FLOSS Business Successes and Failures

While starting to analyze the business successes and failures I came to surprising finding about the size of the companies in question. Whereas the largest OSS company - North Carolina-based Red Hat Inc. employs 2000 employees worldwide[1] compared to its commercial competitor Microsoft that comes above 79000 employee headcount[2].

The second largest OSS company - Uppsala-based MySQL AB employs 360 employees[3] whereas its closest competitors are also significantly larger - 75000 in Oracle[4], more than 4000 in Sybase[5] or more than 1500 in Progress[6]. So in average the companies that have chosen to do business and provide the public with its source code are tens of times smaller than their fully commercial equivalents. Through keeping the number of employees down, making them work from their home-base open source also cuts down on essential research and development costs while at the same time speeding up delivery of new products.

Most of the other OSS companies seem to be small corner offices that usually employ a few fanatics. What is their motivation? In plenty of cases they indeed work with the passion to turn the world into a better place. This kind of approach together with user innovation probably makes them success already on the grassroots. When we look at them - there are a few who are proudly announcing to be geeks[7].

Success Story - How to make good money with OSS?

It seems to be an oxymoron - to make money with free / libre / open source software. When most of the customers would be able to use freely available source code to build their own - why would they pay anybody for anything related to the OSS?

However, there are still several possibilities how to make money with open source. Open Source Business Models and Strategies website [8] displays web-roll of numerous success stories.
The open source business model relies on shifting the commercial value away from the actual products and generating revenue from the 'Product Halo,' or ancillary services like systems integration, support, tutorials and documentation.)[9] In most cases this is associated with related services. One strong example would be JBoss, which is a division of Red Hat. JBoss has managed to sell conferences, support, certification, even reference manuals.[10]

How to fail with OSS?

But then on the other hand it is difficult to identify any failure stories. This is so probably because the very nature of the open source development principles. When a commercial company faces huge losses or enters bankruptcy then usually we can see big headlines - numbers of people were laid off, the managers were kicked out from their positions, shareholders were left empty-handed, customers did not receive their services. However, as the open source development is frequently based on the operations of volunteers - when they stop their activities usually none of the previous would either be applicable or hit a major news channel - the developers simply leave for other alternatives, no managers would have been employed, any financiers would not have committed their funds, and mostly the customers are psychologically ready to accept that whatever they got free until this moment should account for a new alternative thereafter. Hence looking around in yahoo finance, CNN headlines or even some hard-core IT portals did not provide good links on the events that would demonstrate a major failure in OSS business.

Hence I decided to take an approach of a social Darwinist. The very principles of social evolutionary theory provide that there is constant variation of new ideas where only the fittest are selected and retained in the long run. The variation of the OSS ideas is mostly captured in open source software development web sites. Looking at SourceForge.net website[11] their number of registered projects accounted at the end of 2007 to 165234! Appears to be a rather large number! When I tried to trace their discontinued projects - there are really hundreds of projects that demonstrate active development for a few months and have died out thereafter. Hence it could be concluded rather easily that the social Darwinism with combination of lack of stakeholder interests could be used in order to explain the silent failure stories of the open source software development.

References

[1] http://www.redhat.com/about/companyprofile/facts/
[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=MSFT, with the history of the headcount during the past years displayed here: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/library/msftemp.jpg
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_AB
[4] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=ORCL
[5] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=SY
[6] http://www.progress.com/uk/about_us/index.ssp
[7] http://www.landley.net/
[8] http://www.opensourcestrategies.org/
[9] http://www.extropia.com/tutorials/misc/opensourcebiz.html
[10] http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/6417/1/
[11] http://sourceforge.net/

Wesnoth

Red team

In the class of open source management was a home assignment to develop the game named Wesnoth. For some obscure reason I ended up as team leader. Teams were composed by Kaido Kikkas. As I have a background in the field of education, then open source and Wesnoth have not been present in my everyday life. So I was a team leader in the field I know nothing about.

Already at the begging our teams suffered losses: our team member from Ethiopia could not be part of our team having some problems with the internet. Hence we were left with three only!

We agreed in the beginning since everybody wants to have fun with map drawing that every member of the team will compose one level of the game. Although this kind of agreement did not match the best way with our profiles, we still decided to try.

