Designing+Tools

=Design sessions focusing on networked learning tools for the rest of us=

Proposal by: 1155302153

As part of the open conference I would like to arrange some design sessions were we could think and come-up with new concepts and ideas about meaningful learning tools for those people who are not that technologically networked as we probably are.

The obstacles to become “networked” are various, but some of them we may overcome with clever design solutions that are not necessary technical solutions but more related to people and their practices.

If you are interested in to take part in these design sessions, please add you name here:

- Teemu - rose user:kglogowski user:leighblackall: bringing TALO methods user:bdieu

=Background paper=

I am actually writing a paper to one another workshop related to the theme. I thought to share it in here, too. We may use it as a background paper, but should not limit our sessions in the open conference to the system described in it.

However the systems described in the paper can be used as an example of a solution that is potentially feasible and sustainable in many places. Feel free to edit and comment the paper.

AUDIO WIKI FOR MOBILE COMMUNITIES – INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR THE REST OF US
DRAFT 11.08.2006 1155302063

by Teemu Leinonen, Eunice Ratna Sari, Francois Aucamp

Introduction
Information and communication technologies (ICT) can offer powerful platforms for communities to manage, coordinate and develop their activities. Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have made it possible to set-up online services where people are gathering around some common interests or hobbies to share information. Number of WWW-based systems has been introduced also for citizens for participation in planning and implementation of public affairs and democracy (Friedland 1996; Tsagarousianou 1999; Savolainen, R & Anttiroiko, A 1999; Ridell S 2001, 2005).

Nevertheless there seems to be several obstacles to make WWW-based online community systems useful in many parts of the world. At first access to Internet can be limited. Secondly online communities require high-level functional literacy with typing skills. Thirdly online community culture may not match with the general cultural patterns of the users.

Information systems that are not relying on Internet and WWW-technology but rather to mobile phone technology may be more potential platform for developing infrastructure for people to build their own information systems. First at all globally access to mobile phones is high - much higher than availability of PC’s with Internet connection. Secondly use of mobile phone with your own voice does not require high-level writing or typing skills. Finally existing mobile phone user culture may call forth and enhance information systems of some communities much better than the web-based systems.

We assume that use of mobile phones and audio with advanced server-based information systems may be not only technically more feasible but also culturally more accessible in places where there is a strong culture of mobile phones, but Internet and WWW are not widely used. For this purpose we have developed an Audio Wiki – community information system that can be used with mobile phone.

Online communities as self-organized information systems
According to Langefors (1973), information system is a technological medium for collecting, storing, treating and distributing information. Internet and especially World Wide Web (WWW) have introduced the concept of information system for number of totally new user groups. Because of the Internet and WWW corporations and companies are no more the only communities using information systems.

Online communities, that are sometimes called virtual or digital communities, are examples of these new kinds of information systems that are often designed, made and managed from most part by the people who also are using them. History of Internet and WWW is full of examples of self-organizing online communities starting from thematic Usenet Newsgroups and the Well (http://www.well.com/) to later Google and Yahoo groups, Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) and MySpace (http://www.myspace.com) community websites. The offering of hosted community services, as well as availability of number of Open Source community website engines has made it possible to start a community website of your own with relative small investment. The open natures of Internet and WWW technologies have been the major enabler of this development (Tim Berners-Lee).

Characteristic for the online communities is that they are offering a freedom of same location and time for their member. The idea to gather everyone who is interested in some specific topic, regardless where they are, to a single online community to discuss and to share information about it, is strongly in-build to the idea of online communities. You are also expected to have the possibility to use the online community when it the best fits in your schedule. In the core of all online communities there are the asynchronous communication tools, such as news groups, discussion boards and file sharing services offering freedom of same time and space.

It seems that the nature of online communities being global and asynchronous are also hard-coded to our culture of using them. They are open for anyone to join and leave whenever they want. This is the way we want the online communities to be. The culture of use is based on “weak ties” created between the members. The technology is supporting the weaknesses of the links. It can be argued that also the power of online communities is in the “weak ties” it creates and maintains. The importance of “weak ties” for instance in succeed in a labour market has been studied and discussed by several social scientists (Granovetter 1983).

Obstacles of having web-based online communities with “strong ties”
It is interesting that even that the concept of online community in general is blossoming, the attempts to introduce WWW-based information systems for local communities – such as villages or city districts – have not been very successful (Tsagarousianou 1999, Ridell 2005). The reasons why the local WWW community systems fail has been presumed to be related to top-down genre of online services that do not facilitate grass-root activism, as well as to the obstacles and lack of easy access to Internet for citizens (e.g. Ridell 2005).

From the different obstacles of using local online communities the limited access to Internet is probably the most obvious barrier for most people in the world. According to International Telecommunication Union the global Internet penetration in 2004 was 13 and the growth is very slow (ITU Report 2006). We may assume that Internet – as we know it today - will not soon be available for most people in the world.

