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.

I read Ville Eloranta’s book 125 Myths about the Finnish Language. On every page, this deft little opus refutes a misconception about the Finnish language. Myth number 1: Finnish is the most difficult language to learn. This notion is based on the fact that most other European languages are related to each other and, of course, a related language is easier to learn. Myth number 9: People today make more grammatical errors than before. In fact, the native speaker rarely makes actual grammatical errors (like “I are”); most of his errors involve spelling or punctuation. Myth number 12: The Internet has ruined the literary tradition. This is unlikely to be true, because people write more than ever before. Indeed, the spectrum of what appears in print has actually expanded; chat messages include colloquialisms that in the past were spoken but not written down. You may read about the other 122 language myths in the book; they hold few surprises for a professional language cop. However, I liked the readability of the book and its laid-back style. Eloranta’s book made a good read for a two-hour train trip.

October is a month for book fairs: first Turku, then Frankfurt, and now Helsinki. The fairs bring publicity for new books and for celebrity authors—which is fine. These fairs open one path to the world of books, but what other kinds of publicity do we see? In recent weeks, the Finnish media has enthused about the biography of a pop musician, which makes me wonder why this book has been selected from all the interesting works published at the same time. What propels different media to all take up the same book out of the enormous supply? The importance of the topic? The quality of the work? Perhaps celebrity, a marketing campaign, coverage by competing media, the journalist’s personal interests, or the writer’s personality? The media create their own brand of publicity, as do libraries and educational institutions, as well as literary magazines and awards. Bookstores and fairs are not promoting older books; they focus on what’s new. Literary blogs, tweets and other social media can and should promote wider awareness by publicizing out-of-the-mainstream choices. The right book is more often found on the basis of social recommendations.

This year, the Frankfurt Book Fair was an exceptionally important event for Finns, because Finland was the guest of honour. The culture campaign was carefully prepared, and you could see its results in Frankfurt and in the German media. The theme of the Finnish pavilion was the coolness of the north, and the huge exhibit hall was divided into circular spaces for author interviews and other activities. The design was elegant, but slightly bland. Among non-fiction, books related to Alvar Aalto and Tove Jansson were best represented. Textbook marketing was supported by a miniseminar with keynote speaker Pasi Sahlberg. Sahlberg is a great salesman for Finnish school and educational materials; his laid-back, content-rich presentation worked very well in the uproarious fair environment. Sahlberg’s main idea is that equal access to education is a foundation for excellence in teaching, whether in Finland or elsewhere. In the Finnish pavilion and in the displays by Finnish publishers, I began to question the fairly traditional image they tended to convey about our country. I wanted to see something more contemporary, more dynamic. Even so, our key message has been widely received, because even casual visitors greet Finnish fairgoers with the slogan “Finnland. Cool.”