FLOSS In School - Open Source Software in the Education System

I didn’t find a sample code for validating the Facebook Connect API cookies in perl from Google so here is one. The CGI::Cookie interface is a bit tricky to use with the Facebook cookie parsing as it wants to split the cookie contents automatically on each ampersand, but here is how we translated the given sample PHP code to perl:

use CGI::Cookie; use URI; use Digest::MD5; my $app_id = "136913766343238"; my $secret = "dbct84ca3d1fbs44428r02bdbag9193e"; my $cookie_header = $ENV{COOKIE}; my %cookies = CGI::Cookie->parse( $cookie_header ); my $cookie_object = $cookies{'fbs_' . $app_id}; die unless $cookie_object; my $cookie = join "&", $cookie_object->value; $cookie =~ s/^[\"]*(.*?)[\"]*$/$1/; my $uri = URI->new("", "http"); $uri->query( $cookie ); my %params = $uri->query_form; my $sig = delete $params{sig}; my $payload = join '', map { $_ .'='. $params{$_} } sort keys %params; die unless Digest::MD5::md5_hex( $payload . $secret ) eq $sig; my $valid_facebook_user_id = $params{uid};

Splitting the query parameters would have been pretty easy to do with a regexp but as the sample PHP code uses it’s query parser, I thought using a valid query parser from URI would be a safe and easy bet.

To be honest, for a couple of years now I have been pretty skeptical about the future of Free and Open Source software in Finnish schools and education sector in general.

In Finland we have a lot of open source expertise and know-how. We have developers. I also assume that majority of the (liberally) higher educated people in Finland, at least know what is “Open Source” and “Linux”. This should be a great foundation to get open source software to all public schools (and public institutions).

Today I did a little Internet study on the topics to find out where we are now. Frankly, I am positively surprised. There are a lot of things happening in the field. But there is also something very crucial missing. I’ll get back to this in the end of the post.

The good news is that the number of schools using Open Source is growing. Relying on several sources I would estimate that around 5% of the schools are using Linux on desktop and over 50 % of the schools have some Open Source software in their desktops — mainly Firefox browser, whose share in Finland is estimated to be over 50%. This is a great result when the Linux’s is estimated to have only 1-2% share of all the desktops in the world.

Another good news is that there are several projects raising awareness on Free and Open Source software for schools. There are blogs and newsletters, webinars and get-together events. The outreaching and educational activities seems to be today professionally carried out and well organized. Still, I would claim that the information provided on the topic is far too technical and as such irrelevant for most of the decisions makers. The people making decisions on the educational technology are not really interested in the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project). They want solutions. It looks that we are still missing credible providers of solutions.

Probably, however, the most promising thing in the field of Open Source in education in Finland is, that there actually are several small and middle size companies that are specialized in providing Open Source solutions for schools. Some of them have also build their own products and services specifically for the school market.

I am maybe doing some unfair promotion of only three companies, but they are good examples of those that were catched by my survey.

Opinsys seems to be the most promising one. Opinsys designs and implements networks, computers and software for schools — in practice solutions for teaching and learning. They provide support and maintenance. All Linux and Open Source.

Dicole use to develop their own Open Source community/intranet/learning environment platform, but has since then focus more on knowledge work. I still, however, believe that they could pull together a package of software-as-a-service specifically designed for schools.

Mediamaisteri is a company with strong presence in the Finnish education sector. Their product / service portfolio includes Moodle, Elgg, Mediawiki and Open meetings hosting. All Open Source. (Disclaimer: the founders of Dicole and Mediamaisteri are my friends)

Could these companies find growth in the international markets? I think they could. At least, in the European markets. Maybe there are similar small companies in other Scandinavian / Baltic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Estonia) or in the large European countries (Germany, France, UK, Poland, Italy, Spain). Maybe these small Finnish companies could establish partnerships with them?

I honestly was happy to find out that the Free / Open Source in education is not dead in Finland. Some regions in some other countries, like Andalucia in Spain and some pockets in the UK are maybe far ahead of us. I still, however, think that in Finland we have great chances to make a real impact in the field.

I wrote in the title that there is still something crucial missing. What is that?

It is the simple Linux based device designed specifically for school use. I think OLPC XO is not the solution for us or the rest of the Europe. We need our own device that is basically a touch screen with a web browser, a camera, audio in/out and all possible forms of wireless connectivity (Wlan, 3/4G, Bluetooth).

I know there are people in Finland who are able to do perfect electronic engineering and industrial design for this. I know that there are software people able to do relatively minor changes to existing Linux distributions to make it up and running. If we can do it, why we are not doing it?

Just with the European market — close to 100 million school children — it should make sense.

I am trying to get offline, to the vacation mood, to read some good books in a hammock.

I took some notes in the WikiSym / Wikimania.

I take notes in rather unstructured way. I carry several paper notebooks with me: often an A5 size and a small A6 sketchbooks. Then I always have with me a laptop and a phone which I use for note taking, too. Sometimes I also write notes to some random Post IT notes, which I often have in the case.

My logics with this kind of note taking is that if something is not really important I may and will lose it. Also if I really need something later I should be willing to take the effort to search it.

So, what is there, couple of days after the Wikisym/Wikimania, in the top of my pile of notes? There are many things, such as:

• proper knowledge building research on Wikipedia,
• the OER policies and the Wikiwijs in the Netherlands,
• wiki governance and politics (the picture is related to this: it is a simple version of the Wikipedia policy/rules),
• Wikis and OER’s in open and distance learning,
• new talk pages with LiquidThreads,
• wiki content to books, and
• many, many semantic wiki projects.

From all these I have some random notes in here and there. I may write blog posts about them later.

The most hypnotic new thing I found during the WikiSym/Wikimania is probably the Wikipedia article traffic statistics. Actually it is not even new and I think it was not even presented in the conference, but with some free browsing on wiki-related things I happen to found it now.

With the service you can check the popularity of any Wikipedia article from more than 70 language versions. The latest statistics are from December 2009, but it is still la lot of fun. I have been playing with it now for several days.

For instance, I have been comparing the top 1000 articles of the Finnish, Swedish and Russian Wikipedias.