Alongside the physical access the lack of basic skills is limiting people’s opportunities to take in use any kind of information systems. According to the Eurostat survey close to 50% of EU population have no computer skills required to participate in online communities. Even that the differences among the elder age groups and younger age groups are remarkable, still more than every fourth of 16-24 year old do not have basic skills needed to use WWW (Eurostat 2006 – I interpreted that a person with no or only low level computer skills is not able to use WWW-based information systems). When we consider regions and cultures where general literate culture is weak and functional literacy levels are low, the number of people who even potentially will have ability to use web-based information systems degreases even more.

We may also speculate that because online communities are primary supporting “weak ties” among the member, they do not very well facilitate the needs of communities with “strong links”. The culture of online communities is global – not local, whereas villages and city districts are by nature local. With the people you share a physically space – basically those people you are living with - you rather want to have strong links than weak links. The strong links guarantees higher security and caring which results as wellbeing and you would like to have technology that supports the strong links. However, we should not forget that different cultural patterns related to use of different technologies are not the only obstacles for having local information systems. The general culture, the sub-culture or simply the way of living does not necessary support strong links among the people living close to each other.

Mobile phones and mobile infrastructure: a platform for community information systems
In 2004 the mobile phone penetration in the world was 32%. The growth of the mobile phone subscribers seems to stay fast, especially in developing countries and in 2008 the global mobile phone penetration is expected to be more than 50%. (ITU Report 2006). We may expect that mobile communication is becoming truly global phenomena.

Most of the new mobile phone users do not have an experience of using Internet/WWW. For this reason we may assume that the concept of global Internet with global self-organized online communities may not break through among majority of people in the world. The existing user cultures have an effect to the adaptation of new technologies and practices of using them. SMS is an example of this which is very popular in place where e-mail is common and only modesty used in those parts of the world where sending e-mails has a long history. We may even presume that the possibility to have Internet connection, e-mail client and WWW-browser in mobile devices does not change this, at least in a short time, as the historical-cultural ways of using mobile devices does not support this kind of usage.

Mobile devices – especially phones – are technologies for building and keeping strong links between the people. A survey conducted in France showed that 70% of mobile phone users gave their mobile phone number only for controlled selection of their friends and family (Licoppe et all 2001). With the people in our phone directory we often share much more than an interest to some specific topic, as it is the case in online communities. In most of the cases the people in our “mobile networks” are also physically relatively close to us. Having strong links and physical closeness is hard-coded to the culture of use of mobile devices just like “weak links” and freedom of common time and space is hard-coded to the culture of use of web-based online communities.

The current mobile phone and mobile operator infrastructure does not support people to build their own information systems relying on the mobile phone infrastructure. With mobile phones we can send group SMS messages and have phone conference, but we cannot search for information, access news or have asynchronous discussions with our peers. We may not set-up a mobile portal for our village or for our local bridge club. With the concept of audio wiki for mobile communities and the MobilED SERVER we try to answer to these challenges and needs.

MobilED SERVER – Audio Wiki for Mobile Communities
We have designed and developed a MobilED server that is targeted for mobile users interested in to set-up their own audio information systems, basically audio wikis. The server is designed and developed in MobilED Initiative (http://mobiled.uiah.fi) operating in South Africa and Finland. In general level the objective of the MobilED Initiative is to design learning environments that are meaningfully enhanced with mobile technologies and services. However, we consider learning and learning environment very widely and include in it people learning in informal setting – in their own communities – out of formal school or educational context. For this reason we have come-up with several design ideas that may empower mobile users to set-up their own information systems that will match with their own information or learning needs.

The current version of the MobilED platform offers an access to Audio Wiki – a collaborative information system. The server makes it possible to use MediaWiki (MediaWiki 2006) server as the Content Management System of audio information system. Mediawiki is a feature-rich Open Source wiki engine written primarily for Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (Wikipedia 2006). According to Wikipedia, “wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration”.



Figure 1: MobilED server use case.

The MobilED server installation (see: Figure 1) allows a user to make a query to the MediaWiki server by sending a search term as an SMS message to the service number. After a while the user will receive a call back from the server and a speech synthesizer will read the content found from the MediaWiki under the search term. During the call, users may navigate the article with phone’s touch tone keys by either jumping from one section to another or by going to the table of content and choosing a sections from there. During the call users may also add audio annotations to any of the sections of the article. User may push button number three (3) and will receive voice guidelines how to add an audio annotation to the section.

The First Field Test
The design of the MobilED audio wiki was started with the scenario of offering Wikipedia’s Encyclopedia content for mobile users. The primary user group have been schools, teachers and school children in places with little access to learning materials. On the other hand we have considered the MobilED system with Wikipedia content to be a public service in areas with no libraries or other easy ways to access reference materials.

The first field test of testing the MobilED audio wiki was conducted in one school in South Africa. The system was used by three classes of grade 11 (15- 16 years) students. The aim was to try out the audio wiki in a relative formal school community as a part of study project related to HIV/AIDS.

Before the field test was started the teachers planned the study project and the use of the MobilED audio wiki with the researchers of the project. In an early stage of the planning it was already decided that students will use mobile phones in small groups and that as the main source of ready-made information the English Wikipedia content will be used.

To access the MobilED audio wiki service, each student group were given a Nokia 3230 smartphone and Nokia Music Stands MD-1 (speaker for the Nokia 3230).

