This is becuase I’m working as a coach (my official job title is mentor) in Laurea Business Ventures, at Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki. The basic idea is (and I’m not fully prepped myself yet, having only just started) that rather than going to boring lectures about marketing, finance and accounting, sales and so on, the students actually get to live these things. The students are encouraged to work in groups on on practical business-related projects, overseen and guided by coaches, or mentors, such as myself.

Laurea Business Ventures

Personally I think this is brilliant, and I’m proud to be part of something so revolutionary and original. The students benefit from real life business experience, which will give them practical skills and confidence to take into their careers. They are also guided in more theoretical aspects through guest lectures from business people from partner companies, and guidance from tutors within the context of their project work. The difference is that the theory is mostly learned through practice, with any gaps that that can’t provide being filled in with lectures or theoretical guidance, and the new knowledge is used directly and reinforced when it is applied in the projects, rather than being forgotten over the years as it would be in a normal business degree programme, which often leave students with little knowledge and no practical experience to back up their qualification.

Of course, there are possible downsides. While experience of academic work and knowledge of its principles is not required for this kind of degree, and quite probably not needed for the future careers of its graduates, some of the students may want to go on to take a Master’s degree at some point in the future. If they do, they may find that they have a lot of catching up to do in terms of the academic standards required for said qualification. As there are no graduates from the programme yet, it is hard to tell what kind of impact this kind of discrepancy will have, if any at all. However, as long as students applying for the programme are aware of what they’re letting themselves into (i.e. as long as this is made clear in the publicly available literature about the programme), this shouldn’t be an issue.

So far, I and many others both within and outside of the programme are pretty impressed with the whole thing, but as the programme is only a year old, it’s genuine benefit hasn’t realistically been road-tested yet. Will this avant garde educational method provide the goods in the long term? Only time will tell…

As I said, I like Spotify, but without some improvements in usability, I can see people getting fed up, particularly as the next wave of online music services come along. Here are just a few of the issues I’ve noticed from my personal use of the service, along with examples:

Information: Information about artists is often incorrect. For example, if you believed everything you saw on Spotify (and didn’t know better), you might think that Muse were a newly formed band, who have been very busy this year – almost all of their singles and a few of their albums are incorrectly given as being released in 2009, including Origin of Symmetry and all of the singles from their first and latest albums! You might also be mistaken into thinking that Longview is a bluegrass band (maybe they are, but not the Longview that is featured on Spotify) and that Mansun’s debut album Attack of the Grey Lantern, which was released in 1997 and which I personally bought in about 2000, was released later than any of their other albums, in 2007.

Incorrect labeling and listing: Artists’ tracks and albums are not always listed in the correct places. One instance I found of this was when listening to Aphex Twin, one of my favourite artists – while drifting into a pleasant reverie to the trippy-techno sensibilities of this seminal artist, my ears were suddenly ambushed by what turned out to be some drippy Christian rock (you know the type, twangy guitar, no melody, lyrics in praise of the good Lord disguised as love songs).  The band is called AFX Worship, for those who wanted to know. And that isn’t the only example – according to Spotify’s description, Marion are one of the might-have-beens of the mid-90s Brit Pop explosion… but wait there, what’s this? It’s a Finnish female solo soft-pop singer…oh no, wait, it is one of the might-have-beens of the mid-90s Brit Pop explosion after all!! Well, I suppose it’s economical to list both artists with the same name under the same description.

User unfriendliness: When you use a music service, one thing you want is freedom to choose how you listen to the music. While I applaud Spotify’s use of a social networking platform to allow users to share playlists, one thing that you can’t do, and that you are pretty likely to want to do, is shuffle your playlists. Picture the scene: You have a party, you want to set Spotify up to play your favourite tracks, but obviously you don’t want to listen to whole albums at a time because not everyone has exactly the same music taste as you, and some might object to hearing the whole Slipknot discography in one go. In fact, I daresay it might end up being a pretty lonely party. But you’re willing to risk throwing in one album of that obscure artist you love, peppered throughout the night’s entertainment. Simple, right? You just select your playlist and then hit shuffle, and the rest will be done for you. Wrong. Actually you have two choices – either selecting the albums and tracks you want on your playlist and then shuffling them manually by clicking and dragging one at a time into a vaguely random order, or literally selecting the tracks in the order you want them played, which again will be vaguely random at best. Either of these options is going to take almost as much time as the playlist will be running. There is a shuffle button, but all it does is shuffle the list of tracks that will play when your selection has been played – your selection will play in the order you queue it – this is something to do with active and inactive playlists, which you can read more about here.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Spotify – in fact it’s quite good all in all, apart from the odd time when it doesn’t have the track you really want to listen to, but I’ll let them off seeing as there’s probably not a lot they can do about that. I just think the service has a long way to go before it will be the finished product it could be. I daresay that if the major record labels (without whose approval in the form of licensing deals, no such service will survive) had realised much earlier that many of its predecessors could have been equally profitable for them, the state of online music services would already be much healthier than it is now.

