http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/mining-patterns-in-search-data-with.html

This is a continuation of the Google Flu Trends -thing which started when Google search data was found to correlate with flu activity. Simply put: when people search for flu-related stuff on Google’s search engine more than usual it indicates a peak of flu activity. Now you can test your own findings and see if you stumble on any interesting phenomena out there in the world… there’s bound to be lots of interesting stuff to test, like… er… wait for it… ah, eventually something will crop up – but just remember: correlation does not imply causation! [wikipedia.org]

Update: results of the survey available, links below:
http://ok.helsinki.fi/moodle/2011/05/26/moodlessa-kaytetyt-kielet-kyselyn-tuloksia/

http://ok.helsinki.fi/moodle-sv/2011/05/26/sprak-i-moodle-forfragans-resultat/

http://ok.helsinki.fi/moodle-en/2011/05/26/languages-used-in-moodle-survey-results/

Moodle can at present be used in three languages: Finnish, Swedish and English. The used language – via both language selections and used phrases – is an essential part of using Moodle and how it works. Teachers’ and students’ language choices do not show in Moodle statistics, and information concerning user preferences does not exist at all. As a consequence, we wanted to collect data about Moodle use in various languages at University of Helsinki. Tell us in which language you use Moodle, how the choice of language guides your work in Moodle! The questionnaire in English can be accessed here:

https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/26879/lomake.html?rinnakkaislomake=eng

The questionnaire is open until April 12. It will only take about 10 minutes to answer the questions.

The results will be presented in MoodleMoot UK this coming April, and published in this blog later in the spring. For additional information, please contact Kristiina Karjalainen (@helsinki.fi).

Thank you for your co-operation,
Kristiina and Anni

Apple’s products usually generate a lot of emotions, and are often the subject of some humour as well…

The iPad is more of a big iPhone without the phone capabilities, using a normal backlit touch display (albeit a high quality one). It is capable of browsing the net, watching videos and of course reading e-books but doesn’t offer the paper-like readability and battery life of the e-ink readers. But its sheer versatility and 10 hours battery life might be enough to make dedicated reading devices less desirable – hopefully this competition will speed up the evolution of the paper-like display even more. Apple also launched its iBookstore alongside the iPad, so they do have e-books in mind with the device alongside games, music & movies… although becoming the replacement for news(papers) might be what the iPad really is aiming for where consuming digital text is concerned. This is hinted by the imminent launch of  media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily [engadget.com], an iPad exclusive 7-days a week news magazine.

Amazon, currently holding the “iPod”-status of e-readers with its Kindle-line  launched two generations of Kindles (now in its 3rd generation) since my last post in 2009, including Kindle DX [amazon.com] which is specifically targeted for reading textbooks & articles with an A4-sized screen – although it’s not apparently perfect yet for academia, at least according to  Princeton University students [The Daily Princetonian] who tested the device extensively. The Kindle also launched worldwide – you can now order it from Amazon.com and it works in most welfare states.

The free 3G-wireless functionality that enables you to buy books & browse magazine content is a bit crippled in Europe or not available in some countries (in Finland you can buy books from Amazon and browse Wikipedia, but that’s it).

The large bookstore Barnes & Noble have also entered the ring with their e-ink reader called “Nook” and the “Nook Color”, which is an Android tablet more like the iPad but cheaper & smaller. As a big bookstore they apparently have a similar business model to Amazon,  where the books can be read on their Nook-devices and on PC:s & iPhones. As a novelty, these books have DRM that allows them to be “lent” to a friend for up to 14 days, during which you cannot access the book yourself.

All in all, during 2009-2010 you could definitely watch the Wikipedia comparison list of different e-ink readers [wikipedia.org] grow, and the prices got lower too.

New technology

The black & white e-ink displays improved during 2010 with the new Pearl-type displays, and the company making these – E Ink Corporation. – also unveiled a colour e-ink display [crunchgear.com], which however still is too slow a technology for moving images and it “only” has 4096 colours (the Amiga HAM-mode [wikipedia.org] comes to mind) and apparently the colour images look a bit desaturated on this type of e-paper.