First we (team) had to come up with a scenario. I wrote basis of the scenario and sent it to our team for reviewing and commenting. Scenario was received ok from other team members and we agreed on some deadlines when something must be ready.

As all team members were working and having extremely busy times at their daily work, we did not manage to keep any of those deadlines. As a team leader I had some doubts whether to choose some other style and start strongly controlling but I didn’t consider this right. Because in the end - what matters is whether we do development of the game not whether we succeed to hold on strictly our deadlines. Maybe it was wrong decision because it was understandable that one of our team members - Egert - has some problems and probably would not cope with the assignment. In the middle of december it appeared that he was still with us but a couple of days before the final deadline I have to say that unfortunately another team member has left us and at the end - red team today has only two members (and none of us has background in computer science). So as it became clear that our Wesnoth will have only two levels and we had to change our storyline a little.

About the game:
Development of this game was a huge challenge for me for several reasons. First: I don't like computer games that much. I almost don’t play them. Second: not having any previous programming skills it was at the beginning quite difficult to figure out how this stuff works. I had some help from my husband who worked with me and explained the logic behind it. I must admit that the most fun part for me was still drawing the map. The scenario-language become understandable after a while. As well did this how all those pictures, scenarios, map go together.
Although it was a really hard assignment for me I'm still quite happy about it. I don’t see myself as an open source developer in the future but it is good to know how these things work.

My thanks go to my husband for patience and to Geroli.

Science progress as example of free culture

Our assignment was to describe an interesting case from outside software and Internet sphere.
To think to different - something similar is in use in the world of science.

Whereas lots of scientists prefer to opt for the protection of patents or copyrights, probably the most famous example of the opposite activity comes from Marie & Pierre Curie.

Namely, public pressure in France prompted the government to give the Curies money for research. They continued to produce radium using Marie's process for chemical extraction. For awhile they had the only supply of this rare element. Generously, the Curies gave away samples to other physicists like Rutherford and Soddy. Soon private chemical manufacturers wrote to the Curies asking for more information about how to produce radium. The Curies decided not to patent their extraction process, but to give it to the private sector for free. If they had sold it, they would have been millionaires many times over as radium was in great demand.

This kind of behavior is perhaps also a representative of free culture? Any person is free to conduct research. (S)he discovers/creates something, the results and methods of survey will be published and available to others. It is possible to others to use the results of the research, based on this create something new or add something extra to the subject. Appears that it is following the principles of free culture!

Lets go further and look at the principles of scientific publishing practice.

In many ways the social science publishing works in this way. Scientists publis their detailed findings in journals that are either available completely for free - at public libraries or public websites such as scholar.google.com or free working paper series or at a very low cost (cost of purchasing a journal or access to research research database). In many cases also the doctoral dissertations are freely downloadable or accessible for any interested parties.

Coming back to example of journals - even if the journal format does not allow to publish the full results of the research process, the journals also publish the original contact information of researchers so that anybody could contact them for additional information. In many cases the researchers are willing to share also their original data provided that this would not harm the ethics of the research process (disclosing sensitive data about research subjects).

Also the research community in peer review process operates on completely voluntary process. In top journals - every single article is subject for review process: 2-3 top researchers who remain anonymous would get responsibility to review the work of their peers. In practice this means that top scientists in their field would have to spend 2-3 days of their time to read, analyse and comment on how the authors should improve their work. Let alone they would not get any payment for this. They even do not get any credit for mentioning their names! Again - this process seems to fall under the principles of free culture!

Legal issues of FLOSS

Since computers, internet, open source as a is still pretty new in the sense of legal proceeding history - there are several legal problems still to rise. Legal issues around FLOSS are not a criminal or civil code that has had over thousands of years to develop. So there is no clear-cut overview about what is strictly prohibited or what is absolutely allowed. Although there have been already many lawsuits, there are probably still many to come and they my estimation is that they will get more and more complicated.

It was fun to find out that there are already insurance companies that cover for the risks that what if some kind of legal problem is found in the piece of software that you use. They bluntly phrase it: they think that the IT geeks who develop open source software are not rich enough to sue them for copyright or patent infringements. Hence the best approach would be to go after rich users who have chosen to use the open source software developed by those geeks. It somehow strikes me how this would be in harmony with good-will of the customer. Should all open source software come with the disclaimer: "We hereby do not take any responsibility if we have violated any patents!" This definitely would leave the door open for any of us who naively has used Linux or Firefox.