Here are the top-10 articles in the Finnish, Swedish and Russian Wikipedias in December 2009:

Finnish Wikipedia

1. Suomi (Finland)
2. Wiki
3. Talvisota (Winter War 1939)
4. Brittany Murphy (Hollywood celebrity)
5. Irwin Goodman (a Finnish protest singer, rock and folk singer)
6. Suomen itsenäisyyspäivä (The Finnish Independent Day)
7. Joulu (Christmas)
8. Twilight – Houkutus (Hollywood movie)
9. Lady Gaga (American celebrity)
10. Yhdysvallat (United States of America)

Swedish Wikipedia

1. Sverige (Sweden)
2. Brittany Murphy (Hollywood celebrity)
3. Wiki
4. Lucia (Saint Lucy’s Day)
5. Anna Anka (Swedish Hollywood celebrity)
6. Julkalendern i Sveriges Television (Christmas calendar in a Swedish Television)
7. Kurt Wallander (character in Henning Mankell’s novels)
8. Jul (Christmas)
9. Wikipedia
10. USA (United States of America)

Russian Wikipedia

1. В Контакте (Russian social network service)
2. Турчинский, Владимир Евгеньевич (Vladimir Turchinsky; Russian celebrity, bodybuilder, TV/radio, actor)
3. Википедия (Wikipedia)
4. Россия (Russia)
5. Порнография (Porno)
6. Мой Мир@mail.ru (free e-mail service)
7. Аватара (Avatar concept of Hinduism)
8. Москва (Moscow)
9. BitTorrent
10. Новый год (New Year)

Looking the top lists of English (I love The Beatles, too) German (and adore Elisabeth von Österreich-Ungarn) and French (and listen to Johnny Hallyday) Wikipedia’s and comparing them is also interesting and fun.

From the top 1000 lists we may already conclude some hypothesis / theories. All the lists show the actuality of using Wikipedias. For Finnish and Swedish people Christmas is important, whereas in Russia New Year is the Christmas (Orthodox Calendar). The Finnish Independent day is in December. In December 2009 it was 50 years from the Winter War.

Also the celebrities in the list were actual in December 2009. In Finland and Sweden people seems to follow Hollywood. In Russia they have their own stars. Brittany Murphy in the Finnish and Swedish WIkipedia and Vladimir Turchinsky in the Russian Wikipedia represent the celebrities who died in December 2009.

It looks that the Russian Wikipedia in December 2009 was still dominated by technology / internet people. The general public was not yet the main user of the Russian Wikipedia as it obviously was the case in the Finnish and the Swedish Wikipedias.

The high position of Irwin Goodman, a Finnish protest singer, rock and folk singer, in the Finnish Wikipedia could be a result of some new research about him that was published in December 2009, but why is the Hindu concept Avatar so high in the Russian Wikipedia? Could it be that people were looking for information about the movie Avatar but end-up to this page?

Then you may ask why the Twilight movie and Lady Gaga are in top ten in the Finnish Wikipedia but in the Swedish Wikipedia only in the places 43 and 36. In the Russian Wikipedia these great cultural products are in the places 60 (Twilight) and 352 (Lady Gaga).

I already started to copy paste the data to spreadsheet to do more analyses, but gave up. I know that there are people who really can do statistics. I am not very good with them, but I would love to do some cultural-historical analyses of the Wikipedias with someone with solid skill in statistics. Let’s do some hypothesis and see what the data tells us.

In my previous blog post I discussed about what value is from marketing perspective using Kotler’s framework for delivered value maximization (see Value from Marketing point of view). Now let’s approach value from a broader perspective – from logistics point of view.

I must admit that I didn’t actually study logistics very deeply in the school of economics but after graduation I worked almost a year in logistics claim handling which gave me quite a good insight what logistics is all about and how value is created during its processes. Nevertheless, a quick overview on logistics theory helps to perceive and conceptualize value better.

Logistics is all about managing, monitoring and developing both internal and external processes including inbound and outbound activities, services, procurement and sales. According to Karrus (2001, 13) it covers at least following cycles:

• material, information and capital flows
• purchases, production, delivery and recycling
• transportation services
• warehouse operations
• maintenance and support services
• customer service and relations

All these processes are seen to occur in certain order and value created during these steps. Traditional way to approach the concept of value in logistics has been through value chain analysis introduced by Michael Porter in early 80’s (check Porter’s book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance for more detailed description and analysis). Here is Porter’s model to elucidate the entity:

In value chain thinking there are two flows: suppliers (the upper flow) and customers (the lower flow). Value is created both in developing logistical processes and cooperation between suppliers and customers (Karrus, 2001, 14-15).
(Source: Karrus, Kaij E. 2001, Logistiikka)

Traditional way to define value creation is, however, rather linear. In other words, roughly it suggests that value is created step by step, phase by phase, so that the final value is cumulated from previous processes. Nonetheless, it seems to be widely accepted concept and it is still applied in businesses. Anyhow new views have emerged already in the late 90’s. Haapanen and Vepsäläinen (1999, 24-25, 270), for example, see that structural changes in business environment such as decentralization of operations have also changed the way value is created. Thus, instead of value chain it should be spoken about value field in which supply and demand are looking for best approaches in all occasions. This means that all participants comprise networks and these networks create value in cooperation and from many directions. This is how their value field looks like:

Value field consists of different customer channels that face various customer needs. Services represent different companies or service providers that are placed somewhere within the value field, and the value creation process is much more diverse now than before since today’s communication technologies enable better interaction between suppliers, customers and other interest groups, and they allow all parties to get involved in developing and improving logistical processes.
(Source: Haapanen, Mikko – Vepsäläinen, Ari P.J. 1999, Jakelu 2020: Asiakkaan läpimurto, ed. by Bask, Anu)

What I perceived how the processes work in practice, was that the most fundamental element i.e. communication between various parties was still ineffective in many ways – especially regarding overseas operations. What would be a better option at the moment than using social media platforms and applications in order to improve and optimize logistical operations? However, it seems that traditional operators in logistics haven’t embraced social media practices very eagerly nor very fast. Instead, in some companies social media usage has even been banned. It makes me wonder, what happens to learning and business development in this fast changing world if opportunities are rather seen as threats?

I am this week in the WikiSym / Wikimania double conference.

Its’ another great opportunity to spend some time with the world’s brightest wiki-minds: academics, developers, community members and bureaucrats.

I am going to give a short talk on Friday in the Wikiversity session. I am going to present the EduFeedr, a small and beautiful project I am working with Hans Põldoja.