There is also a new type of low-power LCD-display marketed as Pixel Qi (as is the name of the company producing it), which can enter a special black & white mode without backlight that makes text easy to read and keeps power consumption low. The first tablet computer using this display is called the Adam [wikipedia.org], and has been surrounded by a lot of hype. Thanks to the Pixel Qi-display, it combines the good features of e-ink readers with iPad tablet-like features. An interesting device for sure!

The devices are there – where are the books (in Europe)?!

OK, it’s fairly trivial to get a dedicated device for reading e-books today. The problem is finding the books – there are many stores and few of them have all the titles you would like “in stock”, but the bigger problem is that they most likely only sell to US or UK customers (if we’re talking about English books, how the situation is for other languages beats me). Also, the  prices of the e-books themselves are of course more expensive in Europe as shipping e-books overseas is soooo expensive through the internet. And the books are often crippled with DRM, requiring additional software or bookstore-approved devices to be able to read them. Globalization is funny in  the way that companies may freely go to where labour is the cheapest, but the consumer may not buy the product where it is sold at the cheapest price. Free markets my… er, donkey.

So, e-books (like all digital content) are facing the dilemma where old rules of distribution really shouldn’t apply anymore, but they are artificially upheld. But some publishers “get” e-books, and in my last post I also mentioned sci-fi publisher Baen, who have the e-book store Webscriptions. That’s were I purchased my first e-book from, and it went really nicely. No DRM, I can download it as many times I like, the price was right… and I could read a free book by the same author first to see if I wanted to buy more, which I did.

At the moment a good bet is to use an e-book search engine / price comparison site like Luzme [luzme.com], which also shows you if you can buy the book outside the US/UK.

So, the devices are there and sales of e-books are growing [idpf.org] – now it’s just about finding the content. And academics might be better of with a tablet like iPad or Adam for the time being, since they currently offer the functionality that research requires – flipping through tons of short articles while bookmarking and making notes. The slow e-ink readers are still king for novels. Now excuse me, I think I’ll watch some TV…

Official soundtrack to this post

Somewhat related to literature…

E-book
 

The 2010 Seminar on Blended Learning was held on the 11-12th of March at the functionally beautiful Metsätalo (“House of Forestry”) in Kaisaniemi, central Helsinki.  If you are unsure what blended learning is, here is the Wikipedia link. Simply put, think of it as mixing different modes of teaching in one course…

Keynote speaker Charles Dziuban from the University of Central Florida gave an entertaining presentation on blended learning from his point of view: he has been advocating blended learning & e-learning as solutions to problems with growth inside the university. From the 1970′s the Uni of Central Florida has grown from accommodating 1800 students to a whopping 54.000 students. Of course, in the U.S. more students equals more money more significantly than here, and it is definitely lucrative to offer courses completely on-line  in order to save on physical space & travel costs. Students were more satisfied with blended courses than fully online courses, and it was nice to see the claims backed up by some data. American lecturers like Mr. Dziuban are nice to listen to, even if I always get the impression that I’m being sold something rather than being told new things – watching the shopping channel too much on late nights has its drawbacks, I suppose 

Online exams in the blender and in the bed

Taina Joutsenvirta from the Faculty of Social Sciences presented their Moodle-exam pilot, where students can take book exams on Saturdays from any computer they wish by logging into the Moodle course management system, either at home or at the computer class in the city centre. Students and teachers then evaluated their experiences of this way of planning, taking and grading exams, with the following results:

• Good readability of the keyboard-typed answers were generally considered a big plus
• Students liked the fact that they could do the exam in a calm, familiar place (and with no need to dress properly – imagine lying in bed in just your underwear comfortably typing away) which made answering easier.
• There was, however, some discrepancy between students and teachers about the perceived quality of the answers – some teachers thought this type of exam produced poorer answers, and others (esp. students) were more satisfied with the answers they wrote.
• Students liked the applied nature of the questions and felt that they learned more this way – as these weren’t monitored exams the questions had to be designed with a broader scope to cover instead of simply being a test of individual facts, since you can’t know if a student reads his notes, consults a textbook or makes Google searches and such.
• But teachers were worried that too much trust is placed on student ethics – you couldn’t be sure that student’s hadn’t for example  used collaborative tactics and shared the exam into several pieces where each student concentrated on one part. The lack of monitoring thus potentially creates unequality compared with students taking the traditional exam, as cheating in one way or another is easier in this type of unmonitored online exam.