What if somebody finds out that few lines of code in the Firefox that I use in my home computer had been stolen from Microsoft? Would I need to set aside some money for a potential claimant? Obviously there are much more wealthier users of OSS applications who would probably be vulnerable against those claims.

These types of questions appear to be still unresolved and would apparently leave possibilities for several high-profile legal cases ...

But lets look at two examples more closely

1) Busybox vs Monsoon
Lawsuit on behalf of Andersen and Landley (developers of Busybox ) against Monsoon Multimedia inc. Busybox is lightweight set of standard utilities and it is an open source software. Based on Busybox code Monsoon Multimedia developed it's own product: Hava. On the webpage of Monsoon there was a note that Hava is based on Busybox, but Monsoon did not publish the source code as required by the GNU General Public License.

Case was taken to the court, but after few days Monsoon reported that settlement negations are taken place. Case ended with settlement: Monsoon published the source code on its Web site and paid unpublished amount of money to Andersen and Landley.

This case demonstrates one side of OSS case - when one of the developers would not stick to the principles of GPL.

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/sep/20/busybox/
http://www.linux.com/articles/120629
http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-GPL-Lawsuit-In-The-USA-66330.shtml

2) Firestar Software vs Red Hat
In June 2006 Firestar sued Red Hat and claimed that JBoss (freshly acquired open source provider what just become a division of Red Hat) claiming that one of their software applications - Hibenate - violated Firestars patent. In this patent a detailed method of interfacing an object oriented software application with a relational database has been described and protected. Firestar says that they have not patented only a method but the entire concept of object/ relational mapping.

Despite the fact that there are several news sites that raise this claim. Both company websites are silent on that issue. I also tried to look the further proceedings or final results of this court case, but I failed.

Two possible reasons: I couldn't search properly or the case is not over yet. Anyway: the stock price of Red Hat has definitely suffered a little because of this litigation.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS9631006534.html
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/192501606?queryText=red+hat+firestar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2006/07/

New Education vol 2

Author

Kersti Peenema

Keywords

Education, competencies, creativity, e-learning, knowledge

Abstract

In this article Kersti Peenema from Tallinn University focus on the new goals of education. The main goal of article is to find an answer based on literature analysis to the question whether e-learning can meet the competencies of tomorrow. Peenema expresses her belief that using Web 2.0 tools in education will help develop creativity and competencies of tomorrow.

Intorduction

Development of technology is rapid and this has impact to the society and education. With the development of electronic forms of communication and World Wide Web new learning spaces are being created (Jarvis, Holford & Griffin 2003). As society is changing more knowledgebased the question arises: what kind of education we do need to meet the requirements of tomorrow.

Research Question

How can e-learning meet the competencies of tomorrow?

Method

Method used in this blog is literature analysis.

Future competencies

Ken Robinson (an expert on creativity) argues in one of his presentations, that we do have the same kind of educational system for a long time now: mathematics is still at the top of the curriculum and arts down of the list. He poses a question: whether the structure and goals of today's education meet new requirements of society 50 years in the future? His answer is no as for the future we have to support more creativity.

Quite the same is said in the Report of National Centre of Education and the Economy in 2006 where skills of future are listed as: collaboration, communication, creativity, innovation, information literacy, critical thinking, problem solving and global awareness (Rosenfeld 2007). Erica de Vries argues also, that people need in the future to have competence in defining problems, finding information and collaboration (de Vries 2003). The nature of work is changing: there are more people who are working in the knowledge-based professions. Knowledge-based professions have a continuous need for updating their competence (Severinson Eklundh, Groth, Hedman, Lantz, Rodriguez, Sallnäs 2003). These people are dealing with different mental problems every day. Based on this, we can say: problem solving will be the key issue in future, but successful problem solving can be based only on creativity. So how can we support creativity instead of killing it?

As society is becoming more knowledgebased more people who are part of educational system are representers of knowledge-based professions, it means that lifelong education and the availability of different educational possibilities are growingly important questions. Here e-learning can definitely help by offering different tools to learn in formal as well in informal education. But the question is: will e-learning meet the requirements of tomorrow?

