The fifth student professor class - stable performance

After two good classes with the problem of doing everything in 90 mins + a break the television team was smaller and well prepared and met no difficulties in keeping the schedule.

The professors had geared up their pieces well and the coordination was pro. The team assignments were again funny but challenged the students to strive for creativity.

Some relevant topics were excluded, but the professor team offered depth in the chosen issues instead. Can't blame the team for that, now we got excellent coverage of history of TV, watching habits and factors determining the future of TV. In addition we got a hilarious overview of television culture around the world.

If the team should have tried to cover other relevant topics like the discussion of public service vs private, funding of broadcasting or citizen TV all sections would have given only a scratch on the surface.

Thank you very much, Krista, Dita and Ryoko.

***
The feedback team made some very clever observations and suggestions, but like I already commented their feedback post on this blog the feedback should not focus so much on individual professors but on the team and its performance.

Connected - The Movie

Today we have watched a film that with no doubt had a message to convey and hopefully made us stop for a moment and think. The film indeed sparked a discussion with many opinions and points of views. Unfortunately I feel that many people got upset about an unexpected twist in the movie and ignored the message altogether. I didn't comment much during the class, because movies usually make a big impression to me, and I need to ponder them properly, sort my thoughts and make some sense of the emotions I get from those experiences. And usually, when the film works it leaves me stunned for several hours or even day. And this one worked.

I believe the form of the movie and the point went hand to hand with each other and the director's choice to include the autobiographical story made perfect sense. It is important to remember it did never claim to be documentary, it titled itself in rather jovial way - "An Autoblogography" and as such it had the deepest rights to be subjective, idealist and bold. And it also perfectly explains the heavy use of personal "family" material. Secondly, besides all the carefully researched and portrayed facts a great part of the story was based on books written by one man and therefore opinions and views. It would be rather ignorant to expect anything else but personality and individuality.

Those strong negative impressions based on the form and storyline of the movie may have darkened minds of some of us, and so I suggest, let's forget about it and focus on the message. And to the person who jokingly said "And what if he died in the end? Then it would be a film only about him." I suggest you to watch the whole movie again, because the old man did die and the last five minutes were about his funeral and its consequences.

And to all those who felt mislead by the trailer, I suggest watching it again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbU4wrKVxUo

"And then I had this year that turned my world upside down,... and forced me to rethink everything I thought I understood about the ways we are connected. We as humans have accumulated so much knowledge, why only do we have such a hard time seeing the bigger picture?"


PS: I wrote this blogpost because there is no space to discuss today lesson online. So discuss it here! :)

PSS: It was nice to see Maria joining us! Cheers! (:

The future of TV is on the internet.

Since it is alright to post on the blog I would like to add some insights and relevant information to shatter the concerns about future of our culture and consumer habits.

While I agree the traditional TV program is getting worse and worse everyday, arguably everywhere around the world, I can also see that there is much more improvement in the independent creator's waters - the internet. From simple trolling, gifs, cam records and cat videos, the capacity of those services has increased greatly, allowing for scheduled, periodical and meaningful quality contents. Of course cat videos aren't going anywhere anytime soon. ;)

One thing to ask ourselves before I get into it. Is the content on TV getting worse because of the increasing commercialism and competition, or is it because consumers are more accustomed to this contents and demand it more and more? I don't feel entitled to answer this question, but if you do, please go ahead.

Feedback notes for television group

Overall the presentation was really well done and it covered the subject well. The group was small, so they each had to work hard for this, but on the other hand that helped them to stay in the time-frame and give out a cohesive presentation, that was interesting and fun to watch.

Krista started the day with a introduction video. We thought the introduction video was more effective than someone talking through it. It had all the main points you would expect to hear in the beginning of a presentation and it was a really nice pick. The Follow up slides were concise and relevant- no repetition of what was in the video but still maybe a little long. Visually the slides were really good. It was good that it was summarised by decade in general, it helped us listeners to see the main points. Krista did a great job! Presentations like this are a very difficult thing to do. Krista also gave a good presentation to the audience- wasn’t scripting.