Further reading:

The Seminar on Blended Learning (Blog, in Finnish):
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/sulautuvaopetus/

Online exam pilot of the Faculty of Social Sciences (in english):
http://www.helsinki.fi/valtiotieteellinen/opkeh/online_exam.html

Official soundtrack to this post:

Here’s a piece by the Chemical Brothers celebrating the reboot of this blog!

The Finnish Virtual University organized an online seminar on the 9th of December 2009 about taking exams using computers instead of plain ol’ pen & paper. The potential benefits are obvious: students can choose more freely when (and possibly where) to take the exam, and the teacher doesn’t have to worry about finding the suitable time and space to organize an exam. Four speakers from different universities told us about their solutions in this area during a two-hour Adobe Connect Pro meeting, so attending the conference didn’t require a lot of travelling and it worked surprisingly well.

From the presentations it became obvious that there are really two different philosophies of doing exams electronically:

First, there is the more traditional exam type where the student can book a time slot according to his needs, and then go to the space which has been setup as a dedicated exam environment with a computer shut off from the regular internet and a remote surveillance system (usually a video camera and a microphone recording the student). Even staff or students can be around monitoring the process, providing extra security to discourage cheating. These exams can be just like regular exams where you (usually) aren’t allowed any materials and must know all the details by heart.

Second, there is the completely do-it-anywhere-virtual-exam, where the student can use any online computer to take the test, even from the comfort of ones home if he or she so wants. This usually means that cheating cannot be monitored in any secure way and so the exam itself must be of a different type: learning materials are allowed but the questions are broad in scope and require knowledge that you simply haven’t got the time to learn in the time it takes to complete the exam.

The differences between these two ways of thinking about e-tests are interesting and the exam culture probably depends a lot on the subject being taught/learned, so it was interesting to hear about the different approaches chosen.

The aquarium approach

Three universities had built an “electronic aquarium” -type solution, of which two – the University of Jyväskylä (UJ) and Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) – had a solution based on the SoftTutor application. LUT had an aquarium in their library building, with 10 machines (seats) and 4 cameras monitoring the place, as well as some paid students on monitoring duty. About 30 teachers are taking advantage of the system at the University, especially for the “maturity test” (fin. kypsyysnäyte, a small exam that tests the student’s knowledge of his/her thesis).

Jyväskylä has a similar solution, with 12 seats and 6 drawing tablets, enabling some sort of free hand drawing to be added to the the exam. 8 courses and 7 teachers were using this electronic exam system as a compliment to the normal exams.  The University of Helsinki has a few different approaches to electronic exams, of which the oldest has been the aquarium system called “Tenttiakvaario”, which is currently in use on the Viikki Campus (3 seats) and at the Faculty of Law and Order… awww, ok, just the Faculty of Law (1 seat), so this is a smaller scale solution that students and teachers nevertheless have been happy with.

The more Out-of-the-box approach

At Tampere the University has taken the course management system Moodle and uses its quiz module for making exams, with the goal of having large groups of students taking the exams in a short time period. Electronic exams have been seen as being especially helpful with organizing book exams, that students need to take sporadically.  Using existing computer classes especially the summer exams have been popular – during the summer of ’09 927 exams were taken.  The exams were monitored, as with the previous examples, using access control cards, video surveillance and spot checks.

At the University of Helsinki Moodle has also been thought of as a way to make remote exams, and then of course the exams themselves have to be re-thought because surveillance is next to impossible to organize.  For example, exams then have to be more “putting knowledge in practice”-type broad questions than questions asking for detailed tidbits of knowledge. This approach could in the future mean great savings to space costs if people could do exams on their home computers instead of being dependent on expensive computer classes. And space costs are always an issue in Helsinki.