Use of technological solutions and real life

When web changed to web 2.0 it brought along the change of goals and the essence of web. Instead of being just arbitrator of information (offering/receiving) web 2.0 is about creation of new information and knowledge. In web the user was passive and just gained information, in web 2.0 the user is active (!) and takes part of knowledge creation. This is qualitative change and it has changed the goals and structure of web. Similar to web 2.0 there is already discussion about education 2.0 but it remains quite technological. So there must be a qualitative change in education before it is legitimate to use the term education 2.0. Todays discussions about education 2.0 are supporting the same essence of education as it is today. Will there be education 2.0 or are we just using new tools of technology to fulfil old goals of education?

So we don’t have yet deep discussion about education 2.0, but still: can e-learning somehow support creativity as basis tomorrow's competencies? Roschelle and Pea in 1999 have pointed out, that today's web-based communication is pretty much text-based. This leaves knowledge creation to background and supports just passive reading (Järvelä, Häkkinen 2003). So today many opportunities stay unused. More active creation and use of videos, live-conferences, live-interaction, online communities and (why not) different simulations would help us solve that problem and fortunately we can see it already happening. But as the design of virtual environments is political (Gillespie 2003), it must be possible to create a learning environment to support creativity. Let us take for example virtual environment Second Life (SL) what has being used as a learning tool . Terry Beaubois created a virtual classroom on architecture . Since almost everything is possible in SL, it gives to the student's possibility to try out different architectural design. Students can try things what they would never try in a normal classroom: it is possible by either denying the laws of nature (gravitation) or it's just not too expensive. This all enables students to "think out of the box" and foster their creativity.

Of course there rises a question: how can we create a bridge between this kind of learning and real life with real situations. It is very important to know how to transfer our knowledge to the real world. In this transfer reflection has important role: does this kind of learning make students reflect more their knowledge? Visualisation of their knowledge helps to bring out tacit knowledge. Students are more conscious about it and it might become a ground to the creation of new knowledge. It might be even great that you have to visualises everything (even by writing) because if helps to reflect. So this is real win-win situation: tacit knowledge will become visible and conscious and knowledge will be available to others and used a ground for creation something new. The key question is how to do it so that people will want to make it visible.

Second Life is a multiplayer role play game (Doherty, Murphy 2007). As future games will be more complex and realistic and players will have more control over them (story, structure) (Goldstein 2003), this means that using different games in learning will add more fun and creativity to the process. And having fun in learning usually guarantees a good learning outcome. But using different games is hole different approach to the education then usual classroom study.

Different generations

There is one more problem in the field of new education. Differences between the generations are growing larger and larger and not only from an attitude side. Young people of tomorrow will still have another attitude toward life, but they will have a different skill profile and different thinking structure. As technology is more widely available, more people are using it. Because of use of technology there skill and thinking profile is different and this is causing a conflict between the generations. As more learning is becoming knowledgebased there will be a fundamental shift in the relations of teachers and learners (Jarvis et al. 2003). They will be from different generations and the old ways of teaching do not work. So it gets harder to understand and predict the needs of future and the essence of new education. If we can, then it's clear that new education requires radical change in the ways in which learning is organised and executed. E-learning may develop the skills and creativity; it is the great enabler (Thompson, Randall 2001). It all depends whether we can realised that.

Conclusion

In this paper I analysed impact of development of technology to education. Society is changing and therefore the goals of education need to change. With wider use of technology we have different technological tools to support new goals of education.

References:

Doherty, P., Murphy, P. (2007) "Science visit the metaverse and change your mind", Fantasy & Science Fiction 113 (3), 127-134.

Ecklundh, K. S., Groth, K., Hedman, A., Lantz, A., Rodriguez, H., Sallnäs, E-L. (2003), " The World Wide Web as a Social Infrastructure for Knowledge-Oriented Work", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 97 - 126.

Gillespie, T. (2003), "The stories digital tools tell", in Everett, A. & Caldwell, J. T. (eds), New media: theories and practices of digitextuality, New York: Routledge, pp. 107-126.

Goldstein, G. (2003), "People @ Play: Electronic Games", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 25 - 46.

Jarvis, P., Holford, J., Griffin, C. (2003), The theory and practice of learning, London and Sterling: Kogan Page Limited.

Järvela, S., Häkkinen, P. (2003), "The Levels of Web-Based Discussions: Using Perspective-Taking Theory as an Analytical Tool", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 77 - 96.

