Tobias Ley is a professor of Digital Ecosystems at Tallinn University. With his research at the Institute of Informatics Education Innovation Centre, he connects two worlds: one the one hand HCI and on the other hand psychology, in which he has a PhD.

His project Learning Layers is the first of its kind in Estonian higher education institutions. Learning Layers is also a part of this year’s display at the EXPO science exposition. Can you explain what a digital ecosystem is? We look at digital technologies as eco-systems that consist of networks of persons, tools and contents. And we study how these systems evolve over time, and how knowledge is accumulated in them, for example if a new idea or a new tool is introduced. Essentially it is a way of looking at changes over time. An example would be how a Wiki can be used as a tool to support learning and teaching. The idea is that everyone brings their own background knowledge but they also construct the common knowledge together – the result being an article in that Wiki. And in the end, somehow, they have created a collective knowledge but also learned from this individually. In your articles, you have written about social tagging. Can you explain what we are doing when we use social tagging? In earlier times, we used to have libraries with different classification schemes to locate books and librarians to help us. Nowadays we have to rely on an emergent classification system that comes from people. We have many individuals with their own classification systems in mind and they contribute through social tagging to some kind of collective classification system. In a sense, it is a collective phenomenon emerging from many people contributing to it. How it happens and what kind of mental mechanisms happen when people use these systems are the kind of things we look at here. Social tagging might look as a very “democratic” process where everyone can contribute and some kind of a common knowledge can be generated. At the same time, this is widely used for advertising, promoting products, self-promotion etc. Yes. I think that one of the dangers of the recommender systems used by big companies is that they lead us to a so-called “recommender bubble”. That means that once the system has classified us into a certain group we only get recommendations suitable for that group. So the recommendations draw us into a narrow bubble and we lose the ability to find things that might maybe lead us into a different direction. What we want to do is to develop recommender systems that would not recommend you the same stuff again but suggest things that are not totally unfamiliar or useless to you, but a little bit off the road you usually take. How could an individual person avoid running deeper into this bubble? Unfortunately, we are often quite lazy so we use things that are easy to use and just displayed to us from the systems working in the background. At the moment, it is the big companies who decide on what we are recommended – we don’t realize it often and think that these are just some links displayed. But these are links displayed to us from millions of other potential links that could be displayed to us. For me these systems like Google are extremely powerful without us realizing it. That is why I think that in the end we need to change the system. People could have a lot more control in choosing the recommendation and diversity. We should build systems that give a higher level of control to the user. Let us talk about your project Learning Layers. You are aiming to improve the learning experience through technology in this project. The EU has an initiative to promote technology-based learning strategies in industries that are not working with computers all the time. Therefore, we have tackled this new challenge to support construction workers and health care workers who are using digital tools in a very different way than say, engineers or consultants. They are very mobile, working at different places, using technologies in different ways. Can you give an example of how construction workers could benefit from learning with the aid of technology? It is quite hard to imagine how a worker on a construction site could use tech devices! When we started the project, we also had the preconception that construction workers are very low tech and do not want to use those tools. Turned out that in fact that they are actually using mobile devices quite heavily to coordinate with others. There are unexpected things constantly happening on the construction site and these are solved over the mobile phone. In addition, they take pictures because they want to document who is responsible for certain issues, or ask questions from others. What we were seeking were ways to introduce learning into that process. Because currently it is very one-on-one based, meaning if a problem occurs it is solved usually between two persons and nobody beside those two parties learns or benefits from this occurrence. Therefore, we have created a tool called Ach So! This is a system where you can share videos with others; connect the video to a particular location or a tool or material, so that others can discover it. We could improve knowledge sharing in this way. It is already, to some extent, going on, but we can bring it to a larger scale. Could some aspects of Learning Layers be implemented in the university and higher education learning?  Definitely. I think there is a trend now in all of the education system to go away from this emphasis on the institution, where we try to improve the learning at universities, for example. In fact, what we should be doing is improving the lifelong learning process. We should make sure that that what we teach here at the university, helps people in the workplace to perform better or to make a career. This should be our focus. For example, here we are training teachers who, when they go back to school, apply some of the things. Systems and technology that they own could enhance this process rather than having them take a course in some course environment at the university, go to school, and use nothing of it. Instead, if they have a blog where they can reflect on what they have learned and reflect on how to apply it, this whole cycle can be supported much better. Then when they leave the university, they take their blog and continue to use it. Estonia is generally known for our good IT skills, but at the same time, we are criticised for a low level of innovation and creativity in our school system. Do you think that technology could somehow aid us here? Yes, absolutely. One of the big projects we are working on is Digital Textbooks and of course, there was this strategy by the Estonian ministry to say that the publishers should publish electronic content. What happened was that the publishers got worried about content sharing – maybe the same would happen to them as with the music industry! However, I think that what we should try to see is the new opportunities that this would give. Again, looking at this as an ecosystem, the teacher is already not using just the one book, but using many other resources: Internet, games, and simulations. We should try to break up the monolithic textbook into smaller pieces and give the teachers the opportunity to mix and match, taking the content from the publishers, but matching it with other things they find and then share it with other teachers. This is in my opinion one thing that digitalisation brings – you can break up monolithic contents, mix and match, share with colleagues and even extend this knowledge. You can also include the students in this process to foster creativity, so even students can now produce content in this learning ecosystem and contribute much more creatively to their learning process. Your background is in psychology and now you deal with research that connects psychology with IT. In Estonia, interdisciplinarity is something that academic research is still sometimes struggling with. What is your impression – how to bridge the different areas of research? I think the recent structural changes at Tallinn University have been going in the right direction. Even the former rector of Tartu University has acknowledged that this is the right thing for us. Science is becoming more and more specialised, so Estonia needs to make a decision on where our strength lies. Estonia is a small country, so the question really is, will we be able to sustain, fund and support those increasingly specialized areas – can we be excellent in the areas that we are trying to compete in with the whole world? That costs a lot of money. For a small country, a better strategy is to focus more on interdisciplinary, problem-based areas of research, because people here are much closer, it is much easier to work together. For Estonia, it is much easier to bring people together and break divides, build up strengths in collaboration, rather than trying to compete in the highly specialized fields. However, I guess this is a question for the Estonian Science Strategy development at ETAG. At the same time, I do not want to say that highly specialized basic research is unnecessary, of course it is. We need to have good connections between those two. We need institutions that could “speak the language” of basic disciplinary academic research, but also understand the application side of things and understand the needs and problems that people are actually facing. Questions asked by: Maria Jäärats