WordPress is great for blogging – Ning is better for communities, where several people could participate.
There is also possibility to create subgroups – e.g. one for steering group members.

I really liked the booklet for Finnish upper secondary schools – that provides excellent source of information of good practices and helps creating meaningful connections between schools.

In another example you told about how genealogy computerized your mother-in-law. In Christmas Eve 1986 my late mother, then soon becoming 70 years of age, had a similar change. Till that eve, she had a huge genealogical survey on thousands of small slips of paper. While we others were waiting for Santa Claus, my mother enthusiastically examined – for the first time in her life – my computer and found, how she could easily change the order of anything written, delete, add in-between etc. This all was an easy notch for her to overcome, and later to publish a 400-page genealogical survey. Later, I wrote an article about her Christmas Eve enthusiasm. It was entitled “Mummoni ja Macintosh” (in accordance with the title of a contemporary book by Paavo Rintala, instead of the more truthful “My mother and Apple IIc”).

But now to the main point:

If only we could grow carrots as long as sticks and use them to encourage people to overcome the small notches on the stony and lingering pathway of progress! I think our Competence & Capability Development Community for Excellence Finland currently stands in front of such a notch. Your example of using a (personal) blog for spawning the fruits of our monthly gatherings is an excellent example.

This kind of mutual and interactive forum or fora continue the discussion first amongst the actual audience, then amongst our 963 members and further amongst anybody interested around the globe. It would also serve as the forum for gathering information about the needs of our forthcoming schedule for 2010-2011.

Currently, I am also running another community, the association of 127 very small Finnish upper secondary schools. Many of them routinely use modern e-learning technologies on the daily basis. Standing at this crossroads of quality and education is challenging in terms of spreading information of new developments.

To start with, do you recommend this Word.Press.com as a basis for our Competence & Capability Development Community, or would you prefer some other form of group communication? I am going tomorrow to Turku to attend our next workshop (about risk analysis within quality management). That might be something to continue with.

Your concerns of digital divide are very, very valid. However, I hope that social media applications could also provide some solutions for bridging some gaps of digital divide.

New technology & social media can also combine grandparents, with their grandchildren. Making it possible for them to be better connected and be closer to each other. This happened to the mother of my friend and her nephews studying outside Finland. It was grandma that first tried out Facebook and then Skype calls

I’ve also seen my mother in law – getting excited with computers at the age of 70 years. She never took any interest before, but now she is doing genealogical studies over the internet, searching new information from family communities and exchanging information with other researchers.

In schools and in workplaces situation gets really interesting. Are current teachers motivated, and willing to take in use new approaches offered via social media and learn together with their students? Luckily here as well social media can help, and offer possibilities for sharing experiences.

Hopefully we can help people, where ever they are, find their own personal approaches for using social media also for meaningful learning.

About 16 years ago I attended another session at the very same campus of Helsinki University of Technology. At that time I belonged to a Finnish group using the latest electronic technology in education. Sitting by computers, we were introduced to something very new: the concept of web sites and instant access to global information. Still now I remember the exhausting moment when I realized the immense possibilities of this new step.

Minna’s presentation at Design Factory reminded me of what happened at that session 16 years ago. From the plateau of using regular email, Minna took us higher to the hills of social media, till now unexplored by most of us in the audience. Further, she showed how we could reach there by several pathways: FaceBook, Twitter, Linked in, Second Life, You Tube, Ning etc.

For me, this raised the question of still widening gap of digital divide. Before the era of social media, the gap has been between email users and non-email users, nowadays typically sharing non-user grandmothers and grandfathers from their digitally active grandchildren.

Since the introduction of social media, the digital divide widens, sharing even regular email users into several categories from completely illiterate to less and more active social media users, not to mention the grandparents who are swept away from this new map completely.

Still more puzzling is the digital gap at schools. The gap widens between the teachers and their students. In good old days the teachers – and older people in general – were on the better side of the gap, asking younger ones to follow. But now: the students are not only seen to run away, up to the hill, but to vanish with pace, out of sight altogether.

So, here I stand, puzzled, knocking on the first doors of social media, trying to find the right path to the hills where my spiritual friends already have their camp fires.

Similar kinds of worries arise among media people, I notice as I look at your listing of issues. Perhaps one uniquely to my company, YLE, is the highlighting of reputation and trustworthiness – how does one know who to trust online. There’s a lot to learn in the new environment indeed.

It’s taken me a few years to evolve my web persona and the tools I used. One of the biggest hurdles is changing the way of reading social media — from primarily a browser to primarily a feed reader — so that reading content becomes as fast as reading e-mail.

(I have to admit that I’m last generation in using offline e-mail clients, rather than webmail. I’ll take any edge in productivity that I can!)

Earlier in Finland it was not that common to hug, not even within family … However, gradually hugging habits have changed.

In the two years I studied in Chicago, I got an international family (Polish and Italian American descent), and learned to accept hugs. I’m not sure that I ever really learned to give hugs.

In years gone by, when I visited again, I remember that the daughter came up to hug me, and laughed because I again had forgotten how to receive hugs. I’ve just discovered that the study of distance spaces is called proxemics. It could be that the social distance for Finns could be about the same as for Chinese, but the intimate distance less of a barrier.