTEC blog.

The iTEC project — the designing the future classroom — is now in a full speed. It is a four year project we started in September so the first results are expected to be out around April-May. To follow our work focusing on to engage teachers and learners in the future classroom you may visit the blog and wiki just set-up last week. Here is the link:

http://itec-wp3.taik.fi/

LeMill — the web community for finding, authoring and sharing open educational resources — developed and hosted by us is something that is getting better and better almost every week. The latest updates are reported in the blog of the service:

http://blog.lemill.net/en/

The LeMill community is also growing steadily. The statistics show that most of the growth right now comes from Lithuania, Russia and Hungary. Why from these countries? I think it is all word-of-mouth marketing from our stable community members in Estonia and Georgia. Where is the rest of the Europe, United States, Asia and Latin America? What are the competitors of LeMill in these countries or is it simply that teaches do not care? A lot of open questions. A good thing is that LeMill is getting better and better.

We are also soon starting some new projects. They are related to service design and use of ICT in informal learning in open spaces: offline and online.

Here are some slides with some initial ideas on how the interactive surfaces could be used in classrooms in collaborative learning processes.

Our research group have several talks and session in it. Here is the list of events and talks:

April 21st: Full day workshop

Workshop on social media in teacher’s daily work

April 22nd : keynote and sometu track talks

Teemu Leinonen: Keynote: Networks and Learning in Future

Tarmo Toikkanen and Jukka Purma: Teachers’ open idea repository, LeMill (in Sometu track)

Tarmo Toikkanen and Anne Rongas: Teaching and studying in the fully open Finnish Wikiversity (in Sometu track).

April 23rd: Content repositories

Jukka Purka and Tarmo Toikkanen: 15 years of content repositories for teachers: what went wrong?

April 22nd and 23rd: In Open Content Bazar

On Thursday and Friday we also have a booth in the “Open Content Bazaar” where we are continuously running demonstrations about LeMill and Wikiversity.

The event is from most parts in Finnish – all our talks are in Finnish. If you are still interested in to get to know the Finnish “scene” there are some nice presentation in English, too.

Because of this we sometime use the term “sophisticated” to describe the tools and the learning they support. The term “sophisticated” is of course, also problematic but I feel that it is somehow according to our design orientation.

We are moving to start two new projects that are also conntected to each other. They are both small pieces in a possible open learning ecology with sophisticated tools helping people to run sophisticated learning – online. These are:

1. Lightweight tools for knowledge building in social media
2. EduFeedr – to handle your open online courses

With these tools the world would be a better place.