Juha-Matti Arola’s blog

I attended Wednesday a discussion for boosting the work effiency at TKK Dipoli. This was in conjunction with a Finnish government programme initiative.

In this meeting it was clearly seen that when using virtual tools like virtual meetings or rooms we could achieve huge benefits: less worktime consumed, less costs (due to travelling, worktime etc.) and reduced throughput time within a process. This should be an important issue for country like Finland with long distances and scarcely populated areas.

When people are trained to use those tools and their activity is supported effectively, we could finally enter into a true distance work environment including virtual collaboration without the limit of place. This could mean that an employee could have a right to select his/her living location, which solves the problem of packing all people into cities. I would rather think that a person within his/her most favoured environment is the most productive. Being right next to a beautiful Finnish lake in summer or next to a skiing resort in winter is a much more innovative environment rather than sitting years and years at the same office with the same people.

This world-changing paradigm which builds up a networked collaborative environment out of the hierarchical, controlled working environment is a huge change. Virtuality might cause challenges for travel agencies, publishing houses and other controlled and supervised organizational structures in the society.

What were your experiences during the conference? Please comment.

I think the Learning Buffet session was a blast. We had no formal schedule, agenda or even a collective consensus of what we are going to do. Sounds like a disaster to start with. How was it? Well, I think people were terrified in a positive way. I was playing with all the cheap technology we had (zero budget) and my memory of the session is as chaotic as the end result. But learning is, after all, a chaotic process. Otherwise learning wouldn’t be an issue at all. But things are not that simple.

So, it started by letting the room to self-organize in groups. I setup a chat room on our second projector where people could also send messages through their mobile phones, thanks to Labyrintti Media. People could also join the chat through wireless LAN and our guests around the country and Canada were also able to see what people had in mind. I had a webcam in the room (not high enough to really see what’s going on, though) for our international guests. The main projector was used for showing some slides and other things.

Kari Mikkelä and Juha-Matti Arola facilitated the groups to talk with each other and ask questions. We presented some food for thought, like how the web is changing and how we are moving from consumers to pro-sumers (creators). I displayed this blog, a podcast, a videocast from the cafeteria and then we had a fierce discussion about wikis (wikipedia, Jon Udell’s umlaut video), blogs (technorati, MSM vs. blogs, blog growth), Flickr, open content (Creative Commons, showing Star Wreck as an example, also Flickr Creative Commons) and some other things I already forgot about. While we were talking, Stephen Downes and George Siemens had an interesting academic discussion on our chat channel. Why on earth are they sharing this discussion with us, some asked. Well, George and Stephen are part of the millennials, it’s a natural way of collaboration for them. I think millenials are not about age, millennials are those who have grown with technology, old or young. Here is the complete chat log, including their discussion about networks:

