Vision of the Sometu-Future?

[Anne Rongas]

There has been a conversation about Sometu and English speaking Sometu friends.

Andrea Vascellari had a very good comment:

Releasing some English posts might encourage others to jump in and do the same. On the other hand the fact that the UI user interface is in Finnish language still remains a huge roadblock for many foreign people. (Trust me!)

What I think we should look at is the big future picture. A vision. What's going to be Sometu in 2-3-5 years? Or where we want to take it?

Is Nign still going to be here in 5 years? Yes, no, maybe? The important is to keep the Sometu concept alive and make it grow according to that future vision keeping in mind that things WILL change and evolve.

So: What will Sometu be in 2015? How to interact with people who don't speak Finnish?

[Tuomo Turja]

First, this linking of topics and posts between groups that Sanna, Andrea and Anne have done in Sometu is a good step.

I have a vision that in Sometu there will be many innovative and experienced Finnish and foreign participants who start discussions about learning or make comments to them. If we like to keep Sometu fresh and lively there needs to be broader audience and broader group of innovators and commentators than Finnish language offers.

After 6 years there will be translators that make the communication easier between language groups but still some work is needed to get the finest distinctions and difficult ideas or theories understood.

[Mira Pihlaja, Vaasan AMK]

I think that it is a good idea to have (at least part of) the discussions and other materials in english, so this step 'SOMETU in english' and your vision is something I agree.

We could have networks of communities (check this: http://cpsquare.org/), link easier to other similar groups abroad etc (for example these kind of communities: http://community.bccampus.ca/etug or http://www.eunis.org/).

If we are trying to give (through learning processes) students know-how/knowledge how to deal in global/multicultural environment, shouldn't we as well do the same also when creating learning groups/collaborative communities (or shall I call them CoPs) for ourselves (teachers, developers, tutors)?

Kurt's idea (next comment) of EU27 TeamFinder is simply great!

[Kurt Linderoos]

Social media as a part of your "lifelong learning" - what could it be on our common EU level? I think I've had the answer already 10 years. 10 years too early? Your as well as anyone's life is personal, we are the base unit of human life. This and our personal interactivity with the union level will in my mind be the "secret" of our success.
Think about this: If you should have a button bringing around you from each EU country one person whose challenges are most like yours. What could would you do with that team to survive in the tough global competition? Remember that the European union is our common "enlarged home country" and that already 50% of our laws (rights, duties, challenges) come from that level.
My site http://www.personaleu.eu presents this "missing European organi(c)zation level", almost everything of it.
For the next step your role is essential: We need now an EU27 TeamFinder - and your activity is needed to make it come true.

Inspiring Interactivity!
Kurt
http://www.personaleu.eu

[Helge V. Keitel]

Vision Sometu 2015? We're now soon in the middle of 2009. What was social media five years ago? I try make a personal evaluation. I was blogging and did see some possibilities of business and corporate blogs. Web 2.0 was emerging. Google was around. Search. YouTube started 2006, right? Facebook was a neophyte. Twitter 2006 or 2007? Ning came along 2007. Jaiku started at the time of Twitter, but is declining. Pownce is dead. Mashups are still great things. Wikipedia happened. Wiki was a great promise for the Enterprise 2.0 and all virtual collaborators. Mobile computing has advanced. Most important is the bandwidth evolution. We can do much more with rich content NOW and even more in the future.

Mobility will change the way we work. I guess more people will join the crowd-gathering platforms like Facebook. Ning-platforms will be used by tiny undergrounds and sub-cultures. We continue to write, but probably much more on the run. I fancy that pod- and webcasts [narrowcasting and on-demand] will get a new meaning with more powerful mobile handsets. I hope that Nokia comes out with a minilaptop before Apple. I guess that Apple will do it in January. Steven Jobs will make his last big presentation and retire as a rich - and hopefully - healthy man.

Computing everywhere is still an emerging thing. Cloud computing sounds interesting but requires infrastructure investments from Internet Operators and Enterprises.

