H0, null hypothesis – challenge your preconceived notions

After listening to Göte Nyman at TEDxHelsinki about Null hypothesis (H0), I just had to write down some thoughts that arose from it. First a recap:

Göte presented examples from popular news media, such as “coke and pepsi activate different areas of the brain”. Well duh, if they are experienced differently, someone might assume that the experience manifests itself as brain activity. So the null hypothesis behind the news item was that coke and pepsi affect the brain in the same way. So the point was that looking at the assumptions behind “revelations” tells you something about the naïve assumptions people generally have about the topic. I mean, it’s not news unless it challenges current thinking. So each scandalous headline reveals something about the assumptions of the editor about what the audience thinks about the topic. Read the rest of this entry »

Visuaalisuus ja nimet oppimisympäristössä

Anne Rongas pohtii visuaalisuutta kirjoituksessaan Väliäkö visuaalisella? ja sanoo mm.

Miksi visuaalinen on niin tärkeää (ainakin minulle)? Se on kuin arkkitehtuuri ja sisustus ja puutarhasuunnitelma ja liikennejärjestelyt. Jos verkossa visuaalisuus ei tue liikkujaa, ympäristö ei avaudu. Harva uskoo, mikä vaiva on luoda mahdollisimman havainnollista verkkoympäristöä. En todellakaan ole taitava tässä. Muut pankoot nyt paremmaksi.

Ympäristön nimeksi tuli Penaali. Visuaaliseen ilmeeseen liittyy erilaista normipenaalista löytyvää: kyniä, terotin, klemmari yms. Penaalilla on myös vertauskuvallinen merkitys, kuten testihenkilö totesi: Sieltä löytyy kaikki apu visaisiinkin pulmiin, kunhan vain muistaa ajatella!!

Lähtökohtahan kaikkien tilojen rakentamiselle on se todellinen tarve. Opetuksessa perimmäinen tarve on oppimistulosten parantaminen. Niitä voi tukea uusilla menetelmillä, pedagogialla ja toimintatavoilla. Toimintatapoja taas voi tukea uusilla välineillä, kuten tällä Annen perustamalla Penaalilla.

Kukin väline tarjoaa affordansseja ja rajoitteita, eli tarjoaa joitain mahdollisuuksia ja toisaalta rajoittaa toimintoja jollain tavalla. Nämä eivät kuitenkaan ole jokaiselle välineen käyttäjälle itsestäänselviä. Ne pitää tuoda esiin.

Nimi on tärkeä elementti, sillä se ohjaa välineen käyttäjien ajattelua (frame of mind). “Penaali” nimenä johtaa palveluun tulijan suhtautumaan siihen eri tavalla kuin vaikkapa “Koulutuskeskus” tai “Kahvihuone” tai “Liitutaulu” tai “Kateederi”.

Palvelun nimen lisäksi myös muut käytetyt termit vaikuttavat toimintaan. Kutsutaanko blogia blogiksi, vai kurssipäiväkirjaksi, vai kurssin kotisivuksi? Onko foorumi foorumi, vai keskustelualue, vai ideointipaikka, vai hengailumesta?

Myös visuaalinen ilme vaikuttaa. Käytetyllä kuvakielellä saadaan katsojassa aikaan tunnetason reaktioita. Onko kuvitus innostavaa, viileän asiallista, omituista, kunnioitusta herättävää vai ahdistavaa? Tyhjän tilan käytöllä, typografiaa vaihtelemalla, värimaailmaa säätämällä ja kuvia valikoimalla voi samasta palvelusta tehdä tyystin erilaisen. Ja tämä erilaisuus tulee myös vaikuttamaan sen käyttötapaan.

Kokeilkaapa joskus vaikka katsoa jännityselokuvaa tai toimintaelokuvaa mutta mykistäkää ääni ja soittakaa ihan mitä tahansa muuta musiikkia tilalla. Musiikki on tietysti oma aistimodaliteettinsa, mutta vastaavalla tavalla visuaalinenkin vaikuttaa kokonaisuuteen.

Itselläni on itse asiassa sama homma kuin Annellakin edessä, kun täytyy rakentaa verkkosivusto tukemaan tammikuussa ilmestyvää Sosiaalinen media opetuksessa -kirjaa. Eli pitää miettiä visuaalista esillepanoa.