[15:28] SMS: Juha: moi
[15:31] StephenDownes: Hello
[15:34] TeemuA: Ilkka Kukkonen, University of Joensuu
[15:34] TeemuA: People see what you write
[15:34] Ilkka: Hi there
[15:36] Jarkko: Change from conventional to virtual work!
[15:37] SMS: Juha: kommentti pöytä 3: kilpailu kiristyy: omaksumisen nopeus tärkeää :: Oppiminen jatkossa yhä tärkeämpi osa liiketoimintaa …
[15:40] viimeinenvartti: testtest
[15:40] ryhmA: testi
[15:41] Mikki: It time to start wrappping up F2F discussions soon. Be prepared!
[15:41] Jarkko: Cross-functional teams are collaborative!
[15:43] viimeinenvartti: do technical solutions really solve problems? they might well do, but at the same time create x times x times ? totally new problems
[15:43] Jarkko: Cross-functional teams are innovative.
[15:58] GeorgeSiemens: Good morning stephen
[15:58] StephenDownes: Good morning
[15:59] StephenDownes: How’s the weather: snowing yet in Manitoba?
[15:59] TeemuA: I think its sunny here
[15:59] TeemuA: what time is it there
[15:59] StephenDownes: It’s 10:00 a.m. here
[15:59] GeorgeSiemens: we had ~ 12″ of snow last week
[16:00] GeorgeSiemens: earliest blizzard on record…
[16:00] StephenDownes: no kidding… some days I don’t miss manitoba at all
[16:00] GeorgeSiemens: i can see why!
[16:00] GeorgeSiemens: btw: just finished reading your last article…
[16:01] StephenDownes: which one?
[16:01] TeemuA: see webcam
[16:01] GeorgeSiemens: semantic network and social networks
[16:02] GeorgeSiemens: I like the notion of semantic social networks…
[16:04] GeorgeSiemens: The challenge I see is in the extreme opposites of each approach
[16:04] StephenDownes: yeah… it appears to me too… the paper is really an academic version of my ’semantic social networks’ paper
[16:04] GeorgeSiemens: semantic=logic, structure, clarified, machine-readable
[16:04] GeorgeSiemens: social = chaotic, rapid tie-formation, breakdown
[16:04] GeorgeSiemens: a noble undertaking to bring the two together
[16:04] StephenDownes: well: to paraphrase some of the recent discussion on your site, the semantic web is all about content, the social web is all about connections
[16:05] GeorgeSiemens: yes: that’s the distinction I’m grappling with personally
[16:05] StephenDownes: I have posted back on this: will take some thinking: but from my point of view, the two are logically indistinct
[16:06] StephenDownes: ie., content just is connections, connections just are content
[16:06] GeorgeSiemens: I’ve stated that connections are more important…but the more I reflect on it, all of our growth in knowledge (through connections) is reflected in content
[16:06] GeorgeSiemens: like your last statement!
[16:06] StephenDownes: yeah (I expect a footnote wink )
[16:06] GeorgeSiemens: some McLuhan undertones there…
[16:07] StephenDownes: go back to the analysis of language: what is the ‘meaning’ of ‘content’ like, say, ‘Paris’
[16:07] StephenDownes: there isn’t some ‘thing-in-itself’ that constitutes the ‘content’ of Paris
[16:07] StephenDownes: the content is, quite literally, distributed
[16:07] GeorgeSiemens: in the aggregate of all who connect to the content?
[16:08] StephenDownes: that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s social tho (the big diff between my approach and yours)
[16:08] StephenDownes: oops, lost conxn
[16:08] StephenDownes: The content is distributed even if it is contained all within a single person
[16:09] StephenDownes: literally, physically, it’s distributed across neurons
[16:09] GeorgeSiemens: so you mention the difference in approach: (mine/yours)
[16:09] StephenDownes: conceptually, it’s distributed across related concepts (’paris hilton’, ‘plaster of paris’, ‘capital of france’)
[16:09] StephenDownes: the social dimension is just one dimension
[16:09] GeorgeSiemens: yes: some of the recent literature on connectionism (not connectivism) and not thorndike either …expresses the distributed nature of understanding
[16:10] GeorgeSiemens: research into brain injuries acknowledges that certain functionaly can be acquired by other parts of the brain
[16:10] StephenDownes: I see you as emphasizing the social dimension (much Vytgostky, not so much, um, who, james?)
[16:10] StephenDownes: right
[16:11] GeorgeSiemens: though in many cases, key nodes can be damaged, mininimizing that functionality
[16:11] GeorgeSiemens: in part, I assume then that even in decentralized structures, some centralization occurs…
[16:11] StephenDownes: cf LeDoux, The Synaptic Self, or Hawkins, On Intelligence
[16:12] StephenDownes: sure: the hippocampus processes sensory input: no hippocampus, no sensory input
[16:12] StephenDownes: there is a modularity of mind
[16:12] GeorgeSiemens: so if you don’t emphasize the social aspect as much, how do you replace connection-forming elements (relating to content)
[16:13] GeorgeSiemens: ?
[16:13] StephenDownes: Hebbian associationism
[16:13] GeorgeSiemens: or which devices play the connection-forming role that I assign with socialization
[16:13] StephenDownes: coupled with back-propagation
[16:14] GeorgeSiemens: what back-propagates?: software?
[16:14] StephenDownes: the view I have is that it’s networks all the way up, all the way down, different networks at different levels of granularity, hence a neural network, a conceptual network, a social network, etc
