BPN 1629: EVA continues

The European Virtual Academy (EVA) is running spring semester. The original European Virtual Academy (EVA) project funded by EU is over but the project goes on with three courses this spring. For next year the partners prepare a new bid to extend EVA to other fields of education and bring it on the next level. There are many European universities considering to join EVA.

 

 

 

 

Poster by Emilia Kwiatkowska, EVA-logo by

Alexandra Ostasheva. Both TAMK Media
Programme students

 

The courses of EVA spring semester are:

Image Interpretation

Babeş-Bolyai University (Romania)

This course is dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of images. Visual interpretations will be performed and the focus of the course is to develop examining skills for any type of images available in the visual culture (from classical paintings to digitally processed images).

Social Media in Communication and Community Building

Tampere University of Applied Sciences (Finland)
After completing the course the student knows how to use social networking, blog publishing, micro blogging services to broadcast and to communicate with targeted audiences. (S)he is also able to establish and moderate online discussion groups and wikis for knowledge and community building.

Interactive Movies

Hochschule Mittweida - University of Applied Sciences (Germany)

The course introduces students to the concept of interactive storytelling and digital narratives. For the purpose of this course the term “interactive movie” will refer to animated, filmed, video game-based and any other kind of movies following a main story but enabling user interaction. Interactive movies implement interactive dramaturgies and typically use technologies to allow users to influence the storylines.

All courses give 5 credits and run until end of May. The courses are open for students of member universities.

 

Announcement copied from http://tamk-artmedia.blogspot.nl/

 

Eva is an initiative of partners who met in the Academic Network Conferences organised by the European Academy of Digital Media (EADiM). EADiM is proud of EVA and congratulates the consortium with the continuation.

 

BPN 1440 Finland trip 2010 (7)

On Friday night a farewell dinner was organised by Media Update. We sat around a fine dinner and looked back over the week. The organisers of the trip, Hans and Jak, were thanked and received Groninger gingerbread as a present. They had brought together a group of interesting Dutch multimedia lecturers. They all are working in multimedia education and come from Groningen (Noorderpoort College and Hanze Hogeschool), Utrecht (Hogeschool Utrecht, CMD) Amsterdam (Hogeschool Amsterdam, Interactive Media) and Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam. They also mixed with one another. And they also played jokes on one another like the guy offering to get coats for his colleagues from their hotel rooms as he was going upstairs. The next day the colleagues found out that their suits had been exchanged.

The weather was also beautiful for the whole week. For the lucky ones in the hotel who had a room with a view, they looked over the lake and part of the wood and had a view in the morning like the photograph. The hotel is built against a rock which is overgrown with trees, who were already showing their autumn colours. It was also remarkable that this solicited a lot of walks in the woods by the participants before and after the program. But they also walked to the city to shop for beautiful, but expensive Finnish goods, such as a winter coat and lady’s bags (no photographs shown!).

Interesting was the behaviour of some of the young lecturers. They were the whole day busy with their mobiles picking up messages and writing tweets. I had expected to see many iPads like I saw last time in New York, where every other youngster of the WSYA event had such a tablet. But sometimes the lecturers were in a meditative mood.

The program consisted of three parts: two days visits to educational institutes, one day academic lectures and a two conference. An evaluation will have to tell what the general feelings were about these three parts of the trip. But the delegates were also enterprising as they went amongst others to a presentation of Electronic Arts at the other side of town. There they were informed about all the new stuff in games and especially about the Wii and the micro strokes. And one of the lecturers got completely excited by the Galaxy tablet by Samsung. He said: Forget the iPad. The only real drawback was the price of 900+ euro in Finland and 750+ euro in The Netherlands. Some lecturers also went out to visit other schools outside Tampere such as in Turku for contact, students and lecturers exchange.

The social agenda wasnot filled but a number of parties were attended. On Wednesday night the Cloud Computing people had drinks together. On Thursday there was a reception at the Old Town hall in the center of Tampere. It is a beautiful old building with a great chandelier in the reception hall. Some of the lecturers extended the invitation of the Electronic Arts people and had a good time at their party.

On Saturday morning most of the group flew back to Holland. Some stayed behind in order to visit Helsinki or have talks with Finnish colleagues. Some went early to Helsinki to look around or do some shopping. Once back in Holland the Amsterdam people were home soon, but the Groninger people had still a long way to go by train.