What is SOMETU = sosiaalinen media oppimisen tukena. Computers and Internet will change but the human being will be the same. Four years more experience means that we've to forget a number of old stuff and learn new ways to collaborate.

I'd like to say that social computing and open innovation will finally change the way command control corporations work. The economical crisis will help to transfer the companies. Hopefully, we'll survive one or several pandemias, because there isn't yet a second life for humans; maybe for cats.

Second Life. Why didn't that become a big thing faster. I guess, we need faster computers and networks.

Games might be important in learning as well. The new generation will bring their cultures to SOMETUs. We continue to believe that Rock and Roll is the final invention in music and entertainment. Or Motown. Or Gospel. Or in Finnish Humppa an Tango.

I wrote lots about gadgets, but to survive, the social media concept has to bring people from simple tweeting and qaikuing to something that creates value. We've to adapt all this chatting and jaikuing to something that brings bread to the table.

I see a lot of geeks, web2.0 people, educators and socially active people here NOW, but would like to see:

- farmers
- truck drivers
- taxi drivers
- hair dressers
- store owners
- small manufacturers
- fishers
- arts and crafts people
- seniors
- the not-so-smart kids

This is still a kind of elite-sub-culture. The average man and woman don't care a damn about what we are talking and writing. Okay, there is also Suomi24 Keskustelee. Social media is fun. I've learned to know a lot of interesting people from all over the world. But, do I really know them? Are we still in a superficial "hello, hello, how are you doing?" mode. We socialize but are not so good at building real and lasting relationships.

The first years of social media represent "the spring" of collaborative activities. Think about what happened to email. The same can happen to Social Media platforms. These platforms can be taken over by spammers, criminals, crooks and porn-distributors. The first signs are already emerging. Maybe, we shouldn't be naive either. The good-bad-and-ugly scenarios have to be considered.

Are these meeting places a compensation for not going to church or taking part in political activities? Are we achieving anything? Is it important to be productive?

These things came to my mind...

Hauskaa Vappua!

Helge

[Tuomo Turja]

Social media is becoming more and more a way for average people to be awake. big changes and crisis are surrounding us and many people seek ways to get more information faster and more straight than ever before. What do we get? More information for our decisions for people more alarmed...

[Mervi Jansson]

I'm in adult education with students mostly from the Finnish corporate world and agree with Helge, that the majority of people and occupations are by and large still missing from the social media scene. Even a lot of corporate people e.g. sales, HR, marketing may have a profile in Linkedin or Facebook, but that's about the size of it.

The same situation applies to the education sector. Most of my colleagues have this blank look on their face when I talk about social media applications. Some have even commented that they hope to retire before having to learn about this new world.

As I see it, the sometu founders were the innovators and now the early adaptors have come on board. Some of the early majority is experimenting but most of the early and late majority let alone the laggards are far behind. However, the change of course is inevitable.

Whether sometu will be a ning-based group in 2015, I doubt it. New, better, faster, easier, more convenient, constently available platforms and applications are yet to come. I think virtual worlds hold a lot of promise, but the user friendliness still has a long way to go. Naturally with more developed computers/mobile applications and faster connections it will be a different ball game.

I think the most important thing about sometu is the social aspect and that I don't believe will ever become obsolete. We need to hear from the innovators who are kind enough to share their thoughts and experiences and then build on that information to spread the good practices to make them best practices. As the world of social media is vast and expanding 24/7 nobody can take advantage of what's out there and being developed alone. RSS and equivalents won't do the job alone. It's the collaboration and dialog that make the difference.

Regarding the language factor, surely we don't want this to become a barrier to entry. However, as sometu expands the number of people not so comfortable or fluent with the English language also grows. Perhaps those of us willing and fluent in both languages could do something bilingual. Anne, let's take this up in the Kotka meeting 13 May especially if Ville's English speaking friend will join us.

[Anne Rongas]

Mervi, Sometu in English will be one issue in 13.5. Kotka meeting.