It was nice to hear these stories, and I think electronic ways of taking exams – or really any new way of grading & monitoring learning – could be helpful, but maybe the biggest challenge then is to embrace the new possibilities instead of trying to fit the old ways into new technology. It is an frustrating idea that you have all that processing power and networked knowledge at your fingertips, but you’re only allowed to write text in a Word document during the exam.

Edit – forgot the music to this post, here it is – a soothing piano piece (no video) by Eluvium, the album Copia is really great!

Further reading:

The seminar presentations:
http://palvelut.virtuaaliyliopisto.fi/palvelut/seminaarihuone/?q=node/179

Tenttiakvaario at the University of Helsinki:
http://ok.helsinki.fi/tentti/

The first day’s theme was Focus on Students & Sociality – and that´s sociality as in social media: yep, it should come as no surprise that everyone and his grandmother are cultivating the term “social media” in every e-learning sentence these days. Päivi Häkkinen from the University of Jyväskylä introduced a concept that was new to me, “Pedagogical scripts”, which seemed similar to having a screenplay for the course where certain events are scripted (like in computer games) to achieve the desired learning effect. Of course, what this again boils down to is that actual work and planning is required to get any benefits from ICT even in collaborative learning situations. Relying on students sorting matters out among themselves and Just Learning (TM) doesn’t work, and the input of teachers is still needed as computers don’t do the work for them. So the central point from the perspective of e-learning once again becomes: plan how to use ICT correctly.

Second Life (SL) once again reared its blocky 3d-head in one of the workshops. The main presenter Irma Mänty (Laurea polytechnic) had been enthusiastic enough about SL to print a very nice, almost life-sized cardboard copy of her SL-avatar (see picture). Like Irma I also think that identifying with your avatar makes these kinds of environments more attractive and you might behave more like in real life because of that, but I’m also more and more convinced that a free, Open Source environment hosted by the world’s leading universities (for example) is required to really make this kind of environment bloom. Second Life, IMO, is just a bit old fashioned and clumsy compared to modern 3d-games, and a piece of land costs too much, but OTOH it is currently the best bet available and there’s still an ongoing buzz about using SL in education. Some of the teaching examples – like taking students in tourism and language to visit appropriate culturally interesting SL locations (like the virtual Rome) were nice ideas. Again, it requires lots of planning ahead to get educational benefits out of Second Life.

The second day started with a couple of  nicely contradictory (or so it seemed initally) talks on video: Olli-Pekka Kangas from the University of Turku demonstrated how much hard work goes into creating good educational videos whereas Mauri Kantola from the Turku polytechnic school wanted teachers to start making videos with the bar lowered as low as possible – think shooting a lecture with your mobile phone and just putting it on the web without editing it (or only slightly with Windows Movie Maker). Of course, these guys were really talking about slightly different things: Mauri wanted teachers to make their first video with no quality requirements, just to get them started and realize that they can use videos for spicing up their educational materials. Olli-Pekka then reminded us of what it then takes to get to decent quality levels – it will cost you lots of time and money too. Like all ICT, a good educational video also requires planning ahead (heard that one before?).

Tarmo Toikkanen held a nice talk about the Creative Commons -license [wikipedia.org], a presentation quite heavily influenced by the (excellent) documentary film RiP: A Remix Manifesto. I’m personally a big fan of the Creative Commons license(s), and it greatly simplifies life in this copyright-jungle world – hopefully it will also make a big splash in education. I do think, however, that if I ever make a hit song, me and my children (and grandchildren) should be able to live off the royalties of that piece of music [wikipedia.org]. That’s only fair

Wrapping up the seminar was self-made man Teemu Arina from his own company Dicole Oy, who I’d previously seen a couple of years ago demonstrating a course running on a blog platform with peer reviewing being a central aspect of the learning process – I liked that presentation. This time the talk was a bit more abstract with lots of flashy visuals and a slight rock star – attitude to the subject, which was a concept called fractal learning. The intellectually stimulating presentation had lots of food for thought but also some things which might have been more style than substance, confusing matters somewhat perhaps. What I’d truly like, however – and this is often missing on any subject regarding pedagogy – is some scientific data to back up claims that “fractal learning” or any such concept is something to “bet on”. I’m always thinking that when we are planning our teaching on certain pedagogical concepts assisted by certain ICT-tools, we’re “betting on horses” in regard to what tools and concepts we use, and the goal is of course to make the students learn what they should  optimally learn, that is to “win the race”. So, as a teacher I’d like to bet on the winning horse (not that I really teach, as I’m a support person for teachers, but still…)!

