Platoniq interviews Teemu Leinonen (1)



1. M-learning-related projects such as MobilED, ShareIdeas and others are operating in pretty much uncharted territory, as the present of mobile communication technologies evolves every few weeks/months. Have you conducted any previous studies on similar enterprises before starting your project or do you prefer to focus on this particular reality?
 
In our research practice we have several stages.These are: contextual inquiry, participatory design, product design and implementation of software and/or social/technological system as hypothesis. The process is iterative and we understand that in the later stages of the process we always gain more understanding of the topics and activities central in the earlier stages.

During the contextual inquiry we do "benchmarking", get familiar with earlier research and try to map the environment all in all. We also do observation of people we are working with and work with "unfocus groups" - people who already are "experts" in the social practices we are dealing with. The aim is to understand the field and to define design challenges.

In the m-learning field we have been active since 1999 but have not published very much about it.

 
2. Can you talk about the MobilED KIT and MobilED SERVER experiences? You emphasize in your site that the KIT project's success is merely a hypothesis. How does it work, things you think could be improved and why?

Right. The KIT is hypothesis and so is the MobilED SERVER, though it is a working prototype. Actually we also build a KIT box prototype in South Africa but didn't really finalize it.

I think the KIT is a good idea. However, it should be such that the communities could build it themselves. My idea has been that it should be very simple and easy to assembled from the local materials and the manuals should be available online so that one could print them and add them to the KIT.

THE MobilED SERVER is a proof of concept prototype. We (or someone) should still develop the software to make it easy to install and set-up. There are still many little things that do not work.


3. What about the Audio Encyclopaedia project? Can you describe the scope, goals and results of that initiative so far?

We have moved from the Audio Encyclopaedia idea to the direction of developing MobilED more to the direction of being community information and news server, some kind of mobile community radio on which people can add their own news, classified adds etc. We are writing a journal paper about this idea and hope to get ready early next year.

However, some parts of the world there is an interest on making the Wikipedia accessible as audio (text to speech) service for mobile phones. We are not working on this, but I assume these people will try out MobilED SERVER or similar kind of set-up in their projects.


4. Open licenses can ensure the future of a project beyond its original range. How important are licenses and authorship issues in your projects? Would you care to elaborate on your views on that?
 
We work in an academia. Our funding is mostly public money (EU, etc.) and they are pretty open for our openness. With software we use the GPL, with content CC-BY-SA and also try to publish research papers only in Open Access Journals.

Sometime we do collaboration with companies too, who may want us to provide them some "proprietary knowledge". We may agree that they will have the first right to the study results, so that they will get them 6 months before we'll publish them. In most of the cases this is fine for companies. I also have said for companies that if our results are such that one can right from them make business we have not done "academic research" but product development and that is not our task. So, we try to stay in a such "basic research" level that the possible benefit will come only in a years come, not in 6 to 24 months.

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