After Krista, Dita continued with her part of the presentation. She also had good, clear presentation slides and she was a very good speaker. Her interactiveness with audience- question and answer, discussion was great and kept people awake the whole time. At some point she rushed through the slides a little too fast, but the information was all valid and still clear to the audience. Dita had very nice use of video and slides and discussion in her part. We would like to have discussed more genres and target audiences (even though they were in the game task). Sometimes she had hard time getting people involved, but that's the audience's fault. But, if you have a problem where people aren’t paying attention- you could start to single people out so that they participate!

Ryoko had the last part of this presentation. She showed us what television is like in different cultures. We really liked the way it was presented visually with world map and video links. Video links were fun and illustrated the different television cultures fairly well, but it's difficult to illustrate ALL the different broadcast types across the cultures. We thought that maybe a comparison of genres in different countries would also be effective next time- comparing tv advertisements/ drama in different countries for example to illustrate the differences. But altogether, Ryoko did a really nice job with this.Maybe fewer videos would have been just as effective, and Ryoko could've asked the audience of their opinion on the videos for additional interaction. But otherwise, good!

Generally this presentation was well-informed, well presented, no irrelevant information, it was kept ‘to the point.’ Only thing we felt was a bit lacking, was the coverage of non-commercial  broadcasting. Less reality tv etc which is the same in most countries, and more about other kinds of television too. The task they gave us was quite a challenging thing to do with only a ten-minute time preparation but it worked well and was fun- it was the wake up people needed. In the end it was nice that they had a conclusion, but maybe it was a little brief, maybe room for short discussion at the end could've also been nice. Anyways, great job for a small group!

FEEDBACK fo radio

Feedback radio

The old radio decoration was a cool bonus.
Dylan presented what was coming up in the lesson very well. The video was funny and engaging.Elizaveta

Prezi presentation of the history radio was great and looked nice and the prezi didnt take the focus out from the presentation. There were lots of interesting content on the history part. It was good that Lisa had more info on the paper than just the one on the presentation. There were no eye-contact on her part at all. the presenation was really concentrated and well prepared.
Videos were great.
Riikka

Riikka’s presentation about what radio broadcasting is today was really understandable and the eyecontact was great.

Different ways to listen to the radio, presentation was really good and had lots of really good information. The presentation was well shortened and concentrated.

There was also a video about people’s opinions about radio, which was fun and the kitten was the cutest thing ever! <3

Radio interview was funny and entertaining, buuuut maybe a little bit too long. It seems like people actually listen to the radio. The lady was maybe a bit subjective in her opinions, but it was nice to see how everything works when someone is broadcasting a radio show.
Dylan
Good presentation, very good that he started with the interview to make this more interactive.
The task was really good, because it forced you to think stuff. The questions were really good.
Students had really good points, therefore I might say this really worked out. The internet question wasn’t that good because it is hard to see the difference. The only problem was that there was not enough time to discuss the subject.
Sindy
Really good idea to go out there and interview this yle lady. We would’ve liked to hear a presentation from Sindy and Iina as well.
Alberto
Good that he was in front of the class. The presentation was a bit too fast and the information was a bit too long on slides. There would’ve nice to have a timeline of some sort so that it would have been easier to follow.
Caro

Caro talked about the ways to record music and the presentation was well concentrated and divided into three parts. The videos were also nice and explained the subject in a fun way.

Riikka
Very good information and she knows what she’s talking about. The time for discussion wasn’t enough, but the information was very well presented and short.

The whole presentation was very good even though the time limit was this small for such a big subject. The group managed very well to cover all the interesting areas of radio and recorded music.

The fourth student professor session - new ideas!

After the previous session I commented we have a pattern - the classes follow more or less the same structure. But the classes have shown good quality, so nothing wrong with that.

The radio team took a big and giant step out of the box by inviting a guest expert speaker. Or actually inviting the team to the working environment of the expert.

It was brilliant! Not only that we made a virtual visit to a real radio studio, but also that a passionate media professional shared her insight with the class. So far the visit to YLE was to me the absolute single expression of principal use of brains on this course. A very creative team this was!

The written feedback from the feedback team is so far missing, but if I remember correctly they did a very good job again. You can always discuss about the appropriate extent of the history part, but the length of individual parts of the class is not the key issue. Quality is the key and quality we again witnessed.

One more thing I that I found especially good and hilarious in this class was the section with the history of recording techniques. I have seldom seen such captivating illumination of technology! An exemplary demonstration of smart research and use of YouTube resources.