If you can’t make it to Gdańsk — it’s sunny and with nice mixture (like good wikis) of Slavic flexibility and Prussian order — you may check the following presentation. I’ll copy here also the abstract of the talk:

Designing Tools for Supporting Wikiversity Courses: the Case of EduFeedr

In spring 2008 the authors organized a course on composing free and open educational resources (in the Wikiversity). It was officially a master’s course at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. The authors decided to make the course available with an open enrollment through the Wikiversity and promoted it in their blogs. As a result about 70 people from 20 countries signed up for the course on the Wikiversity page.

The course was organized as a weekly blogging seminar. In each week the facilitators posted a weekly theme and links to related readings on the course blog. The participants reflected on the weekly theme in their personal blogs and commented their peers.

One of the challenges in a large blog-based course is to follow all the communication. Typically this communication takes place not only in blogs but also in other environments such as Delicious, Twitter, etc. Most of these environments provide RSS feeds but typical RSS readers are not very suitable for following this kind of courses. Most of the RSS readers such as Google Reader are designed for personal use. In a Wikiversity course it would be important to have a shared feed reader that all the participants could use.

EduFeedr is a web-based feed reader that is designed specifically for following and supporting learners in open blog-based courses. The design process of EduFeedr is based on the research-based design methodology. We have organized several Wikiversity courses where we have tried out various online tools to manage the course. The initial user needs for EduFeedr came out from this contextual inquiry. Interaction design methods such as scenario-based design, user stories and paper prototyping have been used in the process.

As a result of the design process we have indicated the key features for EduFeedr. These include (1) signing up for the course, (2) visualizing how the students have proceeded with the assignments, (3) visualizing the social network between the students, (4) annotating blog posts and comments, and (5) archiving the course.

EduFeedr is currently a work-in-progress. The first version is implemented as Elgg plugin and we are currently doing internal testing with real data from several Wikiversity courses. In this version we have implemented signing up for the course and some of the planned visualizations. We are planning to launch the beta version of EduFeedr service in late summer 2010. The source code and more information about EduFeedr is available at the project web site (see http://www.edufeedr.org).

Some time ago the New York Times wrote about the fathers’ leave in Sweden. The articles ends with these words:

In Sweden I am on the right,” Mr. Westerberg said, “but in the United States, I’m considered a Communist.”

Some days ago David Wiley wrote that with the open content the Open Knowledge Foundation gets it wrong when claiming that share-alike licenses are open but non-commercial ones aren’t.

For those who are not that familiar with the open/free content/knowledge discussion, the share-alike (SA) license has a condition asking people who remix or build upon the content to distribute the resulting work under the same license. The license ensures that later works will be open, too — will stay in commons. Wiley wrote:

“When authors adopt a share-alike license, they are saying: we value the freedom of content over the freedom of people.”

As an author using share-alike license I see this a bit differently. I value the *freedom of mankind*, the common good, over the freedom of content or individuals.

I think that this is the way most SA people see it: When you are given, you should give back, too.

I also do not consider use of SA to be any kind of violation of individual’s rights. Individual’s rights is something I am not willing to negotiate about. In the case of content anyone is still free to release *their own stuff* under whatever license. So, as a such SA is not really communism. It is a way to contribute to the common good.

Later Wiley wrote a follow-up post with the title Openness, Radicalism, and Tolerance and asking “Why isn’t the open crowd more open-minded?”

I see here some signs of a straw man arguments.

I think we should look how the Free / Open Source Softeware movement and the Open Content movement were started. People simply started to do things. The Free software people made software and wanted to share it with their friends. Some other people started to write free encylopedia or publish University course content online. They just did it because they could.

What are people doing in the field of Open Education?

Many things. For instance, the Peer 2 Peer Univeristy and the Wikiversity are crassroot open education projects organizing self-organizing learning online. The idea is to bring people together to teach and to learn from each other. Simple.

Similar kind of initiatives are started here and there: from Indian to Brazil, From South Africa to Finland. I find these much more interesting that the discussion on content-driven “open education”. The content is there – now it is the time to use it. That is education.

Peer 2 Peer University 2010 from P2P University on Vimeo.

How social media and digital working environments are really changing management, collaboration and organizations?

This is the question that is most interesting to me and I believe, very transformational in the long-term on how we relate to each other and how things get done.

I was happy to work on this question for a Finnish telecom operator, Elisa together with their VP of Corporate Customers, Pasi Mäenpää. As we know, the traditional operator business of selling subscriptions and connectivity is commoditizing and many plans are going flat rate. The value has moved upwards to the actual applications of communication technologies in the enterprise. Understanding corporate customers and their true business requirements and opportunities is increasingly important. This leads us to ask the question, how is the business environment and practices of organizations truly changing?

To grasp this question, together with my team we produced a video and a presentation on the future of organizations and management:

On Youtube: Cloud Company – Change Happens (2010)

The related slides “A New Era of Leadership – From Hierarchy to Network” are here.

Cloud is the metaphor for the internet and Cloud Computing is the metaphor for a technological paradigm shift in the way how we utilize software and information. Google and Amazon particularly have been busy building the cloud. Practically it is an idea based on Technological Determinism, that technology would drive the development of society’s culture and social behavior.

An opposite view would see culture as a dominating force in technological development. Neither is accurate, as technology and culture are rather intertwining. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said that “We shape our tools. And then our tools shape us.” What the cloud is shaping is our forms of organization, intertwingled by technology and culture. The internet will dramatically lower the transaction costs of doing business. As companies decentralize various layers including infrastructure, R&D, marketing and sales, they eventually empower a new form of organization to emerge: the Cloud Company.

Management = Communication x Coordination x Responsibility = Collaboration

Management traditionally can be defined as effective communication, efficient coordination and someone taking responsibility of the actions. Manager communicates to subordinates, coordinates resources, supervises operations and takes (and gives) responsibility. This is mirroring the typical hierarchical thinking of organizations.

What happens today in digitally distributed collaborative networks is that communication becomes the means between people, coordination is the distributed peer-production activities among the people and responsibility is something that people will have the ability to take because of transparency of activities and open information. Thus the idea is that in organizations today all effective communication, coordination and taking of responsibility needs to be digitally distributed in order to remain viable.

There are two ideas on how effective organizations work. One that is based on complete centralization and the other based on complete decentralization. Most organizations are more or less different variations of the two.