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List of interesting blogs on learning

Couldn’t get any sleep tonight (yet), so I decided to go through a bunch of learning and teaching related blogs and pick up any that interest me. Mainly I used the controversial top 100 educational blogs list and the Edublog 2006 awards basically opening all (well, at the time of this post, not all of them yet) of the blogs up, and reading through what they have on their front page. If they got my interest, I subscribed them to my blogroll in Bloglines (I use a web service for my blogroll since I use several computers and it’s a headache trying to sync Firefox livebookmarks on several instances).

Here’s a javascript thingie that lists the current contents of my Learning folder in my blogroll. But first the disclaimer: these aren’t necessarily the best blogs in the world. But they’re the ones that I’ve found most interesting to me. But I’m a techie as well as a psychologist, so my tastes may be a bit different from yours.

And since this is a javascript thingie, it’s unbloglike in the sense that it will change according to what I have in my Learning folder in Bloglines, and not stay what it was when I posted this note.

Blackboard's eLearning patent is going to be reviewed

Flosse Posse commented in August on the absurdity of Blackboard’s eLearning patent claim. Now action is being taken, as the Software Freedom Law Center is demanding that the patent be reviewed and revoked if necessary.

The power of the networked community of people can be seen in the huge article on Wikipedia on the History of virtual learning environments which goes back to 1728. This massive collection of references was one reason that the SFLC decided to go ahead with this action. Well done, everyone!

And why is it that Microsoft seems to be involved in all of these sleezy patent claims, like the SCO vs. IBM (or the Linux community), which was resolved yesterday and SCO lost royally.

The trend for good companies and valuable employees

On the 12th of September the pedagogical faculty of the University of Helsinki hosted a panel talk Siltamat (in finnish) where, among others, Esko Kilpi was talking about how the frontline companies in far east are conducting business. It was refreshing to see someone actually use hype words like “web 2.0″, “blog” and “wiki” in a meaningful way. Here’s a summary.

Instead of the static business models of the industrial era, the information age and globalization make everything dynamic and changing. This means that the relationship companies have with their customers, and with their employees, must be a learning relationship. The relationships must be evaluated and adapted constantly.

Because the problems tackled in the information age have already become too complex for individuals to handle, the unit that functions, learns, and is evaluated, is no longer an individual employee, but a group of employees, often called a team, group, or department. The traditional way of evaluating role based competences of people is no longer meaningful, since the relationship is dynamic and learning, and people will move from one role to another constantly. Replacing them are as adaptation and learning abilities, and evaluation more often than not happens through peer review.

Each unit (team, department) must communicate and collaborate. If each person just does his own job, the company is soon in trouble. Employess no longer need to learn everything that relates to their role, but rather they need to know where they can get help. The three things that an employee in a new role should find out are:

  1. Who has done this before? Who can I ask?
  2. What has been done before? What has it been based on?
  3. Where is the best expertise?

In order for these answers to be available, employees and teams need to reflect on their work. And the organization must make reflection possible by giving people the time to do that. And reflection is meaningless unless things can be changed. This means that the conclusions of reflection should be fed back to the system, so that the ways of working can be improved based on the findings. The employees themselves thus must have the power to change the rules they work under.

With current technologies, reflection is most naturally done using personal blogs within the company. And instead of just writing, a lot can be podcasted – images of designs, or audio/video recordings of designers discussing a complex issue. The more popular a blog is, the more valuable information that individual is sharing with his colleagues, and the more valuable that individual is for the company.

The company itself should be presented in a wiki. Every employee can edit the wiki pages, and thus the ever-increasing knowledge (or intellectual capital) of the company is not stuck within the heads of employees, but is shared with everyone as best as possible. Any and all documents, people, and resources should be tagged. Not with keywords from a closed vocabulary, but actually tagged with freeform tags (folksonomies). Information cannot be categorised into a tree structure of folders anymore, since most of the complex information should be present in several places. The network hierarchy needed is most easily represented by tags.

Because of the learning nature of relationships and the constant changes in company realities, deep hierarchies of managers are no longer appropriate. Instead of forming permanent departments, employees should form short-lived unofficial teams, groups, or pairs across intraorganizational boundaries as needed (emergent resource allocation). This also means that there is no such thing as repeatable processes, since things change all the time. This makes many quality standards, such as the ISO 9000, meaningless.

Summary: people need to adapt, learn, and share; evaluation is done based on the contributions of the indivudal to the organization, often using peer-review; sharing is done using blogs and wikis; people are allowed to reflect on their work and rules of working are changed accordingly. All this gives the company more flexibility and provides an advantage in the current market, where the focus is moving from mass production to customized production, and companies need to adapt and accomodate changes in the market rapidly.