The study project followed the principles of Jigsaw cooperative learning technique (Aronson et. al 1978), where each student is a member in two groups. The first kind of group is “home group”; in our case we called them “audiocasting groups”, referring to the idea of podcasting or radio show. The second group is “thematic expert groups”. Each thematic group consists of one member from each home group.

The thematic group discussed different aspects of HIV and used the MobilED server with the English Wikipedia content to search information related to their theme. Student groups were free to choose search terms and navigate the system according to their own choice. The content – delivered for them as an audio where a speech synthesiser was reading it – they listen together from a speaker attached to the mobile phone. The results of the information seeking and discussions about the themes were then reported back to each students’home/audiocasting groups.

The home groups then discussed the most relevant issues of HIV/AIDS for their own age groups and started to write a script for an audiocast or radio show of their own. The audiocast shows made by the student groups were then made available for the whole school community including all the students, teachers and parents. They where able to listen them with their own mobile phones by sending the group name to the MobilED audio wiki which then made a call back for the sender and played the audio found.

The aim of the field test was to gather experience how people will accept the concept of audio wiki and how they will learn to use it. This way we are looking the finding and analyses in the larger framework, even that the school pilot was only one experiment of using self-managed information system in rather specific and framed context.

Findings and Analysis from the Field Test
The filed test showed that the students learned to use mobile phones very fast in the small groups. During the first lesson, we only gave the student groups the mobile phones and the speakers and let them to figure out how they worked. One group found that there was a radio application and they started to play on the music with the speakers. Other group needed less than five minutes to figure out the radio in their own phone. Students basically learned to use the main features of the phones just by trying them and following each other uses. Among the students using mobile phones was an everyday skills and jumping from one mobile phone model to another did not require reading of manuals or any preliminary study work. This is very different if compared to the skills needed to learn to operate PC with Internet connection.

During the test, while still getting to know the phones, students found easily by themselves the contact number of “MobilED”, which was the only number saved in the phones by the researchers. Students learned to use the audio wiki and the Wikipedia content only by reading the one page laminated paper guideline and by discussing with their peers how it works.

Yet, by an accident, we found out that the students were more used to interact with a mobile technology than with tape recorder. In one of the groups, the MobilED service collapsed. We decided to provide tape recorders for students to make the recordings as they already had script-written for their show and were ready to record it. When doing this, we noticed that some students were not familiar with tape recorders at all. They didn’t understand the concept of “recording on a tape” and were hardly able to use the recorders. This shows how easiness of use is always related to the cultural-historical situation the technology is used, and how the mobile phones and MP3 players can be more accessible for young generation than devices which are commonly consider to be easy to use.

During the contextual interviews, the students told that they found the field test very interesting and empowering. Recording your own audio was the most exciting part of the pilot. With the recording several groups came up with a “radio play” with several characters discussing about the topic, whereas some groups made a “rap” about the theme. The fact that the number of the audio wiki and the groups’ names were shared among the whole school community with the purpose that everyone could listen the recordings with their own mobile phones, made the pilot more meaningful for the students, because the results of the study work got this way a larger audience than in normal study projects made only inside the class-room.

Other Scenarios of Use
In addition to the pilot in schools and use of the Wikipedia encyclopaedia content we have come-up with several new scenarios of use that will be tested in future. We know that there are many groups and organizations in a need to deliver and share information with their mobile devices in more advanced manner. For instance, alongside the school community, other local communities, working groups, associations and organizations could use audio wiki.

First at all they could publish their “business critical” information on a Wiki, update the “news” –page regularly and have a “feedback” or “forum” page for people to add and listen audio notes add by their peers. Everything would work “on demand”: You send a query term (e.g. “news”) to the server and the server would then call back to you and read the latest news for you. A possible user groups in addition to school communities, where MobilED audio wiki could be used are:


 * NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) with field workers. MobilED could be used for delivering news, guidelines and for sharing point of views and giving feedback from the field.
 * General governmental information services with information about: “health”, “education”, “elections” etc.
 * Village information services with information about “water”, “shops”, “clinic” and “forum” for public speech / feedback.
 * Nurses taking care of patient in patients’ homes with access to the latest news related to their job and more statistics “book of references” with basic information related to their worl. They could also share their point of views related to their work over MobilED in the “forum” section.

Discussion
From the point of view of Activity theory, learning is a complex result of tool mediated interactions (Engestrom 1996). The theory can help to understand, for example, how a computer or a mobile phone as cultural tool, can facilitate learning and how people are changed and transformed by the tool over time (Hardman 2005). On the other hand understanding the cultural-historical conditions of the people using existing technology help designers and developers to come-up with solutions that are likely taken in use.

From our preliminary studies and experiments with the MobilED Audio Wiki, we may claim that mobile phones have the potentiality to become more than a “call and messaging” tool. Mobile phone may become a common technology denominator, due to its wide acceptance among people, in addition to their readily available infrastructure. To become a community platform we need technology that makes it easy for people themselves to start-up and install services for their communities. MobilED audio wiki is a step to this direction.