[16:14] StephenDownes: the mechanisms at each of these levels are the same (the physical substrate is different, but fuinctionally they’re the same)
[16:15] GeorgeSiemens: but within networks, particularly in a neural sense, the capacity to connect or form connections is critical
[16:15] GeorgeSiemens: socialization is one means (probably the most effective)
[16:15] GeorgeSiemens: we can form connections by sitting in a room thinking, reading a book, etc
[16:15] GeorgeSiemens: but ultimately, the attempt to express what we know/encounter, is social (i.e. your blog, your articles)
[16:15] StephenDownes: feed-forward = a variety of Hebbian-type mechanisms, essentially, collections of similar neurons that are (more or less) physically contiguous that fire at the same time come to be connected
[16:16] StephenDownes: similarily, collections of similar people that, say, always show up at the same anti-war protests come to form social networks
[16:16] GeorgeSiemens: in this model, is the socialization a by-product of connections formed through thought?
[16:16] StephenDownes: Both mechanisms operate at once, the neural and the social, both follow the same principle of association
[16:17] StephenDownes: socialism is *created* through association: contuguity and similarity
[16:17] GeorgeSiemens: i’m not quite comfortable acribing a separate identity to social: simply because they are so tightly connected with how neural networks form
[16:17] GeorgeSiemens: i see socialization as a means to form connections, not nec. a separate network in itself
[16:17] StephenDownes: Back-propagation is essentially the feedback mechanism: it is essentially the influence of pre-existing stuctures on association
[16:18] TeemuA: Stephen and George
[16:18] GeorgeSiemens: though in an external sense, we do create social networks: but they are intended to lead to learning (i.e. neural network creation)
[16:18] TeemuA: get ready
[16:18] StephenDownes: social networks lead to learning, learning leads to social networks
[16:19] GeorgeSiemens: do u equate learning with neural networks?
[16:19] StephenDownes: what’s key is how the networks at different levels (neural, conceptual, social) interoperate
[16:19] GeorgeSiemens: i.e. is it the same in your eyes?
[16:19] StephenDownes: learning is the development of all of these networks simultaneously, and the relations between networks
[16:19] StephenDownes: learning = neural networks + conceptual networks + social networks
[16:20] GeorgeSiemens: we are speaking of social on two levels: one as an external network we actively create for self-serving reasons
[16:20] GeorgeSiemens: (in many cases)
[16:21] GeorgeSiemens: and the second as a conduit for additional neural network creation: i.e. learning
[16:21] StephenDownes: and *crucially* content = networks (or, more precisely, content = a representation in one network emergent from the other network)
[16:21] StephenDownes: yes, george, exactly
[16:21] GeorgeSiemens: in the first sense, I agree with you that it is a network that interplays with other networks
[16:21] GeorgeSiemens: in the second sense, I see it as a conduit for learning
[16:21] StephenDownes: The ‘content’ in one network is an *interpretation* of another network
[16:22] GeorgeSiemens: always?
[16:22] StephenDownes: The word ‘Paris’ in English is ‘content’ at the social level, but represents an interpretation (point of view, context) of a set of connections in another network
[16:22] StephenDownes: always
[16:23] StephenDownes: there are no things-in-themselves
[16:23] GeorgeSiemens: so then our discussion has no value outside of our interpretation
[16:23] StephenDownes: It’s all interpretation
[16:23] StephenDownes: There is no meaning without point of view
[16:23] StephenDownes: point of view = way seeing the network
[16:25] StephenDownes: ie of recognizing the emergent properties of the network
[16:30] TeemuA: we keep the microphone off
[16:30] StephenDownes: ok, cool
[16:31] Mikki: when do we get semantic web viablle applications? On which areas do we get them?
[16:33] Mikki: …and what about social annotated content/web? Amazon type of learning content sharein
[16:33] Mikki: sorry …sharing…:)
[16:42] TeemuA: Stephen, we have five minutes, I’d love to hear Georges take on this.
[16:42] TeemuA: so you have
[16:42] TeemuA: then we have 5 more
[16:42] TeemuA: then we have to wrap up
[16:43] TeemuA: are you George on skype?
[16:44] TeemuA: yes
[16:44] Mikki: Thanks..
[16:46] Mikki: So you can bring your “knowledge context” everywhere..
[16:47] StephenDownes: yes mikki
[16:49] Mikki: How do individuals roles evolve in this kind of net of human/tech netes???
[16:50] TeemuA: Stephen might explain Scott Wilsons idea of what this means in practice?
[16:50] StephenDownes: yes, that’s where I’ll go after the question
[16:55] TeemuA: your learning environment is owned by you and not the institution where you belong to
[16:56] TeemuA: software over a single device
[16:57] TeemuA: heh
[16:58] TeemuA: Mr. eLearning finland, Kari Mikkelä will jump in and say thank you
[16:59] TeemuA: I wonder if stephen sees this
[16:59] TeemuA:
[17:00] SMS: Juha: Thanks Very interesting…
[17:01] StephenDownes: thanks

