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March 9th, 2010  |  Published in Picture This

It’s about time. I have not been blogging (on a regular basis) for quite a while, most of my activity here in Finland is captured by other people through Facebook pictures (pancakes and parties, but no evidence of studies).

At the same time, I made a quick visit to Bremen, Germany to follow up on the idea of starting a company around or previous university project Mobea. That didn’t work out so well (yet), so instead of waiting around I focused on the immidiate things: finishing my bachelor studies, i.e. writing my bachelor report.
Through my research for potential competitors I came across A LOT of web startups in the educational space, some of which I will be mentioning in coming posts as they relate to my current work for the report.
At the same time, with the report I want to keep a focus on my current context – local to Finland, specific to IBS, my current studies program.
To get a grip on all the info flowing through my head and browser, I’m applying 3 main approaches:
  1. visual collection (think mind mapping, mood board, pictured below)
  2. content collection (in a wiki and through social bookmarking)
  3. regular synthesis (in this blog as well as in the final report, which is meant to be about 40 pages of text)
this is not a total mess - it's fairly structured and way healthier than the monkey-style laptop and chair combo

my stand-up work station

making sense of a slide deck

making sense of a slide deck

almost like a kanban board, but more messy

almost like a kanban board, but more messy

So what are the current issues I have to deal with:

  • narrowing it down (all things are connected, I come across some interesting perspective hourly)
  • creating something concrete (immediate, practical)
  • making it useful (reading and writing is fun, but I want to provide real value to Reijo, Jeff and the IBS crew)

My starting points on this adventure are these:

Why does everybody use Facebook but everybody I ask has issues with Moodle?

When is a teacher’s physical presence in a classroom really necessary?

I want to be done with my report until the end of April so I can get as much feedback from the people here in IBS, but also to be able to focus on the next step after that: Teach First (application is pending).

If you would like to encourage or comment on any of these ideas and endeavours, please go ahead.

Lots of things will follow.

Happy blogging!

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