Rosenfeld, E. (2007), "Beginning the conversation about education 2.0", Teacher Librarian 34 (4), 6-6, http://search.epnet.com/, [accessed 2 Oct 2007].

Thompson, P., Randall, B. (2001), "Can e-learning spur Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship?", Educational Media International 38(4), 289-292.

de Vries, E. (2003), "Educational Technology and Multimedia From a Cognitive Perspective: Knowledge From Inside the Computer, Onto the Screen, and Into Our Heads?", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 155 - 174.

Second life

This will not be an article. It is more like a blog entry. The reason, why I choose to write a blog lies in the problem that I don't get it. I just don’t get the phenomenon of Second Life (SL), but as SL has many users, then I admit that there must be something catching/intresting about it. I wondered for a some time already about the phenomena of SL. So instead of writing something smart in an article, I choose to write a blog to reflect my thoughts and feelings. Another reason might be that I looked for research about the SL but it was hard to find a concrete study what would be longer then 2 pages. As the SL was created in 2003, this is understandable.

As many researches (Childress, Braswell 2006; Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, Merget 2007) have pointed out, the SL is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. But for me it is hard to consider the SL just as a game. Huizinga (2003) has argued that game is different from a real life because game takes place, game has an end. In that sense the SL is like a real life - it is a virtual reality, it has no ending. Hence not a game?

We may ask: is the SL just a hype? It has around nine millions avatars (Bugeja 2007), but relatively few of them actually use it (Newitz 2007). In online communities one of the key questions is usability of community. How software is designed and developed has an impact to online community: the way people are communicating strongly affects its evolution. (Lazar, Preece 2003). There might be the reason of low usability in the SL - from my personal experience it was quite hard to figure out the basics.

When Linden Lab published the SL, it “gained a reputation as being little more than a hippy hang-out, where people had cyber sex, took virtual drugs “. During time it has become a virtual space that enhanced different forms of social interaction (Ananthaswamy 2007).

What still remains unclear to me is that this it not a game - people are putting real (!) money to the SL to gain pleasure and satisfaction. The question is: why are the not using the same money in the real world and instead of real pleasure they prefer virtual one? Or doesn’t it matter whether where do you get the satisfaction because the feeling (chemical reaction?) is still the same? But why do people pay real money to buy a virtual (!) dog? Why do they not buy themselves a real dog? They want pleasure, but they don’t want responsibility? Real dog brings along a lot of obligations: you can not afford forget to feed him, to go outside to a walk? These kinds of obligations are obviously forgotten in the SL.

But the SL proves that human nature is social. Even if these people choose virtual reality (VR) instead of staying in the real life (IR), they are choosing sociality. Otherwise they would be alone in a different place and not looking around in the world full of other people. People game (we can consider the SL here as a game) due different reasons: some get excitement out of it, some get the feeling of being successful, some find it educational (Goldstein 2003). All those reasons might be true for the SL also. I can accept that in some since the SL is interesting like a game: it is a simulation of a situation or life. You even have proper game tools: a toy (avatar) and playground (world). At the same time it is proven that social interactions in online virtual environment (SL) have the same social norms as social interaction in the physical world (Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, Merget 2007). So the question remains: why do these people decide living in the VR instead of IR? Isn’t real life interesting enough? Why are they not social IR, why do they not dare to live a there own real life?

It is easy to leave the SL and not to think about it anymore as I don’t understand it, but I do realise the educational potential of the SL, what is still fully undiscovered. It might be a simple place where you can learn and communicate with different people (professionals), you can easily create something new or have a different profession (and no harm done IR). Virtual reality can be a medium to learn by doing.

Using VR in learning can be very helpful: it helps learners to reflect and get more deepen understanding of the learning process trough high-level interaction and active engagement by learners (Mantovani 2001). Improvements of environments (like SL) will lead to increased interactivity, the line between face-to-face learning and the online virtual learning will be not so clear. Improvements of virtual learning environments will create new ways of learning and models of teaching. It will depend on development of technology and on creativity of the educators who are using these kinds of environments (Childress, Braswell 2006).

And I have to say: this the SL enables.