Centralizated Organizations

A completely centralized organization is centrally planned and hierarchical in nature. The idea is that efficiency requires conscious coordination of resources and division of labor. Communication relationships and channels are pre-defined and planned – who reports to whom, what paper goes from here to there. This is the world dominated by bureaucracies, hierarchies, command & control and people as cogs in the machine.

Lenin tried to run Soviet Union like a big factory, as a centrally planned economy (or command economy). It was the most Fordist and Taylorist system ever envisioned. Everything would be centrally coordinated. The problem of such big hierarchies is that internal coordination costs increase as the size of the organization increases.

Over time it gets increasingly hard to predict the future and efficiently adapt to changing conditions. If internal coordination costs are higher than the value created and generated, the whole system collapses to its own absurdity. This economic calculation problem led to major problems in Soviet Union. Economic planners were not able to detect consumer preferences, shortages, and surpluses with sufficient accuracy. Resources were wasted and misallocated, eventually leading to the collapse of the whole house of cards.

Just like Soviet Union, most companies today are miniature centrally planned economies facing the same problems of internal coordination problems as the size of the hierarchy increases.

Decentralized Organizations

The father of modern economics, Adam Smith wrote in 1776 a revolutionary book, The Wealth of Nations. During the time his work was concentrated on supporting the political agenda of Great Britain to dissipate mercantilism, the economic reality that dominated Western European economic policies at the time. Mercantilism was based on a protectionist ideology of controlling import and export of goods for the nation’s good.

Adam Smith’s idea was that free market economy based on self-regulation would be more effective from the resource allocation point of view. Rational self-interest of individuals and companies in the short term would lead to common good in the long term. Competition and supply & demand in the context of rational self-interest would create economic balance.

The question then becomes, when does economic activity take place on decentralized markets and when do centralized organizations form as a necessity?

Lowering Transaction Costs

In 1991 economist Ronald Coase received the Nobel’s price on his theory of transaction costs. For a reference, take a look at The Nature of The Firm (1937). . When transaction costs increase, centralized organizations form to take care of the necessary side activities to achieve the goal. As transaction costs drop, certain economic activities are increasingly done on the open markets.

As an example, in the newspaper industry a photographer needs to take the pictures, journalist needs to write the story, an editor lays out the text, the printing press produces the publication and then someone takes care of the logistics of delivery. In the context of these activities there are other costs such as legal, marketing and administrative costs. All of these activities include high transaction costs that make it impossible to deliver such a product reliably without centralized coordination and organization.

As we know, Internet has enabled new forms of organization such as the Wikipedia or Huffington Post to emerge in the publication industry. Internet has radically reduced transaction costs involved in producing resources like an encyclopedia or a newspaper. According to Harward Law School Professor Yochai Benkler, digitally distributed collaborative environments have enabled a new form of organization to emerge between the traditional nation state and the private company, based on the logic of commons-based peer-production. In the open markets, people and organizations improve the common resources, eventually gaining more than their individual contribution is worth.

As companies thrive for higher value creation and move up in the economic food chain, it is impossible to do so today without lowering the transaction costs involved in producing these goods and services. Therefore all effective organizations today will utilize digitally distributed collaboration and management environments and practices, because of lowered transaction costs.

The Emergence of the Cloud Company

The next stage in running successful organizations is to understand that effective organizations today are operating closer to the logic of the open free markets. This means that companies thriving for higher value will decentralize many core layers that were traditionally centralized, including infrastructure, information storage and processing, collaboration, services, sales and customer service.

This stage will be driven by cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital mass-customization (such as the iTunes App Store where each person actually creates the end product through individual customization), commons-based peer-production and other emerging decentralized models for carrying out work in the digital business ecosystem: therefore the name Cloud Company.

Here is how one company might look like, where certain organizational functions have been supported with internet-enabled decentralized models and technologies:

A Cloud Company (or real Enterprise 2.0) will be much more effective than its more or less centralized competitors, because it’s capable of distributing certain organizational activities on the market, operate in a much more customer-oriented and centered way, changes dynamically the costs of running the business, is capable of lowering transaction and internal coordination costs and utilizes latest social media and collaboration environments for digitally distributed communication, coordination and wide taking of responsibility.

My colleague Esko Kilpi writes:

Today, with social media, we stand on the threshold of an economy where the fundamental processes of communication and coordination are being transformed.  Familiar economic entities are becoming increasingly irrelevant as the Internet, not the traditional organization, becomes the most efficient means to communicate, coordinate and exchange value.

That’s the future of organizations in the digital age.

Thanks to: Esko Kilpi, Pasi Mäenpää

I start viewing the concept of value from marketing point of view. After all, it was my major in business school. Marketing theories approach value very often from a customer perspective and evaluate the concept based on difference between benefits and costs. In other words, value is created from a desired feature that is worth paying for, e.g. superior service and unforgettable experience or a product that makes everyday life a little easier with acceptable costs. Philip Kotler – a well-known guru in the field of marketing – talks about customers as value-maximizers, who invest “within the bounds of search costs and limited knowledge, mobility, and income.” Therefore, they choose to purchase the offer that brings them most value. Kotler suggest a framework for delivered value maximization in which customer delivered value is defined as difference between total customer value (benefits that are expected) and total customer cost (costs that are evaluated to be invested). Following figure depicts the framework.

Kotler gives two implications for the framework. First thing is to estimate the customer delivered value by comparing each competitior’s offer and assess how customers would evaluate the value you produce compared to others. Second, if you have a disadvantage in delivering value compared to others, there are two options to consider: either you can try to increase total customer value by improving image, personnel, service and/ or product value, or alternatively decrease the total customer cost in order to create greater value-delivered. In other words, companies can respond to the value-maximizing behaviour by increasing the benefit customer gets or decrease the cost they need to pay. (Source: Kotler, 2000,  Marketing Management: Millenium Edition, 10th ed.)

So how does this model fit in with value creation in social media? Or should we rather ask what is the value of social media for marketing practice and how does it change the concept? Because social media is fundamentally about networking, a natural answer would be creating contacts, building relations, and enhancing cooperation. Thus, maybe we should talk about social marketing and add relationship value to the framework. I’ll return to the nature of marketing in digital media later on.

When people ask me what is my research about I often get nervous. Depending a bit about the person asking, I may reply that my research is about educational technology, e-learning research, computer-supported collaborative learning, use of computers in teaching and learning, social media and learning, new media and learning, Web and mobile things in learning etc. All this is true, but I also feel that with these answers I am loosing something essential.