[Ilpo Halonen]

Engine translations from one language to another are not so good, because even a single lexem has a complex substructure that causes ambiguity, not to speak about sentences, which are even more complex. Anyway, translator engines will pretty soon reach a certain level that is communicative enough.
For example, I have used Google translation from German into English in my blog http://daf.eduprojects.net/blog , and even if there seems to be no grammar left in the translation I think English readers can possibly understand the most of the German text translated by the Google engine.
BTW, I have the feeling that we have to say goodbye to teaching grammar in foreign languages soon.
Another obvious trend in the Internet is to use spoken language instead of writing. Everything that was written and digitalized can be turned into speech using Text-to-Speech web applications. There are lots of them available, both open source and commercial.
The interest in the use of spoken language has grown rapidly in the Internet. The share of speech and video will still grow. It is for a teacher of languages like me one of the most predictable and expected processes of the Internet for the time being.
I started the Tuesday Round of teachers of German in May 2006, together with Austrian colleagues. There will be our 3th birthday party on 19th May 2009 in http://lion.web2.0campus.net/2006/online-raum-daf-community. We will organize separated rooms for visitors who may not speak German. Let me know here if you are interested.

[Ronald Wertlen]

Allow me to apologise in advance as this post tends to stray around the topic a bit.

I don't speak any Finnish, although I have been exposed to Estonian for a couple of weeks. Anyhow, I managed to sign in with a little help from translate.google.com. So I agree, where precise semantics are not required, it's fine to simply try your best and to get in touch.

Europe is also having a major influence on the way English is used (bending rules, etc.).

I am not 100% certain about the goals and mission of Sometu, but 2 things interest me about this discussion in particular:

1. we are working on a social networking software - awareNet - specifically for schools, and for crossing the digital divide - the kind of schools we have here in South Africa where bandwidth is very expensive. So our service can be directly installed on a computer at the school (or what we are finding often networks of schools with cheap WiFi connections sharing resources like servers etc.) and used a lot there. Contact to the rest of the world can take place instantly for text-chat and there are ways to optimise synchronising larger submissions.

2. We are working increasingly with Finnish partners because of the Finnish support for the Living Lab we are working in, in an impoverished rural area. So they are very interested in moving things toward Finland and I may be in Helsinki in July/August (I know bad time for meetings - good time for most other things!). I wonder if there is any interest in our efforts here - would anyone like to meet? I am going to try to organise something through the Suomen eOppimiskeskus...

Also maybe interesting for the German teacher - we are working most intensively with German-speaking partners. 20 students at the Free University in Berlin are busy working on software extensions to awareNet. It's free open source, so there are no restrictions.

Maybe we can help or be part of the Sometu of the future?

[Tarmo Toikkanen]

Hi Ronald. Our research group collaborated with schools in South Africa a couple of years ago on a mobile (informal) learning project, building a configurable open source mobile service platform. So I'm interested in seeing what you guys are up to, and how that might affect us here in Finland.

[Ronald Wertlen]

Hi Tarmo, That project is still alive and well - MobilEd - they ported it to Java and are continuing looking at using the same ideas as those you guys developed for other application areas. I think they have new funding. It seems to be quite relevant to HIV/AIDS counselling.

We are in the Eastern Cape, 1000km away from the MobilEd team. We are working on more rural applications and services. There is another group using MXit technology similar to MobilEd at the university of Western Cape and they are interested in deploying a trial near here.

Anyhow, I think that the conditions are quite different to Finland, where the government is behind cheap communications infrastructure - am I right?

Also I read an article on Somali Pirates using satellite phones to stay in touch with their contacts in Yemen and London, in the Guardian Weekly. I had to think of our situation and the fact that connectedness can also be misused, and I guess that is something that may affect Finland, and any place. I suppose the point is to make the connectedness broadly accessible and also to focus on education - something you can't lecture a Finn about.

[Tuomo Turja]

Social networking with restricted internet connections is at least interesting experience to be analyzed. Even when the mission is to get nearly unlimited amount of information to www without delays, social media gets stronger by learning of difficulties with connection.