Thus, science is required to help us bet on the right horses, me thinks, and not just on any idea that feels fresh and intuitively innovative. But of course, if a teacher finds that a certain piece of untested theory/technology makes him/her enthuastic about teaching, it doesn’t have to be that scientifically proven – whatever makes you think about what students should learn and how you could achieve that is always a positive factor. We humans like style as well as substance, so perhaps a mixture of both is the winning combination even in education! At least a bit of flair helps the audience in staying awake, people should learn from Teemu in that regard…

All in all, food for thought and a great time in Turku with cool people! Hopefully next year again… and oh yes, from now on I will end every post with a piece of music; the first post-post music is Fever Ray from Sweden with a great song from a suitably autumn-ish album that I’ve recently enjoyed:

Further reading:

Verkkoja kokemassa – esitykset (presentations on the official seminar page)

RiP: A Remix Manifesto (homepage of the documentary)

Creative Commons homepage

70 new students started on the path to enlightenment (or the road to hell?) at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, and one of the first things they have to cope with is the  ICT driving licence, of which I’m the responsible teacher at the Faculty. Luckily I don’t have to do a lot of teaching since it’s mostly a self-study module with the heart of the course being the extensive self-study material and (inside Moodle) quiz-based self training tests that pave the way for a similar automated final exam. Supervising the exams is fun as you don’t have to correct the exams afterwards: students are automatically graded and 99% pass the test with flying colours IF they have practiced even a bit. The thing I like about the course is that it scales according to how much the student previously knows about ICT – the gurus can just go straight to the exam whereas the novices can read, attend classes and learn new stuff according to how much they need it.

»» ICT Driving Licence

Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away the Ystävä 2010 -project – a.k.a. the new intranet or Alma-killer, took a big step forward. The content management system was chosen, apparently an Oracle solution, so ideas can start becoming reality soon as the technological building blocks are falling in place. This is a big deal because the CMS will later be used for the external pages (instead of the rather clumsy if tweakable Dreamweaver template solution currently in place) as well and a plethora of other things, at least on paper.

»» Ystävä 2010 -blog

The network of e-learning specialists had its first “morning club” at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, where we heard about the history of the virtual university at FIOH, which organizes the education of doctors specializing in the field of occupational health. With students & supervisors all over the country there really seem to be significant gains when using e-learning tools as time and distance are obstacles for this kind of cross-country education. Also, some of the materials are easily accessed in Moodle without registering (as they’re made with taxpayers’ money) so you can read a bit more on workplace & health-related stuff yourself.

»» Finnish Institute of Occupational Health
»» Työterveyshuollon virtuaaliyliopisto (virtual university of FIOH)
»» Marja’s blog entry on the subject (no need to reinvent the wheel for me, ha)

It’s getting chilly (of course I already caught a cold some few weeks ago and still coughing) and dark, October is soon here,  hopefully with some blog fodder so until next time – take care!

Sometimes this blog stays true to its name – a few days (well, almost a week) ago a study based on a language development test found that the mental abilities of dogs on average were comparable to 2-year-old human children (and probably some adults too, when you think about it). Basically the test tells us that average dogs can learn about 165 words, which is similar to the performance of humans at age 2. Learning words is maybe not everything in figuring out puzzles’n'stuff, so maybe “mental abilities of a 2-year-old kid” is stretching it a bit.