I feel uncomfortable to define my research with these concepts. Sometimes I even end-up to explain that our research is kind of “e-learning research” but we do it differently. This get people very confused.

On the other hand, when you do not know the background of the person asking — that is often the case — one must use terms and concepts you expect them to be familiar with. Still, I would like to be precise but also present the special characters of our work.

Within the learning environments research group we have before define ourselves that we are “theory-based, design-oriented”. That is a nice motto and even some kind of description. That tells a bit what we do and how we do it. The difficulty to tell “how we” do it has been a challenge.

Recently I have used the phrase: Practice-based design research of learning tools. I think it has everything what I do. Simple. I do “design research”, with a methodological approach relying on “practice”. My object of design research are learning tools.

Now you know.

LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing open educational resources.

Today in LeMill there are over 12 000 teachers and other learning content creators. The site has over 11 000 learning content resources and over 6 000 descriptions of teaching and learning methods and tools in over 30 languages.

With these numbers LeMill is one of the world largest community of open educational resources. The LeMill’s what’s going on -stream shows how active the site is.

LeMill is, however, a classical example of “long tail”. The head, the majority of the community members, come from Georgia (the country, not the US state) and Estonia. Actually, it is fair to say that the only communities with the critical mass are Georgian and Estonian communities.

This year we have noticed that pulling more language communities to the head is extremely difficult. For instance, among Finnish teachers we have worked hard to bring them to LeMill. The results are poor.

We may think why Finnish or English speaking teachers have not found LeMill interesting or useful. There are, for sure, socio-cultural reasons and structural obstacles. No more about them. In addition to these, there are also many design issues. As the designers of LeMill, these are things we may change.

Here is my list of LeMill design issues, we should work with:

1. Connections with Web 2.0/social networking services
We have some cool content in LeMill that do not move because we do not have any “share this” –tools in the site. For instance, I am sure some people could share some english listening comprehension exercise with their friends with Facebook. With all the content in LeMill we could simply use share this or something similar to the sexybookmarks Word Press plug-in.

2. Re-designing (Web 2.0) the appearance of the site
LeMill’s interaction and visual design should be renewed. LeMill is not easy enough to use, neither attractive. LeMill should be simple and elegant. This would require the design to be more like HeiaHeia or Facebook than Wikipedia. In the interaction design we should use Web 2.0 GUI widgets. For instance, LeMill’s Browse content is a brilliant idea: you can set different kind of criteria and will find content depending on it. The current implementation, however, is clumsy: you must choose the criteria and then press “Show”. Choosing the criteria should be enough.

3. Search centric approach
The main reason for a user to visit LeMill is to find some useful content. Google have taught us to simply write the words we are looking for and expect that we will find something useful. We should serve users this way. In practice, this would require including our search field in a central location and redesigning the search results. The algorithms organizing the search results in LeMill are already pretty good, so also this would be more like a design issue.

4. Online status information and chat for the community
We currently have IRC chat in the LeMill community. Nobody is using it. I think, to build LeMill community we should have online status information (the Facebook style green and red dots) and easy to use chat to connect with people online. We could use, for instance, Olark – chat or some other third party service.

5. User dashboard
We already have email announcements telling users what has happen in among their groups or in the content they have contributed to. This same information – kind of personalized “whats going on” should be provided in a user’s dashboard.

If you are interested in to develop these features, please, contact us. LeMill is Open Source platform and we are happy to have more designers and developers in the team.

You will find more information about LeMill platform development from the development site. The LeMill blog is also good place to follow the project.

Not long time ago I wrote a post about a real learning revolution. I decided to elaborated it now a bit in light of Sir Ken Robinson’s latest TED talk Bring on the learning revolution!, even though, I actually agree with what Stephen Downes already said about the talk.

Anyway. Here is my advice for local and national decision makers to do the “learning revolution”, caused by the digital revolution. I am sure my “reforms” would payoff, exactly the way learning does: educated people are able to provide higher output, economically and culturally.

Public Libraries
Invest on public neighborhood libraries with (1) wide collection of different kind of reading materials (books, newspapers, magazines, electronic materials) and (2) public access to Internet: Wi-Fi and laptops. Do a marketing campaign about the libraries. Let people to know about the services of the libraries.

Basic Education
Guarantee universal (for all) high quality basic education: literacy, math, arts, music, civics, culture. Make sure you will have highly educated and motivated teachers, and seamless access to internet, Wi-Fi and laptops (in every classroom and in every space). Support the schools to have continues effort to develop their operations; pedagogy, school culture, workplace. Request all schools to publish their mission, vision and curriculum in their website and to have a blog with weekly updates about their work.

Higher Education
I think Universities are the liver of the society. Make sure that they will function. Research and higher education is there to renew things that should be renewed and protecting things that should be kept.

Network Connections
Guarantee that all the citizens will have inexpensive access (cheap and free) to Internet, network computers (mini laptops) and mobile phones. Make sure that there is competition that will work for the benefits of the consumer. The markets work only when there is true competition.

Media, Journalism and Free Speech
Guarantee public broadcasting media services (radio, TV, online) that are, as independent as possible, from the markets and the politics. Do not limit the public media to news. Politics, civics, culture, arts and music in a widest possible meaning — including cotemporary and independent pop culture — should be the core of the offering. A strong public media will help the commercial media to renew itself to meet the future challenges. This way the public media is a bit like a liver of the media field (compare to the Universities).

Online Content
Invest on free and reliable online reference and other educational content, like Open Educational Resources, Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Bring the content of museums and archives online (Wikimedia may help museums in this effort).

Online Learning
Support peer-to-peer online learning and teaching communities. The open education movement is fast moving to the direction where people are self-organizing themselves to learn together online. The P2PU is a good example of this. People learning new things is almost always good thing. Still, to avoid people to do “home chemistry”, it might be a good idea to provide people something a bit more “guided”.

Community Colleges
Support community colleges and open universities online and on campus. In addition to the online learning we also need the “traditional” community colleges. Still, one should help (and force) the community colleges to go online. In Finland, Otavan Opisto is a good example of a college that is strongly online (and on campus).

A long wish list? It is and it will cost a lot of money. A good thing is that it is not a risk investment. The economist know that these things have a high return of investment. It is true that to get the return for the investment may take some time — 10, 50 or 100 years — but it will come.

