Last Monday was the annual Community Manager Appreciation Day. A couple of hundred participants showed up at a conference held in Lahti, Finland. Similar events took place in two other small towns, Paris and London. This was the fourth such event here in Finland, and I have participated three times. Volunteers organize the entire event here, and it is free of charge for participants, thanks to the sponsors. As for popularity, this year all the participant slots were reserved in three hours.

Johanna Janhonen opened the program by presenting some results from last year’s community manager survey. Result 1. The person in charge manages communities in addition to his regular job. Result 2. His title is usually related to communication: communication manager, spokesman and so on. Result 3. His professional area is typically education or communications. Ambientia’s Aino Heiskanen and F-Secure’s Samuli Airaksinen, in their sarcastic presentation, described how to ensure that your social intranet will fail: ban non-work related communication, and let the intranet fend for itself. Harto Pönkä, in turn, outlined what makes a quality community in social media. One of the most popular performances was lawyer Elina Koivumäki’s summary of the legal issues in social media: you have to know the law and each service’s terms of use.

However, the best thing in the community manager event is that no one complains if you’re using several different devices to be in contact with other communities during the presentations. That’s just part of the job description.

Jukka-Pekka Pietiäinen, the head of The Finnish Association of Non-fiction Writers, has partnered with professor Joel Kuortti to assemble a list of 100 significant Finnish non-fiction books. Each book is introduced with a compact summary. The collection offers an excellent tour of the history of Finnish non-fiction: it starts in 1543 with Agricola‘s ABC book and ends with Elina Grundström’s recent The Black Orchid, which deals with global climate change. Reading the list, you make interesting discoveries. Matthias Calonius created a foundation for Finnish law with his Civil Law Lectures; in the 1700s, Pehr Kalm’s North American Journey was translated into many European languages; in the background of the publisher of Statistical Yearbook you find an institution established in 1748, which began compiling Sweden’s and Finland’s population statistics, the oldest continuous statistics in the world. The real bestseller has been Pikku jättiläinen (The Little Giant), first published in 1924, which was printed in 300 000 copies. Elo’s arithmetic was published in 1915; its 32nd edition was still in use in the late ’60s. A work unknown to me, Recreational Fishermen, has sold amazingly for a book in Finnish: 50 000 copies in Finland and 150 000 copies in Russia.

The 100 books will be the subject of a special exhibition at the Tampere Main Library from 26 January to 7 February 2015. Come on by!

Beyond its keynote speakers, the Online Educa conference offered many interesting presentations for smaller audiences. I was inspired by three Canadians – Thomas Stenzel, Michael Canuel and Donna Aziz – who dealt with teaching English in Thailand. The Thai government had ordered nine million tablets as part of an effort to improve miserable student performance on the PISA exams. The tablets ended up on the shelf. No content had been planned for them, and teachers couldn’t even charge the batteries. Only after this failure was the Canadian group invited to establish a workable, web-based model for learning English. The case is a typical example of what happens when a so-called reform begins by purchasing technology without a pedagogical plan and without training teachers. Technology deployment requires their skills and commitment. Without their own e-learning experience, it’s impossible to implement new teaching methods. Unfortunately, the acquisition of tablets in particular seems to be a value in itself, rather than their purpose. Before deciding on a device, we should analyze its intended use: is it a tool for working and interaction, or mainly a reader for ready-made materials? In the search for fast solutions, we often grasp the wrong end of a problem.

How has the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty changed in the last 20 years? Would you say it’s doubled, remained the same, or dropped in half? Ola Rosling posed this question in Online Educa, because he wanted to find out if the participants viewed the world based on facts or illusions. It turns out that we education professionals are nearly as well-informed as chimpanzees. Rosling demonstrated that we believe development in general is far darker than statistics show it to be. Poverty has been halved, women’s education has increased, and natural disasters have been less devastating, as the Gapminder statistics show. Rosling demolished three common misconceptions. Contrary to what people think, most things are in fact better now than in the past. Prosperity does not lead to social reform; social reform leads to prosperity. And income inequality is not actually increasing; rather, the number of middle-income earners is growing. Whom we should blame for the misconceptions: parents, media, or teachers? At least we instructors should convey an evidence-based world view, which means we need to do our own fact checking.

The 20th annual session of Online Educa Berlin took place last week. I had intended to skip the conference this year, but changed my mind for three reasons: Howard Rheingold, George Siemens, and Stephen Downes. Rheingold spoke convincingly about the empowering potential of networks. Effective networking requires that students create their own public voice. When someone enters your name in Google, you want the results to include your own outputs, not only information written by others. Stephen Downes, in turn, advocated that each person needs his own independent online space. Services like Facebook are based on the premise that users are a product to sell to advertisers. Learning management systems, similarly, collect student data for the benefit of the organization and for the LMS company, even though the student should have the primary right to decide on its use. In the Online Educa debate, which is the culmination of the conference, George Siemens defended the idea that big data is not corrupting education, but rather helps to enhance and personalize instruction—when its use is open and transparent. In the post-debate poll, 72% of the audience agreed with him.