A more interesting factor is how breed matters for dogs: top dog breeds can learn up to 250 words, and there is even a ranking list of the smartest/dumbest breeds compiled! This is probably related to a study published in 2004 in Science, where a border collie Rico learned the labels of 200 items, and border collies rank #1 on the “smartest dogs” list. However, as dog expert Stanley Coren puts it, some of the “dumber” breeds are usually older breeds that were bred for specific purposes (like hunting), and usually there are costs to all benefits, so being good in one thing (words) might mean having to do worse in some other thing (hunting, for example). Traits seem to follow Newton’s Third Law; for every reaction there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

Ok, that’s maybe stretching it a bit again but I like the idea – all kinds of people/dogs are needed to provide variation, and no individual can excel at everything

Further reading:

Live Science (8.8.2009) – Dogs as Smart as 2-year-old Kids:
http://www.livescience.com/animals/090808-smart-dogs.html

Stanley Coren’s blog (Canine Corner):
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner

Science (2004) – Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for “Fast Mapping”:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/304/5677/1682

The e-learning support network at the University of Helsinki consists of a curious group of diverse people with very different assignments according to the needs of their faculties, but at least we have one common entity pulling our strings: The Educational Centre for ICT, which coordinates the e-learning people so we know what’s happening and get to meet each other once in a while too.

During this particular brainstorming session we discussed the e-learning support profession – a relatively new “venture” – and what tasks are definitive to the job. A summary of these thoughts have been assembled (in Finnish) by Anni R. here: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/tukiverkosto/tyonkuva/ The requirement of an e-learning support person was considered to be something akin to a 50:50 mix of pedagogical skills (a typical teacher, that is) and technical know-how (someone fluent with the latest & greatest technology).  Or so I understood it. Or thought. Feel free to disagree Anyway, this curious mix of skills – which often might not reside in the same person – makes it challenging to create some sort of professional identity for e-learning people. But this is a start.

Afterwards we visited the newly opened Kumpula Botanical Garden,  and it was nice to have a guided tour there to get more out of the relaxing green spot in the midst of the city (or the outskirts of the city centre, more like). Last year we visited the Natural History Museum (previously called the Zoological Museum, of which I have many fond memories from my study years) so this was a great continuation of that tradition!

But the really important stuff was, of course, afterwards discussed in the comfy nearby pub (Oljenkorsi).

Oh, and some photos from this glorious day can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7503705@N07/sets/72157621047273427/

We ourselves are the persons most concerned for our own welfare and the typical doctor in Finland has too little time for each patient [terveysportti.fi]), so there might be something that people could do themselves that could help the professionals before coming to the appointment, or afterwards if the medical condition is hard to diagnose. Of course, doctors should always call the shots since wrong diagnoses can sometimes be worse than the actual illness so it’s better to have a real doctor to blame it on if that happens! One thing that would make life easier for the patient would be if all the accumulated lab tests, x-rays etc. over the years would exist in some database that the patient him-/herself could access to better (and watch results detoriate as one gets older, ha). Something like a medical version of Nintendo’s excercise game Wii Fit [wikipedia.org].

Web tools & gene testing kits

The world of self-diagnosis is evolving on at least two fronts: diagnostics websites (sort of an evolution of the family doctor books) and the latest craze, genetic self testing kits which are more about finding about probabilities that you might get some inherited disease if you carry certain alleles in your genetic luggage.

A popular self-diagnosis help site is My electronic MD: http://www.myelectronicmd.com/

Interestingly, a Slashdot user noticed that making a query using this tool with the symptoms the 18-year old experienced (female, chronic diarrhea, fever) brings up Chron’s disease in the top 3 candidates for the diagnosis.

And let’s not forget owners of pets, there are a few similar services for veterinary medicine also (meant for vets, but pet owners could start using them as well – hopefully not too confidently):

Consultant (University of Cornell): http://www.vet.cornell.edu/consultant/Consult.asp
5-minute Veterinary Consult: https://app.vetconnect.com/5min/toc/000.htm

Then there are the genetic self testing kits which bring a new dimension to a lot of things -  here’s a story on MIT’s Technology Review about the rise of these gene kits which were recently demonstrated on the first annual consumer genetics show in Boston. Imagine knowing that you carry a gene for some disesase that could with some probability shorten your life span. And imagine what your employer or insurance company could do with that information. Well, we’ll see if these kits will spread to Europe and if the whole thing is a fad or not… but if the price is right, who wouldn’t check out what his/her genome would tell about life to come – just like checking this week’s horoscope. Ask the stars, ask the amino acids…