The Nordic Conference on Activity Theory and the Fourth Finnish Conference on Cultural and Activity Research (FISCAR10) started today. This time the conference takes place at the Aalto University School of Art and Design.

The keynotes are video streamed online. The recording will be available in the same site, too.

The original home of the activity theory is in psychology (cultural-historical psychology) but people in the community have always moved across different disciplines. The theory has also achieved interest especially among such areas as education, organizational studies, work research and human-computer interaction.

This year — because of the location where the conference is taking place, I think — there are more design thinking in the air than probably ever before. Also the concept of combining art and design, economics, science and technology in the Aalto University is interesting when analyzed in light of the activity theory.

During the conference, I hope, we will have many discussions about design thinking and education, with emphasis on product design, artifact creation, architecture — on things that have concrete impact to people’s life.

It’s not the first time that “design” is discussed in the context of education and learning. One branch of learning science have present the idea or design-based research (Barab & Squire, 2004; The Design-Based Research Collective, 2003). In design-based research the aim is to do research with designed interventions into real-world educational, teaching and learning situations. In design-based research design interventions are a research method.

I think design-based research is missing some important aspects of design thinking. In design field the designs — artifacts, products, “things” — are the main outcome of the activity. The design process is creative and intentional activity of composition: “brining parts, pieces, functions, structures, processes and forms together n a such a way that they have a presence and make an appearance, particularly of unity, in the world” (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003). The designs (the “things”) are the change agents. They are concrete things that are changing our way of doing things.

For someone coming from the field of new media design the impact of tools and artifacts in human life and culture is obvious. People playing with new media and internet know that these things are changing the way we live our lives, socialize, communicate, work, love, hate, and learn.

The sad thing with the new media is that we easily take the tools and artifacts for granted, as something that just comes like a natural force. This is of course not true. There are people “designing” these things. They are driven by values, ideals and intentions. They are humans.

Design is communication. Design thinking is a skill of moderating design communication, deliberating different intentions and interests. But this is not enough. Design thinking is also an issue of leadership. When there is a request to deliver the “thing”, the designer must be able to do decisions. To get the thing done.

Here is a video nicely explaining how design process can go wrong.

All businesses are fundamentally based on value creation. Value, however, can be described in many various ways depending on the context in which it’s represented. At the School of Economics, I was frequently faced with value in all fields of business economics, so it wasn’t a very clear concept to begin with and the more I studied about it the more multidimensional construct I started to build. Thus, I see value as a relative measure, which should always be approached from a context-based perspective, nonetheless, always keeping in mind its holistic nature and interconnections. But why is understanding the value concept meaningful for using social media? I’d say in every way. Since using social media in business is all about creating value, it is more than crucial to understand the nature of the concept in different contexts. Therefore, in the next few weeks my aim is to go through various fields of business economics one by one, discuss how value is commonly defined and created in them, and conclude with the help of examples how social media has been, hasn’t been or could be used in these different fields in order to increase the value creation.

In the free encyclopedia — the Wikipedia — there is a new feature and a service that allows anyone to create custom printed books from the Wikipedia content.

Users can create their own customized books from over 3 million articles in English Wikipedia by adding in to the book whatever article on whatever topic. The feature will, at some point in a future, be available in all the Wikipedia’s in more than 250 language.

The service provided by PediaPress, a partner of Wikipedia, will create out of your collection of articles a printed book and send it to you. You may, also just create a PDF out of your book, distribute it as a such or print it on your own.

So, what you could do with the Books out of Wikipedia content?

I think this is a great addition to the Open Education Resources (OER) offering. From the Wikipedia one may combine a learning materials (books) with selected content. For instance, I would love to see a book about history of New Media, multimedia programming, 3D design, or typography design.

I am going to do some books but would also love to see “your book” about these topics! More books — the better.

Some press:

Wikipedia And PediaPress Now Allow You To Create Books From Content In English

Wikipedia Now Lets You Order Printed Books

Pauliina Seppälä just published a great presentation telling the story of the Refugee Hospitality Club in Punavuori, Helsinki. It’s a nice example of using digital social networking service (basically Facebook) to organize people to change their own living environment, the Real World, to be a bit more human, pleasant and civic. Check the presentation:

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My second example of informal learning in a Real World is a Master Thesis work from our MA in New Media program. Linda Kronman’s Killer Fashion Revolution is a project that uses fashion hacktivism to promote human rights. Check the video:

What is common with the two projects is a strong community aspect in them. Pauliina and Linda have not build Personal Learning Environment to benefit themselves, but have started a project to build and maintain platform for community interested in important and common interest. The communities also have clear missions, shared values and commitment. The operations are transparent.

The topic of role of informal learning has been a widely discussed among online learning people. The idea of Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and Do it yourself University (DIY U) are considered to be a real game-changers in learning and education in the digital era.

I agree with this but have found the PLE and the DIY U problematic, because they emphasize individuals over communities. In them the individuals are considered to be in the center, with all the rights and the responsibilities to choose whatever he or she wants to study, when, where and with whom.

The weak social ties in pure online communities easily results as opportunistic and no or only short-term commitments.

I see that the Real World does not work like this, or should I say, that the Real World requires different kind of approach. I see that the ultimate individualism and lack of commitment may cause a lot of trouble — actually some very serious problems.

It is —I admit — a strong claim, but I see connection between the PLE and some of the most shocking accidents in Finland, in recent years: a bombing in a shopping center in 2002 and in two school shootings that took place in 2007 and in 2008.

From the Wikipedia articles you can check how the perpetrators were active online “learners” in an anonymous “home chemistry” group and in online hate groups interested in school shootings. All the perpetrators were individual learners online.

To blame “Personal Learning Environment” about the incidents would of course be silly. So, I am not doing it. I am, however, either not one of those people who think that technology and tools are neutral and can be used for good and bad.

Guns kill people. Killing someone with hammer is possible, but there is a difference.

http://mattn.github.com/zencoding-vim/, is a great plugin for Vim, for example just type:

#div#person-$*5>span.meta-info

Press <Ctrl-Y>, and you’ll get the following results:

<div id="person-1"> <span></span> </div> <div id="person-2"> <span></span> </div> <div id="person-3"> <span></span> </div> <div id="person-4"> <span></span> </div> <div id="person-5"> <span></span> </div>

Great and intuitive, uses the same syntax as CSS selectors.