Links:

http://twitter.com/MindTrek
http://www.mindtrek.org/
http://tamk-artmedia.blogspot.com/
http://npsvk.blogspot.com/


BPN 1440

BPN 1439 Finland trip 2010 (6)

The second day of Mindtrek started with a view of the future. Latif Latid, the president of the IPv6 Forum, spoke in the plenary on the need to change the IP address from version 4 to version 6. He urged the Fins in the audience to press the politician to have IPv6 introduced.
His presentation was larded with historical details. IPv4 originated in 1983 and resulted in 1992 in The Web. In the meantime, from 1986-1995, the US Government and the US military pursued the OSI telecom standard. It was in 1992 that the US Congress approved the use of NSFNET (National Science Foundation) for commercial traffic. In 1993 the US Government moved to IPv6.
His conclusion is that Internet is loosing its original design and needs to change over to IPv6 fast. IPv4 is good to connect a quarter of the world to internet. Google scans only 17 percent of the present Internet. IPv6 can do the whole internet. IPv6 can connect the whole world. Besides, more than 50 billion of devices will be connected to the internet in the next 10 years.

After the plenary a choice could be made out of four tracks: social moving pictures; social machines; war stories and a workshop on designing social network games with soPlay heuristics. I chose for the social moving pictures. Tommi Pelkonen of Frantic Media in Helsinki has been in interactive marketing for years and has worked in The Netherlands and Hungary. He introduced the subject and the speakers. It is all about story telling. It is the oldest media format, while video is fairly new.

Tommi introduced Christian Fonnesbech an interactive media producer from Denmark. He has been in this trade since 10 years and has made interactive, cross-media productions for banks and other companies. I met him some 10 years ago when he had just left the movie industry for the interactive industry. Now he is creating big production. As promo for Mindtrek he wrote:

"Facebook is wonderful on a good day. Most of the time, however, the experience is like inviting your friends over to watch TV and discovering that there is nothing on. You sit around, trying to start conversations, chitchatting about the weather and making jokes.
But what if this is just the beginning? What if the Internet is destined to become a dramatic, narrative medium – just like other media? Books, Films, TV, and Console Games have all become storytelling media.
My presentation will show some of the cases and methods that have led us to the development of our online, storytelling format, including our global breakthrough from 2009, The Climate Mystery."

Christian Fonnesbech is a new kind of director. In over 30 different online projects, he has explored the Internet’s potential as a storytelling medium. Through various combinations of dramatic fiction and games, social networks, search, e-mails, mobile phones, webisodes, websites, teaching materials and more, Christian has gained unique insights into how to engage online audiences emotionally and interactively. He has worked with many different audiences, purposes and media formats. The Climate Mystery (2009) was a global breakthrough, developed in collaboration with partners such as Microsof and Discovery Channel.
Christian is Creative Director at the newly started The Quantum Room (TQR), a Copenhagen-based digital content studio, which has just become the first team in Denmark to receive Film financing for online fiction. Christian is a master of Film and Media Science. He has worked as a consultant for the Danish EU chairmanship, for a variety of film and TV companies, as well as for the MEDIA and IST programmes.

After the presentation of Christan Fonnesbech, Korash Sanjideh, managing director of chew tv network, took the floor and presented TELL US TV, connecting the UK's young people through social movie making.

In summer of 2010, The Chew TV Network was commissioned by the UK’s leading youth development agency, Creativity Culture in Education, to develop a nationwide social moviemaking experience that would see thousands of young people from all over the county be given the chance to let the UK government know what they thought about Culture and how it affected them.
The TELL US project is based on the premise that exposure to the arts and culture can transform the aspirations, attainment, skills and life chances of young people and over the course of 3 months, Chew TV developed a unique approach to capture the imaginations of thousands of young people through in a fun and exciting way.
From the development of the core brand messaging to the production of positioning movies to be used on the national tour, The Chew TV Network involved young people in every step of the production process to ensure that the content remained current and connected with young people on a level they understand and enjoy.

Links:
http://twitter.com/MindTrek
http://www.mindtrek.org/
http://tamk-artmedia.blogspot.com/
http://npsvk.blogspot.com/

BPN 1439

BPN 1438 Finland trip 2010 (5)

It is Thursday and the conference Mindtrek starts. It is the largest multimedia conference in Finland and draws a lot of people. Looking into the halls I estimate that there are some 450 visitors. The conference starts with two plenary sessions, followed by four tracks. The conference day will be closed with another plenary session. In the evening there is a social program with a reception at the old town hall, followed by the Mindtrek party and the awards ceremony.

The first plenary sessions dealt with cloud computing and Yle, the Finnish broadcast company. The cloud computing presentation was a good presentation. At the end of the presentation I understood the breadth and the with of cloud computing and the potential effect. I understood that Amazon is the example of cloud computing. Around Christmas time they have to scale up in order to process all the orders; so they buy capacity and not servers. Dave Nielsen of Cloud Camp had a nice oneliner saying that data are like oil now. And he predicted that healthcare was a typical area for cloud computing.