Stephen had a very rushed journey through eLearning 2.0 (see here if you want a more complete version of the excellent talk) as we were running out of time. In the middle, George Siemens jumped in and explained his theory of connectivism. Then Stephen continued and showed a practical example of making connections through technology, a personal learning environment where you choose what’s in your learning environment, instead of handing this task to your institution. This was the picture by Scott Wilson, an illustration of small pieces loosely joined, a future VLE or should we say, PLE.

Too bad we didn’t have time for discussion with the audience, as the day ended (hope their world did not). All in all, in this session George and Stephen put very well together what people had been talking about for the last two days and I’m sure the last session is something they will remember (in good or bad). I forgot to press record when the Skype session started and I have no pictures, I hope someone has.

The technology worked, there was lots of it and I think the tools had their purpose here. I hope this will remain as an example for future conferences in Finland. I would rather participate in a truly social conference which knows that we live in a networked society and we are free of economic constraints to play with the tools of learning we already have. Our notes proved to be useful even for outsiders, see for example here (swedish). The 10 years old conference format full of powerpoints is ready for a change.

Collaborating with Juha-Matti Arola on the blog reportage was pretty extensive. We wrote all the over 10 blog posts together, while the other one was taking notes, the other one was fixing spelling, taking pictures, adding pictures to Flickr and getting posts ready for delivery. Most of the time we were ready right when a presentation ended. Now that’s realtime collaboration.

A note worth to remember from Juha-Matti Arola was that this is exactly what he has been doing during his career at KONE: translating ideas into english and sending them to his colleagues. Now he is able to share ideas in an environment which encourages participation, collaboration and sharing. The value of information increses when shared.

I will write a short introduction to the world of sharing economy in a few days for those who want to know about what tools are already in the horizon for people who want to be pro-sumers instead of consumers at conferences like this.

– Teemu Arina

Antti Saarinen, Project Manager from UPM-Kymmene Oyj tells us that the current challenges include the aging problem, transferring best practises and methods as well as transferring training materials and models.

Explicit knowledge is hard to train for individuals in organizations. At the crossroads of explicit and tacit knowledge of human beings is directing the behavior of actions and decision making.

As a business case a paper mill in China was presented, where persons with basic background are trained to be multi-skilled paperworking specialists. Training scorecards were used.

Process training simulators with live videos were used to train the staff for a new paper mill, concentrating especially in the security, roles in teamwork, right working methods and effective working.

The main result of the business case was that the new people trained during the summer 2004 show no performance problems. The mill started one month ahead of schedule and according to a plan.

Mr. Seppo Siika-Aho, IT Manager/Training Corporate IT, Stora Enso Oyj presenting at the Kontakti.net conference.

The challenges for knowledge delivery do exist: ownership, knowledge modelling, value of knowledge, adoptation, relativism of time and processes & tools.

When the Swedish-origin Stora and Finnish-origin Enso Gutzeit merged, a project called Fenix was needed to standardize existing 10 different IT departments and hundreds of systems. The ERP-system today includes 4034 named users, 1000 concurrent users and about 4 million messages monthly. The system is for the whole organization and not only for one division or department.

All the data is also available for partners. The challenge of the system is its multiple applications, in which an error in the beginning will cause huge difficulties in the end.

In the beginning people were trained, now the training is more focused on processes in which the applications are used. The Fenix Support for the Fenix Users will be provided by Fenix Super Users. Works ok in Finland, but does not work in Europe due to hierarchical reasons. The person who is consulting should be positioned higher within the organization. The Super Users are supported by the Service Desk, which should be supported with System Expertise.

Stora Enso is training more and more in virtual classrooms, not in face-to-face class rooms. There is over 250 pages documentation. A lot of time is consumed for creating materials, if the system is changing in a minor way in one part, it should be changed in many places. Therefore a new tool had to be found.

Therefore learning paths and objects were introduced including modular learning objects of test, introparts, documents etc. The trainers are responsible for developing the content.

The training is not any more in Powerpoint-presentations, but multimedia learning objects are used. In the future all the process variants will be saved for reproduction and for reuse.

How to realize this in technology? The base is the database including advanced metadata model. Content Management tool for trainers and developers is in use, the training interface and the official Fenix Guide will be developed or even they will be merging. Based on MySQL & PHP concept and the delivery channel is Intranet. Material formats include .ppt, .doc, .swf, .jpg, etc (no restrictions).

The biggest challenges are change management and committing to that, concrete goals, joint understanding what we are seeking and achieving “early wins”.

Jay Cross from Internet time group invented the word eLearning. Now he approaches the concept very differently than what people currently understand about eLearning.