The traditional sales funnel worked in a world where we had limited number of channels reaching a wide number of eyeballs. The advent of the internet has brought forward a myriad number of alternative channels. As a result if you ask someone on the street, a random TV advertisement today is remembered by far less number of people than what the same advertisement would have gathered in the 60s.

Traditional Sales Funnel (ref: Forrester Research)

Someone walking with a mobile phone in a shopping mall is no longer in the shopping mall, but impulsively dodging things that come by as the mind is somewhere else than in the physical realm. Someone scanning Twitter on a mobile phone while in a restaurant is no longer in the restaurant either, but lured into an endless flow of retweets.

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
– Social Scientist Herbert Simon (1971)

Due to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, information aggregators, news radars etc. our attention is now highly fragmented. Traditional mass media channels no longer have the same control as they used to have. Attention Economy is an economy where our attention has become scarce and fragmented, unfocused and disoriented, something Linda Stone calls Continuous Partial Attention (CPA): we only pay partially attention to what goes on around ourselves as we scan different channels for new opportunities, barely paying attention to things around us.

It is no surprise that the AIDA model (Attention + Interest, Desire + Action) from the end of 19th century is no longer as relevant as it used to be. In 2007 Forrester Research suggested that engagement is the new metric. They said that the traditional sales funnel based on awareness is broken and no longer works in digital media. In place they suggested a labyrinth depicted below, showing contributors as one potential outcome:

The New Funnel According to Forrester Research

The complexity of this picture sure doesn’t look very welcoming to managers who want command and control, predictability and assurance for their marketing euros. What ever may be the case, the reality is that customers on the internet now have a wide variety of opportunities and low threshold to gain second hand opinion.

The labyrinth can be understood in many ways. Here is mine:

Non-linear Inverted Funnel (ref: Teemu Arina)

Shifting from company perspective to customer perspective, things get highly non-linear and could go towards any path, not just the one the company depicted to be their sales funnel in the first place. From this perspective many sales funnels companies employ are delusional and grounded in false belief systems regarding the linearity of the purchase process and miss the beauty of the complexity involved in decision making.  Taking the point of view of the customer reveals insightful details about the process:

1. Searching & Browsing: over 80% of browser sessions start with a search. Over 90% of people search online while considering a major investment like a digital camera, a trip or a car. Search is the primary means through which people start browsing the web.
2. Recommendations & Persuasion: As soon as one fires a search, conversation appears. Forums full of second hand advice start to influence our decisions. Some people out there have a vast amount of knowledge and their opinions persuade our own opinions.
3. Reinforcement & Sacrification: New information enforces our expectations but makes us also sacrifice initial assumptions, as new information emerges from the conversation.
4. Usage & Value Creation: One decides to get involved with a solution or product. Usage reveals new requirements and reveals non-predetermined unexpected benefits. Value is created through the way how a solution is actually used, not what it appeared to be in the first place.
5. Value Recognition & Self Expression: One starts to recognize the true, deep and hidden value the solution represents. You may as well call it wisdom in the context of using the product. Self expression leads to recommending and persuading the decisions of others: fancy details and complex reviews are being revealed to others on internet forums.

A friend of mine, Anssi Mäkelä from Nokia did a little mystery shopper experiment. As an avid Nike fan, he was looking to buy a pair of running shoes from the internet and took a screenshot of each website he visited in the process. Out of the around 180 screenshots only two were from websites owned by Nike. He only went to their website to have a feel of the products, as is the case with high-definition digital advertising.

The word engagement is so deep that it has even made itself to the values of Nokia. In their lobby I saw a banner reading “engaging consumers“. the same words insisted by a marketing person from Louis Vuitton in a conference talking about social media and how it relates to their brand. What this is to me is an oxymoron: active engagement and passive consumption do not go into the same sentence without a logical conflict.

“56% of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with, and better served by, companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.”
– Center for Media Research (2008)

The potential buyer no longer comes through the front door to be lured through various steps to become a customer. Because of Google, he is entering through any door he wants instead – even a window or a backdoor – armed with the opinions of his peers carried over from the conversations along the road. As he starts to use the product, he starts to speak to other customers about the true benefits and deficits of the product: even dodging manuals to hack the product to make it what one wants, as has happened at Ikeafans.com.

From this perspective, the word consumer describing passive behavior is no longer valid. Alternatives have been suggested for the new era of participation, such as produsage and prosumerism. In any case what we are actually talking about is empowerment. The customer is not just engaged, but in an ideal situation is empowered to go beyond the product: rate, comment, converse, feed forward, troubleshoot and hack the product in the context of other empowered customers.

Give a man a fish and he is engaged. Give a man a fishing rod and he is empowered.

Smart companies know how to leverage co-creativity. Such is the case with MyStarbucksIdea.com, understanding the importance of customers as active participants in product and service development processes. The value thus is created in interaction and not embedded in the product and production processes alone. This is what Esko Kilpi talks about in his blog about interactive value creation.

Sales funnel is a selfish concept utilized by companies who are mainly interested in themselves. Words like “capturing leads”, “lead acquisition”, “customer retention” and “engaging consumers” are concepts emerging from looking inside-out from oneself as a company, rather than outside-in.

Smart companies switch off their corp-ego-centric world view and make customer-centricity a true value evident in their tactics in practice, not just an empty shell in their mission statement. To push the boundaries a little bit, attention and awareness are also selfish concepts. The true currency is not attention but the intention of your customers: intent to do something, not just attention to marketing messages. In an Intention Economy,  customers are empowered participants.

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
– Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com

5 years ago a small group including me and Teemu Leinonen formed the Finnish Association of Free, Libre and Open Source Software in Education (FLOSSE). Although we did some great things the effort didn’t last because the people involved were not that interested in running a traditional association. As in Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, internet enables individualization of leisure time via the Internet and as a result, participation in traditional formal associations is in a decline.

As Clay Shirky outlines in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, as the transaction costs (in reference to British guru on economics Ronald Coase) for cooperative work drops as a consequence of internet enabled mass collaboration, things tend to happen in a decentralized way without the need for centralized formal organizations. There are many examples of such forces at play, e.g. Wikitravel or OhMyNews.

In Finland we have witnessed the emergence of a decentralized virtual organization called Sometu (sosiaalinen media oppimisen tukena – social media in support of learning). This (dis)organization consists of over 3000 teachers, researchers and other people interested in social media in education. Sometu was formed in the end of 2007 and has grown rapidly since. Their main tool is Ning, but they use a wide variety of other social media tools to carry out educational experiments.