This week, I’ve worked through piles of student articles and interviews for the journalism course I teach. In feedback sessions, we have discussed how to handle direct quotation. The guidelines say that speech has to be quoted just as uttered – nothing must be changed. Anyone who is familiar with the differences between oral and written language will understand that it’s impossible to meet that standard. If you set down exactly what a person says, every second interviewee will sound like an idiot, which also goes against journalistic guidelines. At a minimum, we should drop filler words such as ”um,” “well,” and “like,” as well as unintended repetition. The type of the story and its context affect whether we decide to preserve dialect, loanwords, jargon or cursing. The same is true for colloquialisms. In the discussions students ponder the style of words: when is someoneconnecting and promoting and when are they trolling and pimping? Regionalisms are even harder: should we maintain the southern American’s “y’all” or convert it to “you all”?

Lauri Haapanen has stated that quotations in a newspaper story have many tasks, from rhythm to characterization of the speaker. According to his research, in practice colloquialisms are changed to standard language, slip-ups are corrected, phrases are compacted and statements combined. Quotations should be tidied up, but with a gentle hand, so that the content and priorities do not change.

Many organizations now offer online service chats on their websites, so visitors can exchange instant messages directly with a customer service representative. Veikkaus, the Finnish Lottery, does this, as does the Nordea Banking site; people can ask for advice anonymously just by clicking the chat button. Colleges have had such chats for years, but a public-sector newcomer is the Helsinki regional government’s Infochat, which provides information about city services to new arrivals. Finnish libraries have been real pioneers in this area, and they offered the Ask a Librarian chat for over ten years; many college libraries have similar services on their own sites. In recent weeks, I have tested a dozen online service chats. All have worked well, and the customer service agents had good instant messaging skills. These chats make it easy for anyone to contact an organization, and people can ask questions more informally than via forms or in e-mails. Such a chat is usually run by experienced customer staff, so starting one doesn’t require extensive training, though each organization needs to develop some basic guidelines. Customer service personnel mainly have good experiences with this vehicle, and positive customer feedback is an additional incentive. Online service chat is a fast and easy communication channel ‒ my choice.

Last week, I agreed to make a presentation using the pecha kucha format. During the planning, I thought once again about how to pronounce this Japanese expression—a problem English speakers struggle with as well. In Finnish, pronunciations vary from pekkakukka to petsaska. I would like to have an easy equivalent for this expression and so I’m proposing 20 dian esitys, “20-slide show.” Some features are missing in this alternative, for example the 20 seconds per slide time limit, but you can’t have everything. Besides, Pecha Kucha means ’chitchat’, which describes neither the format nor the content, but the discussion after the presentation. The new name may lack the hype of the original, but it has one advantage: the founders of the Pecha Kucha Night format do not harass organizers of informal events.

Last week, the 18th MindTrek festival took place in Tampere. Katri Lietsala, who headed the event in its first years, says that back then MindTrek was a multimedia competition which introduced the players in the digital arena along with their best products. The city participated in the arrangements, and open events were held around Tampere. In recent years, MindTrek has struggled to find its direction: the competition has been dropped, and the whole event was about to end. This year, however, Timo “Media Master” Väliharju announced the good news: MindTrek and COSS, which he leads, will merge. Next year, the theme will be openness, and the program will focus on open source and open content production. My own wishes for the future are: 1) Renewed communication: improve the web site’s usability, publish the material in Finnish in addition to English and expand the program and the speaker introductions. 2) Make the theme of the event—and the organizers—more visible, so we do not have to guess. 3) Bring back the competition as a set of awards to recognize the past year’s accomplishments. — As for the rest, I think that the continuation of MindTrek in Tampere is a great thing.

(wk 44 – 2014)

On a regular basis, a debate arises about whether the literacy of young people has declined. The usual suspect is the computer, which lures the innocent away from literary classics to the wonder-world of the Internet. However, reading is too complex a skill for such simplistic reasoning, as is clear from Kaisa Leino’s recent dissertation The Relationship between ICT Use and Reading Literacy. When the amount of computer use was compared to the PISA literacy test results, moderate usage seemed to improve reading skills. Students who used a variety of media did almost as well as heavy readers of literature in hard copy. The lowest PISA scores were for two groups: those who did not use the computer at all, and those who simply did not read. All forms of reading and information search seem to serve the development of diverse reading strategies. In the information society people need multiliteracy; that’s why pupils have to study online texts in addition to classics.