The second plenary was an interesting subject, be it presented too slowly by Lauri Kivinen, the CEO of Yle. He started presenting the basic stats of Yle. It is a broadcasting company, which started in 1926, now serving 5.5 million Fins with 4 TV channels, 6 radio channels and the Yle.fi portal, but also with events, mobile and big screens. The company now also has on demand television and radio, but this is not very popular yet. Presently the company is restructuring itself and aiming at cross-media programs. On November 1 it launches a children’s series, using all the media available. Around that same time the company will launch a series with ten instalments on Rock ‘n Roll, presenting it on TV and radio and drawing heavily on archives. The objectives for the coming months are:
- few services, but richer content;
- network journalism;
- ubiquity;
- unlimited mobility;
- services for young adults are growing fast.
New to the broadcast business is the top of the broadcast pyramid. On the bottem are the direct broadcasts, in the middle the on demand programs and on top the social media with which the audience can share, link, mesh and participate.

The tracks were concerned with: new mobile ecosystem; cloud computing; Mindtrek launchpad and more academic sessions. I joined the new mobile ecosystem. Not that I could do much with the information, but you can hear what the companies are going to do next month. In the presentations the systems Android by Google, Symbian 1.3. by Nokia and the iOS by Apple. Google gives Android away for free in order to grab the market. Google gets 30,5 pct of the mobile world. As far as the future, the bet is on Symbian and Anadroid. The iPhone, also called Jezus’ phone, has less of than a Nokia. Real potential will have the Bada operating system. Remarkable was the presentation of Tomi Ahonen, an excentrix Fin, who proves that less iPOD has been sold. He states that Apple works with perception of market share rather than the actual figures.

In the evening there was the traditional reception in the monumental town hall in the center of Tampere. In the reception room there is a beautiful chandelier. After a speech the glasses were filled and finger food served. After the reception we negotiated the corner to the right and got to the disco Brix. There was the Mindtrek party: music, drinks and dancing till late in the night. There was also a reward ceremony of several contest. I was asked to be the representative for the World Summit Award Finland 2010 and the World Summit Award Mobile Media Finland 2010 and hand the certificates to the winners.

Links:
http://twitter.com/MindTrek
http://www.mindtrek.org/
http://tamk-artmedia.blogspot.com/
http://npsvk.blogspot.com/

BPN 1438

BPN 1437 Finland trip 2010 (4)

, TAMKToday we do not have to rise so early as the Pre-Mindtrek activities start in the hotel. So no hastening in order to catch the Telitaksi. We can slowly take breakfast and go to pick up the Mindtrek badge.

The Pre-Mindtrek activities consist of two major tracks: Academic and Cloud Computing. The Cloud Computing stream is a full day session. The Academic track has five major streams: gaming, social media, open source, ambient media and user experience. I have chosen for social media. I would almost say of course, as we are in the country were social media was embodied first. Finland was in my book the first country to develop social media with the Habba-hotel, a social media site for kids. In 1999 it received a Europrix award and has had lots of success with licensing the concept.

The Academic sessions were really academic sessions: some presentations were very obligatory and just an excuse to come to Finland, but I also heard some interesting stuff. Early in the morning I was confronted with social media and public transport. Not exactly a line of research I would have thought about. Yet one of the first slides I remembered. It was about a metro exit where the staircase had been decorated with the keyboard of a piano. When piano music was played more people took the staircase than the escalators. But when I saw it first I did not see this as an exercise in social media. Now the researcher demonstrates with examples that public transport can do with an experience by using screens and mobile applications. It looks promising, but I guess that first many transport systems, like the Dutch smart card system, will have to be made more efficient before people experience public transport as a joy.

This presentation was followed by a presentation with a high igNobel Award level. The subject was users as sensors. It was a filmed presentation as the researchers were now based in Stanford temporarily. The long paper has as subject creating shared experiences in co-creational spaces by collective heart rate. That was really a mouthful for an experiment whereby members of the audience of an ice hockey event all received a device with which the heartbeat could be collected and totalled. Conclusion: whenever a goal is in the making the collective heart beat rate goes up. Of course.