Now that Ning is going more commercial and social media conversation is becoming more overheated and tiring on the educational sector, people like Teemu Leinonen (at ITK-conference) and Tarmo Toikkanen have started to question the aim of Sometu and its mission. Sometu has started to live a life of its own as an echo chamber for educational social media fanatics with their own little experiments with a questionable degree of impact. With a more clear purpose such a (dis)organization could become much stronger and meaningful force in transforming the educational sector. Will it be capable for this?

With great interest I read Dave Pollard’s post on the Lifecycle of Emergence. He talks how intrigued he is of “flow” models depicting the dynamics and cyclic nature of complex systems. He talks about the details of his discovery of Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze’s (Berkana Institute) model of Lifecycles of Emergence and explains the model with the following picture:

The Lifecycle of Emergence. Illustration: Dave Pollard, original by Chris Corrigan

When I saw this picture Sometu network immediately came to my mind. As I see it, it was set up by pioneers who named the network. Then it started rapidly evolving as a network as other enthusiasts joined, eventually emerging as a community of practice for using social media in educational practice. A lot of attention and success stories were built, illuminating the (dis)organization’s activities. As more newcomers joined and as the activity and transparency of the group’s activities grew, it became a major system of influence for educational transformation – until someone said that the emperor wears no clothes.

As with anything, technology is like a chair without two legs if the cultural transformation underlying it is missing or unclear for the user. If things get technologically driven – as Sometu seems to be too much so for some people – the question then becomes what is the cultural innovation behind the scenes. This could be concentrated as a mantra, mission or vision for such an organization, but such statements may become empty in meaning.

Influencing real change in education is exceptionally hard. Networks like Sometu need to carefully examine the real competencies they have and focus on those to avoid decline and jump to a new cycle of opportunities. This will be hard, especially if even the originating founders don’t know themselves what would be the forces that will keep their vague network together in the future – simple interest in tools for education is not enough.

Just as Bruce Sterling said to mobile developers at the Mobile Monday Amsterdam:

“I want you to think real hard about the values you are going to save and stop worrying about the plastic”.

Six Thinking Hats is a well known brainstorming method designed by Dr. Edward de Bono. Six Hats aims to help a group to think more effectively. The idea is to use different hats symbolically, in order to take different productive points of view to a conversation such as positive thinking, information & fact driven argumentation and critical judgment.

But what would be the opposite of Six Thinking Hats, points of view to a conversation that would be damaging and non-productive from the group effort point of view. Something that would eventually bring the conversation to a halt, a dead-end or even a fight? On a long lunch today with my colleagues we designed just that.

Six Non-Thinking Socks

How to destroy a potentially fruitful conversation and brainstorming session by just being present.

1. White Socks – Direct Interruption

What ever is being said is being interrupted by speaking over and loud. If someone starts to interrupt you too, just rise your voice and continue.

2. Red Socks – Getting Personal

Every point that is provided is cleverly turned into a personal assault targeting the character and personality of the fellow team player.

3. Black Socks – Unthinking

Use every logical fallacy in the book to confuse the conversation with arguments that first sound reasonable but turn out to be totally flawed in the very details.

4. Yellow Socks – Blatant Ignorance

When someone is speaking, just pretend that you are not listening. Look at the walls, at your clock and knock your fingers on the table. Moan.

5. Green Socks – Extreme Pessimism

It is the worst possible day of your life. Everything that is being said is viewed through lenses of absolute negativity and likelihood for failure. Cast a dark shadow on the whole conversation and start speculating what could most possibly go wrong.

6. Blue Socks – Unreasonable Haste

You are in such a hurry that there is no point in thinking about anything longer than a second – maybe two on a good day. No time to think – decisions are made based on intuition alone.

–

So, there you have it. Not too far away from your typical meeting.

Now go on and use this method in your next meeting and report back the results!

I had to skip a flight to Lapland for giving a presentation due to the volcano eruption in Iceland – first force majeure for me. Due to curiosity, I’ve been keeping an eye on the phenomena from the social media point of view. It is obvious that once again social media is playing an important role here for disaster recovery.

Especially real-time reporting and data has become increasingly important. Twitter and real-time mashups turn out to be most useful on the real-time web side. Various online communities on Facebook and elsewhere are providing solutions and support for those who are still out there. Events like this could be tremendous opportunities for companies customer support departments to listen and react accordingly and provide some relief to crowded phone support lines.

Most important tags for following the volcano related information on Twitter are #volcano, #ashtag, #getmehome and #roadsharing. Here is a chart that shows that the conversation is still going strong with #ashtag (started by twitter user Angry Britain at approximately 7:31am on Thursday 15th) and #getmehome rising as of sunday:

Twitter tag trends for the volcano discussion (stats: Trendistic 2010)

Volcano-stranded travelers have turned to social media for alternative transportation, accommodation and other support.

On Facebook, writer Tod Brilliant organized his own Facebook group “When Volcanoes Erupt: A Survival Guide for Stranded Travelers” (531 members as of writing) a moment after he and his wife Andrea Barrett – who is 31 weeks pregnant – found themselves unable to fly home to California from London’s Heathrow airport after a wedding. The group features country specific advice.

Carpool Europe (1575 members as of writing) on Facebook helps people to find a ride in Europe.

Stuck in Helsinki – accommodation during the ash cloud (250 members as of writing) is providing a channel for those stranded in Finland.

Dohop.com travel search site organized an interactive Google map mashup of the ash plume showing aiport status.

On the real-time data side, Radarvirtuel.com shows airplane traffic and the ash cloud on a real-time map.

TED quickly approved a group to organize TEDxVolcano in London after a whole group of people participating at the Skoll World Forum got stranded.

Someone even set up a Twitter account for the ash cloud and gained over 2000 followers in a short time. Another volcano pretender here.

Roadsharing.com and Couchsurfing.org websites designed for sharing rides and accommodation just became more popular, not to mention image pools on Flickr.com for volcanic eruptions.

Various Airlines are helping their customers on Facebook and Twitter regarding the issue. Good job so far by airBaltic (33 300 members as of writing) with ongoing updates on the issue. The finnish arline Finnair is not doing as well, with only some official updates on Facebook (7500 members as of writing) and no real support. Finnair’s  Twitter account is also completely silent.