Mindtrek Day 3

We started today the program with  a presentation of Latif Ladid, a man with a clear vision about  the future of the internet. The message is: the internet must be changed. Nowadays a quarter of the world population is/can go to the internet and that’s not enough. Everyone must have the possibility to use the internet in a save and payable way.  That’s why there’s a need for new infrastructure ( IP v6 instead of IP v4).

Again there were different tracks of the program: Social moving pictures, Social machines and War stories.
Social machines: the most interesting story, by prof. Hideki Kozima, was about experiments with social machines as a catalyser in the social interactions of autistic young children.
He showed in video’s how the child reacted over a longer period to the so called “keepon” and shared his feelings with the mother/ teacher.

War stories: in a session of Tina Aspiala some useful advises were given for how to keep your clients when they reach your website. Very handy for starting entrepreneurs who are developing there website.


The last keynote speaker of the Mindtrek conference was a very critical woman: Joan Jacobsen, social media expert consultant, who gave the IT-audition a “wake-up call”.
A lot of business are losing their trust in IT nowadays. A lot of applications she found completely useless (for example Second life).
IT applications don’t solve problems, but create problems for the user.And also IT sells their opportunities in a wrong way. She showed several bad examples of advertising and presenting.” Stop talking HOW things works, but tell what they can do for the user ,the business”.  For more information:

http://joannejacobs.net/

Time flies and also this week in Finland. We heard different developments in the field of media on the conference and visited schools in Tampere. We also met people from other schools in the Netherlands who invited us to visit them.
We think we are going in the right direction with the Noorderpoort School of Arts but there is still work to do. What we saw in  Tampere college and university can inspire us.



http://www.kolumbus.fi/outi.aho/outiaho_cryingrobots.html
http://www.myu.ac.jp/~xkozima/index-eng.html
http://eat.fi/
http://www.joannejacobs.net/

Mindtrek Day 2

The morning was filled with two major presentation for all those present:

• Cloud Computing
• The dilemmas of public national broadcasting (radio, TV, internet)
  

In the afternoon there were various workshops and you could also opt for a big game / ICT trade fair.


The lecture on Cloud Computing was done by a Canadian in such a way that we all seemed excited and could understand why people can get from Cloud Computing (CC). He explained that you can look at three levels:


SaaS = Software as a Service
PaaS = Platform as a Service
IaaS = Interface as a Service

He showed the benefits of CC (cost, boring work falls away, you always have access to your software and data) and the risk. With his great way of telling the story he made us very enthusiast. Perhaps because at this moment people aims to: share, collaborations,  openness and trust,  more accent on software than on hardware and to solve problems together.
ICT professionals seem fun enthusiastic people with such passion for their profession, which really surprised us. They are always busy making life for the people easier and more pleasant or better, they don’t do it for themselves, but always look for others: what brings the world a bit further, what makes the world a little better? As Philips had a motto: Let `s make things better," they have the motto: `let` s make the world better".

We had the same feeling during the presentation about public TV / radio / internet broadcaster. The public broadcaster feels responsible for the promotion of values such as equality, religious freedom, democracy and unity. They search for a way to find or create matching program describing this values described above. Maybe in the Netherlands our broadcasters have also such values but you don’t notice it.

Finland is the only European country that is entirely independent of politics or advertising programs for public broadcasts. In Finland only 30% of Finnish households have a PC with Internet. One must therefore take this into account when creating programs to reach every audience. To make good programming is difficult because the differences are large.

In the afternoon the groups fell apart. The colleagues who went to the ICT fair saw the newest yet to be released games and electronics. E.g. the Samsung Galaxy TAB (an android based tablet ), we already hold and tried it out. The tablet will be available at the end of the month. We also had exclusive access to a fantastic party with three bands, delicious food and free drinks that night,  in a country where a glass of wine cost 8.40  and a beer 6.80!

