Jukka Mäkelä

Today is the future of yesterday; what is the future of today?

In the educational context, understanding the future is important for two reasons. First, we are educating people for future tasks, which need skills that are useful in the future. Secondly, educators have to be able to select the most promising tools and technologies to apply in their work. The problem is that there is no clear way to weigh the importance of the alternatives - what the real importance of a certain technology will be in the near future and especially in the long term. In our paper, we focus on analyzing selected technologies. Our approach applies the framework developed by the authors. The promising technologies are reviewed by a systematic literature study, focusing on and restricted to the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. The findings are classified according to their importance and the time span of their effectiveness. The question we answer is “What should every educator know about changes in technology?”

Collaboration, distribution and culture - challenges for communication

Work, to an increasing amount, is based on collaboration between different partners; collaboration emphasizes the importance of communication between the collaborating parties. Increasingly, work is also becoming distributed and carried out in different geographical locations; distribution underlines the importance of managing and organizing work. The third important aspect characterizing current work is globalization; this refers to the multicultural characteristics of work and the need to understand the behavioral patterns of different (national) cultures. The paper addresses these three challenges related to the current work context. The approach points out the importance of a deep understanding of the characteristics of work - collaboration, distribution, and cultural diversity. Adaptive learning provides one potential solution to the challenges.

The educators' telescope to the future of technology

We live in a world of accelerating changes, where technology plays an important role as an enabler. Looking ahead means being prepared for these changes. Preparedness may be reactive - reacting to the situation at the moment something happens; proactive - being prepared in advance for a situation that may happen; or preactive - being able in advance to affect something that may happen in the future and how it happens. Forecasting the future helps us to be prepared for new situations. It is based on making predictions that are derived from understanding past and present data. Known data is organized in the form of trends and further extrapolated to cover the future. From the technical point of view, there are a variety of approaches for forecasting: algorithmic, simulation, statistical analysis etc. The methods used may be quantitative (future data is seen as a function of past data) or qualitative (subjective, based on the opinion or judgment of the target group used in the analysis). Technology is an essential part of education, both in supporting effective learning and as a content of teaching itself. As a result, every educator needs skills to analyze the future of relevant technologies. In this paper, we introduce a framework that can be used in analysis of the importance of technological changes in education and as a part of curricula. The approach is based on trend analysis and classification of the relevant technologies to take into account the time span of their effects in society. The question we answer in this paper is “How can an educator analyze the consequences of technological changes in their work?”.

The digitalization push in universities

Digitalization is spreading across our current society and is a major source of the changes - incremental and also radical - encountered in daily life. It changes the content of jobs: some jobs are no longer needed, and new jobs are also needed. Digitalization in universities has several implications - in teaching, research, and in administration. The opportunities provided by digitalization are manifold. In our paper, we separate two digitalization related topic areas - i.e., networking and digitalization itself. Our paper focuses on academic publishing and we will analyze its role in the current academic world. The approach selected emphasizes the role of an individual researcher and, in particular, publishing the results of their work in academic forums. Digitalization provides a wide variety of new forums but also the means to recognize the impact of the forums and affect it. Networking as a phenomenon is also based on digitalization - physical networks and social networking related applications can be beneficial for researchers. Because teaching is the most visible work of universities, the role of digitalization in this sector is also addressed briefly in this paper.

Role of the user in information systems development

We have focused our paper on the aspects important in adapting an Information System (IS) to the users cultural background. We are interested both in the factors related to IS development and in the use of IS. Increasingly, ISs are being developed and used in a global context. We have perceived differences in expectations of functionalities, architecture, structural properties, information search practices, web-based system properties, and user interfaces. One conclusion would be that a high quality IS reflects user behavior in its use context. In that case, the system has to model its user one way or another. Until now, the topic has been handled without meaningful effort to model user behavior. Current publications cover a wide variety of rules on how to take into account cultural differences in the IS context. In this paper, our aim is to study the current state-of-the-art of user modeling — modeling the human being as an IS user. We start with general aspects related to the role of the user in IS development and alternatives to adaptable systems. The findings are applicable in the educational context as well. More and more, the use of computers and ISs is becoming an essential part of studies: the use of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) as a part or replacement for traditional face-to-face classes; flipped learning methodology emphasizing the significance of self-learning; and blended learning, including quite often computerized study content. Our focus is on the global context, in which students represent different cultures and the IS is globally available.