References:

1. Ananthaswamy, A. (2007), „A life less ordinary offers far more than just escapism”, New Scientist 195 (2620), 57-57, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

2. Bugeja, M. J. (2007), “Second Thoughts About Second Life”, Chronicle of Higher Education 54 (3), C2-C4, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

3. Childress, M., D., Braswell, R. (2006), “Using Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games for Online Learning”, Distance Education 27 (2), 187-196, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

4. Goldstein, G. (2003), "People @ Play: Electronic Games", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 25 - 46.

5. Huizinga, J. (2003), Mängiv inimene, Tallinn: Kirjastus Varrak.

6. Lazar, Preece (2003), “Social Considerations in Online Communities: Usability, Sociability, and Success Factors”, in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp 127-151.

7. Mantovani, F. (2001), “VR Learning: Potential and Challenges for the Use of 3D Environments in Education and Training”, in Riva, G. & Galimberti, C. (eds), Towards CyberPsychology: Mind, Cognition and Society in the Internet Age, Amsterdam: IOS Press, pp 207–225.

8. Newitz, A. (2007), “Virtual worlds are becoming more like the real world”, New Scientist 195 (2618), 40-40, http: search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

9. Yee, N., Bailenson, J. N., Urbanek, M., Chang, F., Merget, D. (2007), “The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments”, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10 (1), 115-121, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

Technology and new education

Ken Robinson (an expert on creativity) argues in one of his presentations, that we do have the same kind of educational system for a long time now: mathematics is still at the top of the curriculum and arts down of the list. He poses a question: whether the structure and goals of today's education meet new requirements of society 50 years in the future? His answer is no as for the future we have to support more creativity.

Quite the same is said in the Report of National Centre of Education and the Economy in 2006 where skills of future are listed as: collaboration, communication, creativity, innovation, information literacy, critical thinking, problem solving and global awareness (Rosenfeld 2007). Erica de Vries argues also, that people need in the future to have competence in defining problems, finding information and collaboration (de Vries 2003). The nature of work is changing: there are more people who are working in the knowledge-based professions. Knowledge-based professions have a continuous need for updating their competence (Severinson Eklundh, Groth, Hedman, Lantz, Rodriguez, Sallnäs 2003). These people are dealing with different mental problems every day. Based on this, we can say: problem solving will be the key issue in future, but successful problem solving can be based only on creativity. So how can we support creativity instead of killing it?

As more and more people who are part of educational system are representers of knowledge-based professions, it means that lifelong education and the availability of different educational possibilities are growingly important questions. Here e-learning can definitely help by offering different tools to learn in formal as well in informal education. But the question is: will e-learning meet the requirements of tomorrow? Will there be education 2.0 or are we just using new tools of technology to fulfil old goals of education?

There is already discussion about education 2.0 but it remains quite technological. When web changed to web 2.0 it brought along the change of goals and the essence of web. Instead of being just arbitrator of information (offering/receiving) web 2.0 is about creation of new information and knowledge. In web the user was passive and just gained information, in web 2.0 the user is active (!) and takes part of knowledge creation. This is qualitative change and it has changed the goals and structure of web. So there must be a qualitative change in education before it is legitimate to use the term education 2.0. Todays discussions about education 2.0 are supporting the same essence of education as it is today.

So we don’t have yet deep discussion about education 2.0, but still: can e-learning somehow support creativity? Roschelle and Pea in 1999 have pointed out, that today's web-based communication is pretty much text-based. This leaves knowledge creation to background and supports just passive reading (Järvelä, Häkkinen 2003). So many opportunities stay unused. More active creation of videos, live-conferences, live-interaction, online communities and (why not) different simulations would help us solve that problem and fortunately we can see it already happening. But as the design of virtual environments is political (Gillespie 2003), it must be possible to create a learning environment to support creativity. Let us take for example virtual environment Second Life (SL) what has being used as a learning tool . Terry Beaubois created a virtual classroom on architecture . Since almost everything is possible in SL, it gives to the student's possibility to try out different architectural design. Students can try things what they would never try in a normal classroom: it is possible by either denying the laws of nature (gravitation) or it's just not too expensive. This all enables students to "think out of the box" and foster their creativity.

Of course there rises a question: how can we create a bridge between this kind of learning and real life and real situations. It is very important if we can transfer our knowledge to the real world. The second part of this kind on learning is: does it make students more reflect their knowledge? By visualisation of their knowledge, it brings out tacit knowledge. Students are more conscious about it and it might be a ground to the creation of new knowledge. It might be even great that you have to visualises everything (even by writing) because if helps to reflect. So this is real win-win situation: tacit knowledge will become visible and conscious and knowledge will be available to others and used a ground for creation something new. The key question is how to do it so that people will want to make it visible.