The session was recorded with Centra. You can view the whole presentation by executing the following file:

Kontaktinet-Jay-Cross-_05-10-11_10.14.exe (32.7 MB)

Here are some notes of the presentation:

If you have not closed something like closing an order, finish a chapter of a book, then it stays active in your mind a lot better. In fact, people learn twice as much if the tension of things hasn’t finished yet. If you want to remember a book, then finish it half-way of a chapter, rather than at the end of the chapter.

The situation world-wide is that a lot is happening at the same time. We react to the moment rather than having time to think what to do next. We don’t have any available time. The same issue comes up with organizations. We plan short-term as we don’t have time. This is the industrial paradigm.

We are now facing a new era and we need to look at it with new eyes.

The technology has advanced. The cost and power of machines has gone up during the time. This accelerating term has happened throughout the human history. This is a logarithmic race against time.

In the beginning we had agriculture, then we invented writing and things like that. Frankly, we are now in an exponential world. Every form of communication technology is doubling every year. If you think there is too much information, you are right, there is too much. We are heading to a chaos.

Because of all of this, we can’t keep up. Our understanding of learning is obsolete. We can’t anymore go to a college and come out of there and then learning ends. In this world, learning goes on and on and on because keeping up is very important.

We are still holding up with the industrial age of efficiency. WW2 was a great success of command & control. Then corporations mimiced the military. They had strategies, tactics, officers and stuff. They copied this for their industrial model.

Learning frankly is not a factory process. Jay invented the term eLearning but the first time the concept didn’t work very well. First they tried to only use the computer aspect instead of combining it with real learning experiences.

There are a lot of learning. Learning to drive a car, learning to smoke cigarettes, learning to dive and stuff like that. Still we think learning only as something that happens in our heads.

Formal learning is not as important as it used to be. Not at all. If you look at the impact of learning on the performance of corporations, formal learning counts only 10% of the learning in the organizations. Only a small fraction what you learn in training transfers to the job. If you ask people how they learn their job, most of the time is not in a class but in observing people, trial and error, reading manuals that are related to work at hand etc.

Most of what students learn is not in class but in their free time when they discuss with their peers and put things in context. Informal learning is all the stuff that is not formal. It’s not schedule, it’s not class and not curriculum.

The informal learning paradox: most of the budget (80%) is spent on the formal side but most of the learning (80%) is on the informal side. Tending a garden is a much better construction than designing a learning experience.

In the beginning we had small bands of people, 30-40 people. When we came up with a language, then the local bands were replaced by kingdoms. The top-down networks became the structure. Then the cost of communication dropped and we ended up in mass-communication. Power was de-centralized and democracy replaced kingdoms. The same is happening in the organization of computing, where we go from small local networks to a wide de-centralized network.

We are going from grades, shut-up-and-listen education to networked learning that is self-organizing because of the motivation of the people in the network.

If a butterfly flaps its wings in brazil, will it cause a windstorm in Texas. It could. That’s the way complex systems work. When we apply that to human systems, it’s possible to have human batterfly effects. Through creating a right environment for learning, we will have some butterfly effects that throw people in super productive modes.

When we design things, we tend to put a limit on them. We make them reach something that is good enough, rather than bust through the limits. The design limitation of being good enough is an industrial concept. In natural concepts we have no limits.

A few years ago learner centric design was the great goal. Jay was also part of the movement, creating images of it. Now he thinks this is not the way to go. We also have to look the learner as part of an organization. So this is not a black and white thing.

We still perceive an individual as an empty container instead of having 95% of the capacity to do what ever the individual will ever going to do.

In the beginning we learn most effectively formally. When we age, we start to learn informally. Those who have the concepts and methods to learn informally, should start feeding their experience and wisdom back to the younger people who are still developing these concepts.

Cubicles in companies are uninviting for discussion. We need to replace these spaces with environments where conversations emerge naturally.

If you have an organization map with positions and titles, that’s not really the way these organizations work. If you approach with a network analysis, you might see that some people are more important than others as connectors. These people can be anywhere in the organization. The picture is very different from the organization chart. If you fire a hub your organization will stall for a while.

We should shift some part of our investment to the informal side. Almost every office is fixated to the idea of an office, while everyone who has been around for a while knows, that the office doesn’t provide much of additional value. We should put our money in meta-learning, which is about teaching people to learn effectively on theirselves. If you teach people to learn better, everyone wins.

– Teemu Arina