Developing curiosity and multimedia skills with programming experiments

Browsers have become the most common communication channel. We spend hours using them to get news and communicate with friends, far more time than communicating face-to face. WWW-based communication and content-creation for www will be the most common job in future work life for students specializing in software engineering. We expect our screens to be colorful and animated, thus students should understand technologies, which are used for e.g. for painting jumping Mario to screen. But massive flow of new software engineering ideas, technologies and frameworks which appear in all-increasing temp tend to make students passive receivers of descriptions of new menus and commands without giving them any possibility to investigate and understand, what is behind these menus and commands, killing their natural curiosity. There should be time to experiment, compare formats, technologies and investigate their relations. In the presentation are described experiments used for investigating, how different formats for describing animation in HTML5 document influence animation rendering speed.

Researcher measured — Towards a measurement-driven academia

In many countries, higher education is financed mainly through state grants. Traditionally, universities have autonomous status and the right to carry out their self-chosen policy. The autonomy and independence of universities have formed the cornerstone of their existence. In recent years there is a rising interest in monitoring the effectiveness of academic institutions. On the one hand, this interest comes from the external desire to control the efficient use of financing and, on the other hand, from the internal desire of the university administration to direct their scant financing in a productive way. In this model, university funding is seen as an investment to implement both government and university strategies. The significance of free external financing has increased simultaneously, but even this funding is based on heavy competition between institutions. To summarize, a transition towards the entrepreneurship model has also begun in universities. Alongside academic freedom, a culture of the evaluation and measurement of quality has been created; in this process, academic values may be consigned to the background. The paper addresses the changes in universities caused by the measurement directed culture. Digitalization supports this process by providing automated tools for collecting data and using it for measurement. The handling of the topic is partially general, and partially draws on the experiences (context) of the authors. The transition towards openness and networked activities has begun. It remains to be seen what will happen to traditional academic values.

Use of ‘learning analytics’

Because of various reasons: cuts in financing, students massive participation in full-time work, rapidly improving technological possibilities etc. the university education is massively moving online and direct classroom contact of teachers with students is replaced with computer network mediated communication, where features of educational processes should be extracted by analyzing data created in this network-assisted education. In the following are presented some experiences and results from such analyze. Because of rather small samples we did not calculate numerical statistics, results are presented visually - this form of presentation is for humans much more understandable than tables with lot of numbers.

Project- and product-oriented course

The current economic crisis and high unemployment rates especially among younger than 25 years old requires also re-thinking of teaching practices. Universities should produce not only professional skills, but also strong business-oriented mindset. Our graduates should be able to create new innovative products, start new enterprises and be prepared to apply all learned skills in business. This mindset can be developed using project- and product-oriented (PPO) approach in teaching, where whole course is built up as a series of projects; the course assessment is based on individual projects, which should produce a finished product with some (commercial) value. We have successfully used this approach for several years; in the presentation is described a PPO oriented game programming course.

A path towards networked organisations - the push of digital natives or the pull of the needs?

Social networking and media reflects peoples need to be connected, to share, to be members of communities, and to collaborate. It supports social interaction and uses scalable web-based technologies. Although modern social media are new phenomenon, the same physical networks have always operated - only the tools are changed. It is also easy to see that the social communities operate in private life, whereas traditional networking is related to business - the direction of the adoption is undoubtedly from the private life to business. The adoption speed is accelerated by recruiting members of the younger generation to responsible positions in organisations. This paper opens up discussion on the use of social networking. The framework characterising the differences between the generations and the characteristics of modern enterprise are introduced. The purpose is to increase understanding of the changes in information and communication technology (ICT) intensive organisations and in society.