In the afternoon I sat in on a session named In the face (book) of daily routine. Greek researchers had studied the use of Facebook by 60 students. Their conclusion: the students only use Facebook as a waste of their time. They want to be busy with Facebook, for then they do not have to be busy with something else. I have my doubts about this research. First of all the group is very onesided, only students. But I think that this group is online and using Facebook just in order to present themselves to peers and claim a place in the community. As such it is not a waste of time. Secondly the choice of a single group like students does not deliver interesting results. No attention was paid to Facebook and business. The researchers thought that LinkedIn was more apt for that. That is not my experience. LinkedIn is too restrictive with its premium messaging and putting up events. More can be done with Facebook. I hope that the Greek researchers can do another research project on Facebook.

Links

http://twitter.com/MindTrek
http://www.mindtrek.org/
http://npsvk.blogspot.com/

BPN 1437.

BPN 1436 Finland trip 2010 (3)

The second day of the Finland trip was a heavy one. We will move to Hervanta, a new town with a smart industry such as Nokia Lab, just half an hour outside Tampere. We went there with two small coaches.
9:00 – 10:00 Nokia Research Centre/Nokia Innovation Centre
http://research.nokia.com/locations/tampere
The session at Nokia Innovation Centre concentrated on the way the company works on innovation. Political issues like the future of the mobile operating system Symbian and the new CEO are friendly avoided.
Nokia started research in electronics in 1977 and presented its first computers in 1992 with Mikko and Mikromikko. In 1991 the first digital GSM was launched. In 1992 the first portable phone Mobra Cityman was launched. Since 2007 Nokia looks at innovation as managing complexity. Since then research concentrated on four areas:
- Sensing & Data Intelligence;
- New User Interfaces;
- High performance mobileplatforms;
- Cognitive Radio.
In these areas research should deliver breakthroughs, cutting edge technologies and provide alternatives in unchartered territories such as 3D or mixed reality.
In order to reach innovation by co-creation. Nokia works together with universities in joint projects. It also receives public funding from the innovation agency Tekes and the European Union. In Tampere Nokia has a contract with local universities (TUT, UTA and TAMK). In this framework there are 16 professors involved and some 50 PhD researchers. Nokia offers collaborative meetings, discusses topics and uses the open call for proposals and grants. The lifecycle should have 5P’s as results:
- Publications
- Patent
- Publicity
- Prototypes
- Products

10:30 – 11:30 Tampere College, Hervanta: Qualification in Publishing and Printing (Hervanta)
- Study Programme in Layout Design
- Study Programme in Printing Technology
This department of Tampere College teaches students printing and lay-out design. It was for me like going back in time. Printing machines and even lead fonts! It was an ink sniffing occassion. In the same building the students have digital design using high tech computers; of course Apple, the symbol of the typographic community.

11:30-13:00 Lunch at Tampere College (in Finland lunched is served early). For the afternoon program we got into the small buses to go back to Finlayson in the center of Tampere.

14:00 New Factory: The collaborative innovation engine room
http://www.demola.fi/
In Finlayson we went to Demola, the demo factory. Here students design solutions for products and services on request of companies. Presently it has delivered 30 products. The time from idetion till evaluation and follow-up lasts 3-8 months. This year a summercamp was held in which 9 problems were posed to teams to be solved. One product was a game, the Super Awesome Fighters, created with tools from Nokia. The licenses to the game stay with the originator and will deliver some money.

14:30 University of Tampere Department of Information Studies and Interactive Media (at Demola)
http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/infim/english/index.html
This year Tampere has a new university institute, named INFIM. It is a merger of Hypermedia Lab, the baby of Jarmo Vittelli from 1998, and the Department of Information Studies. It now has 70 employees and 6 professors. The new institute teaches Information Studies and Interactive studies.

15:00 Creative Tampere and HUB Tampere
http://www.luovatampere.fi/eng
http://hubtampere.wordpress.com/in-english/

Tampere has been an active municipality in the digital world. It has had a program e-Tampere, I guess since 1998 or perhaps even earlier. Now the program is named Creative Tampere. It is oriented towards attracting creative industry. The municipality puts 7,4 million euro in the program. Support from Tampere institutions and companies should bring the total to 40 million euro, while the total revenue out of this effort should be 100 million euro. One of the activities supported by Creative Tampere is the HUB. This is a community which wants to be the center of social innovation. The HUB has 2 to 3 events a week such as salad events, speeddating by companies and dinners. The visit to the HUB started with changing shoes for houseshoes, sold by one of the HUB members.

Late in the evening a group of Dutch delegates went for dinner and climbed over the rocky hill, against which Scandic Hotel Rosendahl has been built. It was a good choice of restaurant.