Others followed workshops in various fields:

• Android Ecosystem: Hype and Reality
• Opportunities with Symbian
• The evolution of the iOS story

In the evening they where invited by the mayor (a voluntary, unpaid work in Finland!) at the City Hall followed by a Mindtrek Award Party with drinks and foods at café Bricks.

http://www.mindtrek.org/2010/
http://www.platformd.com/
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/

Mindtrek Conference

Wednesday: The first day of the conference. Our group fell apart because they choose for various seminars. An impression:

• For Cloud Computing was of course the question: who are already using cloud computing? Whose business is about to start it? Why / why not, what pros and cons have a role in the decision? What about security? Trust? Which responsibility?
• Others went to Social Media, to Interactive TV, The Aesthetics of Game Play, Community Learning, Open Source, nabling Emergent behavior in Location Based Games, The Implicit Rules  of Board Games, etc.etc.

 Most presentations were very interesting to follow.

Two more days tot go! To be continued…… 

http://www.mindtrek.org/2010/

The HUB

This morning we started early with a visit at the Nokia headquarters. There was a power point presentation about how Nokia works together with a lot of universities en invites students to participate in problem solving. Nokia offers professional guidance for the groups and facilities them with hardware.

Afterward students told the same, full enthusiasm, about that projects. They even earned a lot of credits and money with their project. But the most important was however that they learned a lot in those cooperation projects. 

We also visited Tampere College a printing and publishing school. The school facilities was excellent compared with Dutch schools for vocational education. There we had tour of the school and a presentation of the Finnish education. See scheme below.

Today was the most exciting part the HUB. A HUB, Amsterdam and Utrecht also have hubs,  are groups of entrepreneurs who unite themselves into a hub to share knowledge, exchange ideas and inspire each other. An enthusiastic, youthful director explained to us the benefit of HUB `s informal groups of entrepreneurs: setting up a workspace and hire each other quickly, find your question, contribute and share with others.

It was again obvious that there is great emphasis on collaboration with companies and other schools at home and abroad. 

What we saw was:

• Entrepreneurship is pushed and integrated  into the school curricula by doing jobs for companies in order to seek for solutions for companies and business problems.
• New ideas from outside come in through meetings, breakfasts, seminars, networking meetings.

It is an attitude which Noorderpoort students and teachers should pay more attention to. The argument was quite practical: you need other people and organisations to solve the problems and big questions of the community and the companies. You are at school to learn to make the world a bit better. 

http://research.nokia.com/locations/tampere

http://www.demola.fi

http://www.luovatampere.fi/eng

http://hubtampere.wordpress.com/in-english/

The electrician

Visit to School for Vocational Education, dep. AV, the ProAcademy and the University of Applied Sciences (TAMK).

The most impressive item today was a film made by students of Tampere in cooperation with an English College. It was funny, serious, professional and relevant. It was about an electrician that was looking for an another job.  He had worked in prison and was specialised in maintenance of the electric chair. The lady of the employment office was shocked:”Oh that kind of electricity!” 

We also visited the Pro-academy in Finnlayson Area, a terrain with old factories that were transformed to schools. Here a student told us in perfect English how they 'learn by doing'. All hard working students, that went through a strong selection, worked in a kind of mini-enterprises and projects in order of companies. They set their own targets for earning money and credits.

At TAMK a student told of us how she had taken the initiative to establish a gamelab (SCORE).A club for and by students.The school had a room and four pc’s available, and soon it became a room with a sofa, comfortable chairs and a coffee maker. The club consists of gamers and game developers. The teachers are not involved in the club and was also not necessary. It was a Win - Win situation, the teachers learned from the students and at the other hand the students learned from the teachers.  Most of the students follow the developments, market and trend of games closely and are better informed than the teachers.

At the end of the day we got a tour of the school. Check the photo’s below.

http://www.tao.tampere.fi/tao/TAOWWWTAO/briefly_in_english.html

http://www.proakademia.fi/en/

http://tamk-artmedia.blogspot

http://score.igda.fi