There are many details to praise and some to discuss in this class. But I really regret that I mentioned DXing as a very important  subtopic missing. No, it is not so important students should include it in a 90 minute presentation covering radio and recorded music. The thing is, that for an elderly professor it is important to mention it as a pre-internet that it in fact was.
You see, for us, the representatives of pre-internet era it is important to communicate to you that amazing things were done already before the net. That is why I also had to tell you, that radio was the medium for sharing computer games before internet.

I began the very first session of this course  (before the exchange students arrived) by playing the ever awesome "Friday on my Mind" with the Easybeats hoping that our joint Friday mornings would be worth waiting for. My wish is becoming true.

Recording Companies

I am super sorry. It was meant to be a comment but it made it into being a whole blogpost, so I decided to post it. If you are interested in the topic please read. If you want just to read the feedback and get an overview of this post, read the beginning and then the last paragraph.

Nice lesson today! I am really enjoying these Fridays much.

To sum up my feedback today:
Nice prezi with great UX. Everyone should think about it, these can get really confusing. Overall I enjoyed the contents of the presentation. It was well prepared.

And I don't necessarily agree with Cai about DXing. It seems to be more of a hobby, than anything too important and mainstream. I used to chat and broadcast music with friends on short waves when I was a teenager and this double sided communication with first "prosumer" models is probably more valuable. DXing is basically a hobby about tuning in long distance stations and finding and tinkering with signals, at least that's what I get about it today.

Props to Sindy and Iina for their videos and interview, that was really cool! I personally only wished for better recording quality and editing. I wonder what did you use for the recording in the end?

I have few comments about the discussion... I am pretty sure Riikka wanted to say much more than she actually did, but the crowd really overpowered her.

It is important to understand that Record Label is not the greedy company owning rights and law-trolling everyone when someone breaks their territory. I know there are some undoubtedly absurd things like sampling being considered "theft" or prohibition of non-rightful covering, but without RLs there would be no music.

RL is kind of a Venture Capitalist, or Angel Investor if you want who picks few talented, usually poor artists, gives them the money (as Riikka told me: on small indie RL level it is ranging from 2k - 10k €), helps them produce their music into an album, gives them contacts, promotion and pushes them to gigs. And that all is an uncertain investment, which may be a great failure, that can bring the whole label down.

So the first thing is to make the whole business sustainable and viable for the company, so it can A) Push more artists to people B) Maintain the artists and help them grow , when this is covered, then it can come to the Artists' fees and revenue. I believe that for most beginning musicians making money with music is a nice bonus instead of granted expectation. The fact you reach your audience and get your track into radio is much more rewarding for an emerging talent.

As Yonathan said, the problem is not the labels, it is the people, who rather steal music than buy it... but it is also a matter of convenience, efforts and marketing. I know how annoying it can be waiting for your fav music to come out in your country (not that it's so much of an issue nowadays), plus buying music is usually quite inconvenient thing, requiring you to go through all the hassle with credit cards, picking the right format and so on.

Whilst piracy is simple - within 10 minutes you are likely to find and download whatever you want, for free. And that's where internet services step in... iTunes revolutionized (note: gosh am I actually using this word in connection to Apple?) the music market and threatened classic distribution channels. Getting your song in matter of seconds for 0.99€ is just brilliant. Then Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody and similar services are doing even better service to the public by offering their music conveniently for free! How amazing! Of course you can subscribe (and you should) for even more convenience and good moral standing.

There is the other side of it. Music has always been part of human culture and therefore it should be somewhat accessible for free by everyone. Everyone should be able to remix it and use it as part of their cultural genome as they please. If you ignore piracy as plain lazyness and rebellion against the capitalist, those thoughts are indeed honorable and beautiful. However both parties are not very diplomatic in this case. Massive pirating of music is REALLY hurting Recording companies and forcing them into even more vigorous pursuit of profit (only to overcome the increasing loss and maintain the level of NET salaries), forcing them into demanding ridiculous and absurd laws, royalties, taxes, forcing them into bloating our broadcasts with more and more ads to make them sustain. No business wants to disappear, and especially when the business is over 90 years of tradition. Pirates should understand and consider this. And Labels and Broadcasts should attempt to change their business model accordingly to 21st century.