Second Life is a multiplayer role play game (Doherty, Murphy 2007). As future games will be more complex and realistic and players will have more control over them (story, structure) (Goldstein 2003), this means that using different games in learning will add more fun and creativity to the process. And having fun in learning usually guarantees a good learning outcome. But using different games is hole different approach to the education then usual classroom study.

There is one more problem in the field of new education. Differences between the generations are growing larger and larger and not only from an attitude side. Young people of tomorrow will still have another attitude toward life, but they will have a different skill profile and different thinking structure. As technology is more widely available, more people are using it. Because of use of technology there skill and thinking profile is different and this is causing a conflict between the generations. So can we predict at all the need of future and the essence of new education? If we can, then it's clear that new education requires radical change in the ways in which learning is organised and executed. E-learning may develop the skills and creativity; it may be the great enabler (Thompson, Randall 2001). It all depends whether we can realised that.

References:

1. Doherty, P., Murphy, P. (2007) "Science visit the metaverse and change your mind", Fantasy & Science Fiction 113 (3), 127-134.
2. Ecklundh, K. S., Groth, K., Hedman, A., Lantz, A., Rodriguez, H., Sallnäs, E-L. (2003), " The World Wide Web as a Social Infrastructure for Knowledge-Oriented Work", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 97 - 126.
3. Gillespie, T. (2003), "The stories digital tools tell", in Everett, A. & Caldwell, J. T. (eds), New media: theories and practices of digitextuality, New York: Routledge, pp. 107-126.
4. Goldstein, G. (2003), "People @ Play: Electronic Games", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 25 - 46.
5. Järvela, S., Häkkinen, P. (2003), "The Levels of Web-Based Discussions: Using Perspective-Taking Theory as an Analytical Tool", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 77 - 96.
6. Rosenfeld, E. (2007), "Beginning the conversation about education 2.0", Teacher Librarian 34 (4), 6-6, http://search.epnet.com/, [accessed 2 Oct 2007].
7. Thompson, P., Randall, B. (2001), "Can e-learning spur Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship?", Educational Media International 38(4), 289-292.
8. de Vries, E. (2003), "Educational Technology and Multimedia From a Cognitive Perspective: Knowledge From Inside the Computer, Onto the Screen, and Into Our Heads?", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 155 - 174.

Wesnoth

Ollen täie arusaamise juures, et tegu on ingliskeelse õppega, aga kuna tegemist on esimese kandega ja pealegi teemadel, millest ma suurt midagi ei mõika, siis olgu sel korral kanne eesti keeles. Tõlkida saab selle inglise keelde hiljem ka.
Aga siis pealkirja järjekorras:

Wesnoth : ma ei julge väga oma tuttavatele öeldagi, et koduülesanne oli arvutimäng ... ;)
Tegelikult ma eriti arvutimänge ei mängi. Enamus neist on vägivaldsed ning see ei kutsu väga mängima. Peale kaht ebaõnnestunut katset õnnestus W ka alla laadida ning pärast pisikest jagelemist ja restarti sai mäng alata. Kahjuks ei ole W minu jaoks selles mõttes tore mäng, et ka see on vägivaldne. No ei ole mul suurt huvi vaadata, et kuidas arvutis pisikesed mehikesed või kollid üksteist tapavad. Aga väike hasart mingil hetkel tekkis ning veetsin W mingi 4 tundi, sain mõned tasandid mängitud sel ajal. Nõus sellega, et tegu on strateegilist mõtlemist õpetava mänguga, aga kuna arvuti taga istumisega kaasnevad mitmed kõrvalmõjud (ühed neist on mul kaelas praegu tunda), siis tekib paratamatult küsimus, et kas sama tulemuseni väiksemate kõrvalmõjudega ei võiks jõuda näiteks monopoli mängides? W eelis monopoli ees on muidugi tema tasandid. Monopol ei arene mängu jooksul kahjuks eriti kuhugi :(
Ühesõnaga: ära see mängitud sai. Mängu põhiolemusele sain ka vast pihta. See vist ongi kõige olulisem?