Links:

http://twitter.com/MindTrek
http://www.mindtrek.org/
http://npsvk.blogspot.com/

BPN 1436

BPN 1435 Finland trip 2010 (2)

The Media Update delegation started the first leg of the program on Monday morning. First visit on the program:
9:00 – 10:00 Tampere College, Pyynikki, vocational Qualification in Audiovisual Communication
- Study Programme in Audiovisual Communication.
http://www.tao.tampere.fi/tao/TAOWWWTAO/briefly_in_english.html

This vocational college train boys and girls for the audio-visual industry. The training lasts 3 years and has 20 students in every year, in total 60 students. They follow 32 lessons a week and have 8 hours of homework. A normal college day lasts from 8 till 4 o’clock. The gender balance is 50/50 per cent. The students becomes mostly all round AV assistants.The college exists 14 years and has produced amongst others in 2005 the World Skills games in Helsinki.
We noted, that the college was well equiped with AV material and has a strict selection procedure. The initial applications of 80 candidates has to wittled down to 20. The diploma’s are checked, there are tests bringing the number down to 40 and by new tests and an admission interview the 20 students are selected.

10:30 – 12:00 Proacademy and Voimala, Finlayson
http://www.proakatemia.fi/en; http://www.voimalaan.fi/

The visit to the Proacademy was fascinating. I have been at the Proacademy in 2007 when it still cohabitated with the TAMK School of Arts, Media and Music. Now the Proacademy has a floor of its own in a factory building in Finlayson. The Proacademinas study for a BBA degree in entrepreneurship. The story about its origin sounds biblical:
“The story of the Proacademians began over ten years ago. Some restless nomads in tampere had a nose for business but there didn’t seem to be any place where they could test their ideas in practice. They sent scouts around in Finland to look for new radical solutions. Many scouts returned without nothing. However, one scout returned from a little town called Jyvaskyla telling stories about a tribe that learned via action and dialogue. These Teamacademicians had an elder with vision of taking the tribe around the world and learning in the process. The scout’s stories inspired two elders in tampere to change their ways of teaching the young and Proacademian tribe was born.”
One of the students presented the working of the Postacademy. At the Proacademy university students work 2,5 years in a team and learns business and marketing. They are evaluated ny their fellow team members and by coaches. All the teams aim at getting a turnover; but the Proacademy is not money oriented.

12:00h Lunch in Ziberia

13:00 – 15:00 Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK), School of Art Media and Music
http://www.tamk.fi/en;%20http://tamk-artmedia.blogspot.com

After lunch we went to the Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK), School of Art Media and Music (new name). This is the school of our guides Sohvi and Cai. Funny enough they did not take the floor to tell about the school itself. But they had a student present a students initiative: Score. It is a community of students interested in game development and gamers. The community is student oriented; teachers cooperate.Score started three years ago with 20 members and has today 80 members. They arrange lectures, workshops and trips. TAMK offers space and resources such as licenses for game projects. So far they have developed their own games such as Overboard, Number game, Poltergeist and Overtower. Some rights have been sold amongst others to Microsoft. Since the summer 2010 the community organized itself into a co-operative with 20 members.
Sohvi showed also one of their famous movies: The Electrician (http://www.electrician.fi/). This is a surrealistic movies about an electrician, who loses his job as the electrician of the electric chair.
A guided tour through the building from the ground to the fifth floor drew quite some oh's and ah's about the equipment and the space available.

Links

http://twitter.com/MindTrek
http://www.mindtrek.org/
http://npsvk.blogspot.com/

BPN 1435

BPN 1434 Finland trip 2010 (1)

Today we are off with a group of 16 people in total, people working in education. My business mate Hans Sleurink of Media Update and I have organised this trip with the help of Cai Melakoski, the international contact person of the Tampere University of Applied Science school of Art, Media and Music. We will stay in Tampere for a week.

The flight to Tampere did not go without problems. Hans had problems to reach Schiphol Airport in time as the Dutch railways had an electricity problem. He barely could drop off his luggage in time. One of the delegates had problems with his passport and had to take a later flight. Having arrived in Tampere the luggage of Hans had not come with our flight. So a form had to be filled out. Later that night, though, the luggage was delivered to the hotel by Finnair Airlines.

We booked rooms in the Scandic Hotel Rosendahl, a conference hotel in the middle of the woods and on the border of a big lake. It is great to have a room with a lake view.

The first two days the group will visit educational institutes, while the last three days the group will attend the multimedia conference Mindtrek. There are a lot of themes in the conference, in fact too much to take in. But it is nice to pick up trends here. In the next days I will report on the visits and the conference lectures and I understand that the instructors of the Noorderpoort College have promised to blog on this trip also.

Links
http://twitter.com/MindTrek
http://www.mindtrek.org/
http://npsvk.blogspot.com/

BPN 1434