We are in stage of transition. We are dematerializing our worlds, pursuing the virtual. Objects (including CDs, Vinyls and such) are becoming obsolete with the spread of internet connection and computing devices. It won't take long and there will be the ultimate model for such business. But until then, we need to remain patient and thoughtful. And if you think you know what it takes, go out and start your company, it is an opportunity not only for you, but also for many future music star artists and record companies to survive and emerge into a new, more democratic and cultural age.

tl;dr:
Don't be a prick and read this... at least the last paragraph

Radio and recorded music

We started our presentation in the morning in time, though not everybody had arrived at this point. We wanted to already have something to set people in the right mood straight away when they arrived in the class, so we decided to borrow an old radio from the school lobby and had some old recordings playing in the background while people took their seats and made themselves comfortable. Like most of the other groups, we also had a short video intro made by Sindy and Iina right in the beginning of the presentation.

After the video Liz took the lead and showed her Radio History timeline, while explaining the developement of radio, and how it was used back in the day. We also had some old short clips of radio programs. The prezi timeline ended up in brining up the ways radio is used today. Here Riikka continued talking about today's radio broadcasting types and how public and commercial radio differ from each other - and what's their purpose as a medium. There were also short explanaitoins of internet radio and pirate radios.

Afer this Dylan divided people in to three groups to discuss about the benefits of radio compared to other mediaforms, like the internet, print and television. Groups came up with really good opinions and thoughts about this particular subject. Also some good questions were raised about the definitions and future of these mediums. We looked at some statistics in the end and Dylan summarized this subject nicely, even though we were already running late with our schedule and he had to hurry a bit.

Continuing with the same theme Iina and Sindy showed us the video of YLE interview, where they actually went to the radio station and did a really nice interview with this radio broadcaster. She had really interesting views and information on radio in general, and it's way of adapting to changes. 

Everybody could take a quick break before we continued our presentation. Next it was Alberto's turn to tell everybody about recorded music history. He concentrated on the cultural side aswell as the techincal side of recorded music, and also had to make his part very fasy, since time was running out. Alberto also made some questions for the audience about the future. Caro continued with the recorded music theme, but added a different point of view to the history by explaining what the different recording eras were and how the actual recording was done. She showed as small clips of all this eras, where you could see the devices and ways.

In the end Riikka had a short presentation to tell people about the copyrights of recorded music. After this came time for the piracy-talk, which lead to a big discussion and seemed to interest a lot of people. We felt like it would've been great to continue this discussion for a long time, because people had such strong opinions and different points-of-views, but sadly the time was running out and Cai was already showing us threatning signs, so we had to end it there. Dylan added a small summary to the end.

Feedback: We got some good feedback from the feedback team and other students. Overall the presentation seemed to have gone well and we got some nice comments. Also there's always something to improve in, like eyecontact or less information on slides. They were good points, and we all agreed to this. Some thought we should've had less of the historical side of the subject and concentrate more on today's media. Some found the history-parts necessary, so the opinions differed a bit. Cai pointed out that we had missed one important part, called DXing. Somehow we had manage to miss this completely. Still, all in all the whole presentation seemed to have gone well!

The third student driven session - we have a pattern

The third session with student professors dealt with advertisement. It seems the students have agreed on a format for these sessions with an entertaining video intro, a rather traditional set of mini lectures covering the key topics with a funny group work in between. Let's see which team breaks this arrangement if any. (Not that I'm complaining - the format seems to function well. )

The team work assignments again were great fun

The teams complained they didn't have enough time to prepare

Regular professors should follow the example of student professors in
utilising all the resources there are for education, also the floor

The quality of most photos I took was below all criteria, so this time the Coke
professors Austeja and Edita represent visually the professor team. But
thanks also to Federico, Joel, Noora, Taehee and Robert for the very good
effort

This team had quite a challenge - advertisements are today everywhere, the areas to cover are wide and  multifaceted. More problems was created by the fact that the team was too large - seven professors.

The team got down to business very bravely, knowing that they could not keep the maximum of 90 minutes time frame and that many areas would be covered superficially or not at all. The lack of time might explain the lack of interactivity in this class.

The team kept its end up very well. One of the smart solutions was to give an overview - case study - of the advertisement strategies of Cola Cola. This gave both width and depth to the presentation Coca Cola being so well known and successful in massive, creative and well designed campaigns across the entire  platforms of advertisements.

One type of advertisements I would missed was social ads.

The feedback team once again did a very good job. I feel very comfortable with this course thanks to brilliant students committed to their assignmnents.

Organisations, Networks, Resources

In these class we discussed different type of organisations, networks and resources that media students and professionals should be aware of.

Trade Unions
First we had an overview of the history and activities of the trade unions. Below links to some Finnish unions worth looking at. The pages are not always in English, but the ERTO webpage gives a quite good list on reasons why people join the unions:
"10 reasons to join ERTO

• ERTO protects you interests in the labour market
• Influences labour legislation
• Provides training for members and shop stewards
• Offers support and assistance in the workplace through shop stewards
• Gives advice on employment contracts
• Provides legal assistance and free legal aid
• Pays unemployment benefits in case of lay-offs or unemployment
• Offers excellent insurance coverage
• Publishes a membership magazine 4 times per year
• Organizes union meetings and events and offers special discounts"

Viestinnän asiantuntijoiden ammattijärjestö
http://www.taj.fi/

Teatteri- ja Mediatyöntekijät ry
http://www.teme.fi/

Suomen Journalistiliitto in English
Union of Journalists in Finland
http://www.journalistiliitto.fi/en/

Federation of Special Service and Clerical Employees ERTO
http://www.erto.fi/english

Public sector and industry organisations
There are many international public and private organisations who collective statistics and data, also fund research about different professional fields. It is useful to have a look at them at times to know
the developments and trends of your field of business. Some examples:

OECD/Internet Economy
http://www.oecd.org/sti/interneteconomy/

European Audiovisual Observatory
http://www.obs.coe.int/

Online Publishers Association
http://opa-europe.org/

Professional organisations
The professional organisations of your field maintain very valuable information databases about events and reports of the field. One example of these is ACM, which has a vide range of SIGs, Specail Interest Groups. Maybe the most important for TAMK Media students is SIGGRAPH - Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, other relevant SIGs include SIGCHI - Computer-Human Interaction, SIGMM - Multimedia and SIGWEB - Hypertext and the Web.

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
http://www.acm.org/
and Siggraph
http://www.siggraph.org/

International Game Developers association
http://www.igda.org/
http://igda.fi/
http://score.igda.fi/

Neogames
http://www.hermia.fi/neogames/neogames_in_english/

Jobs and salaries
From Digibusiness.fi you can find most of the companies of the field in Finland, and on the Vierityspalkki.fi blog there are always a high number of jobs available, often in English.
Digibusiness.fi
http://www.digibusiness.fi/yritykset/

Vierityspalkki.fi (Scroll bar.fi)
http://vierityspalkki.fi/

Palkkavertailu.fi is a service where you can get an idea of salaries in different fields in Finland. The service is unfortunately in Finnish only, but you should know the key job titles in Finnish anyways.
Here you can find salaries of graphical designes:
http://palkkavertailu.com/palkka/graafinen%20suunnittelija

Festivals and Awards
Some festivals and awards have rich collections of interactive media projects on their websites worth to be looked at for inspiration.

Ars Electronica
http://www.aec.at/index_en.php

Pixelache
http://www.pixelache.ac/

The Webby Awards
http://www.webbyawards.com/index.php

World Summit Awards (Check also mobile and youth award)
http://wsis-award.org/


About Networks
I introduced some of my networks and explained how to do networking. It is not really about chatting over coctails and getting Facebook friends. Serious networking is serious and hard work. Exchanging business cards is only one step. After the first meeting you always have to contact the persons you really want to connect with, share some ideas about what you could do together, and if you have promised to send photos about your meeting send them! Always keep your promises!

I showed how and why I use LinkedIn as my main online tool to maintain and use the networks. Also showed what smart students have done.

My professional network map on LinkedIn Maps: (could show more in detail online as you can see on the image)
http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/share/Cai_Melakoski/

About Twitter
At the end of the session the students were divided in two parties: the Twitter users and non users. At this point the non-users were the majority.
The discussion was quite good, and Ziga Pavlovic demonstrated some great tools he uses to get more out of Twitter and other Social Media services.

Here you can find a guide made by IMPs last year.
http://tinyurl.com/ttvotwitter