To make my point a little clearer, I will take a few aspects of the book and relate them to what I consider to be their modern-day equivalents:

• In the book, the inhabitants of Oceania are subjected to the constant knowledge that they are at war and the fear that comes with that, although they are not expected to understand the reasons or know much about what is going on – all they are expected to do is know that “the enemy” is in the wrong and that they should support the war because it will lead to “freedom”.
• People are not free to have their own thoughts, emotions or opinions, and they are certainly not permitted to show any negative feelings towards “the party” – the apparatus that is in power and has control over the society it governs. If they break these rules, they can be taken away at whim, cross-examined and tortured. In some countries, including the USA and the UK, protesting in groups and about certain matters is not permitted, and police have the authority to detain people indefinitely without bringing charges under various “anti-terrorist” or “home protection” acts. In Guantanamo Bay, innocent people are subjected to torture every day without any charges being brought against them or any justification given. These people also forego the rights to an attorney and to a fair trial.
• The “constant video surveillance” issue is one that has been noticed by people, and it’s well known that Orwell is responsible for the title of one of our favourite TV shows, Big Brother. However, it is not just the video surveillance. Data protection laws are getting constantly weaker, with companies and governments gaining more and more rights to intrude into our personal communications, especially for example online.
• The people in 1984 are expected to believe false information that they see and hear in the news (I’m looking at you, Fox, CNN and practically every other US news network), and if something doesn’t suit the “party”, the records are changed to reflect the new “reality”. For example, after publishing an inconvenient story that several of the apparent hi-jackers of the 9/11 planes were in fact “alive and well”, the BBC, possibly under pressure from the FBI (don’t be surprised by anything) later backed down from this claim, stating that “The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names”. Right. If you like, you can check here for the original article, and here for the backtrack.
• When people become part of the institution, called the “party” in the book, they tend to blindly following the rules and believe the hype without realising or even considering that the position they are taking is illogical, contradictory or that it simply doesn’t make sense. Similarly, in today’s society, once people belong to an institution, whether it be employment by a company or government agency or marriage, they toe the party line, without for a second considering whether they are right or wrong. This can range from civil servants trying to get you to fill out forms that are of no practical use just because “it’s the rules” and they need it for their files, employees of companies foregoing common sense in dealing with your issues because the system doesn’t give them the authority to think for themselves, representatives of companies claiming that their products are the best, only to move to a competing company and publicly laud their products, husbands and wives of politicians publicly defending their spouses during fraud trials, even though everyone can plainly see that they were guilty.
• In 1984, one of the many instrumental forms of control is the “two minute hate”, in which inhabitants are expected to hurl insults at a screen showing Goldstein, an activist with a mythical status who stands against everything that the controlling party stands for, spewing his anti-establishment opinions. In many ways, Goldstein could be likened to modern-day characters such as Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden – we have been expected to hate them as personifications of evil, while in reality knowing very little about them.
• Because members of society in 1984 are effectively not allowed to think for themselves, any cultural products (such as songs and books) are written using complex machinery. Whereas this is not quite the case in our society, it is quite clear that many movies and records, especially those that are made by large corporations and that the general public seem to lap up (seemingly without really thinking much about it) are produced to fairly simplistic and repeated formulae that are easy to consume and do not require much brainpower to enjoy.

Considering that 1984 was written in the late 1940s, it is pretty remarkable that, whether he expected or not, Orwell managed to put his finger on the mark so well. The only advice I could give anyone who chances to read this post is, don’t be so smug in the future when thinking about how closely this and similar books reflect the world we live in!

The only vaguely legitimate argument I could think of is that the mp3 file has to be altered to be used as a ringtone (as it has to be cropped the thirty seconds, or whatever it is that the phone rings for). However, while permission (and possibly payment) may be required to do this, it does not create the necessity to do it in the first place – normally a phone should be able to just play the first X seconds of the track. Admittedly if you wanted to use the middle X seconds, you would have to make some alterations, but even these can be done without the necessity to change the file format and pay Apple.

Pear-shaped for Apple?

And that, really, seems to be the bottom line – Apple want to make more money, by convincing you that if you can afford the horrendous price of an iPhone, you can afford to pay a bit more to have your favourite songs as ringtones. It doesn’t really surprise me that Apple is trying to squeeze out every penny they can though. I mean, this is the company that, after blatantly getting away with breaching Apple Records’ Trademark, tried to make a formal objection against New York city for breaching theirs. Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the Big Apple been around a little longer than this electronics company?! I read somewhere that Apple is trying to shut down (even legit) attempts to get around this irritating feature of the iPhone, and there have even been online petitions against it. I say, “Apple – get with the programme and give your customers what they’re paying for – a phone they can customise and use as they wish, rather than being trapped into the way you want them to use it!”

Anyway, enough of my inane ramblings – perhaps I should divulge a little about myself, at least a teaser, for those unacquainted (or, in the more likely event that I am the only person to read this, a sort of literary time-capsule for a future incarnation of me to look back upon and see who I was when this blog began).

I am a teacher by trade, I suppose. I do other things, but that is my profession. I’m currently lecturing in the degree programmes in Music and Media Management and International Business at JAMK University of Applied Sciences in Jyväskylä, Finland (www.jamk.fi). I should probably explain this institution’s bizarre-looking name, for those unfamiliar. The Finnish name is Jyväskylän Ammattikorkeakoulu, which is abbreviated to JAMK, and to avoid confusion with Jyväskylä University, the official English name has recently changed from Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences to JAMK University of Applied Sciences. Which effectively means “Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences University of Applied Sciences”. Oh yes, and as an aside, thanks to those wonderful policy-makers the official acronym is JUA, not JUAS as you might expect it to be – the reason? JUAS apparently sounds like “you ass”. I’ve said JUAS plenty of times, and as a mother-tongue speaker of English, that has never crossed my mind. If you say JUAS in a Finnish accent, it might sound like someone saying “you ass” in a Finnish accent, but seeing as most Finnish people call it JAMK anyway, I wouldn’t see that as a problem.

Again, I digress. Back to me. I like to think that I am a fun-loving person, with a wonderfully wide-range of interests. As someone once said (about themselves sadly, not about me, but I’m going to steal it anyway) “I am fascinated by many things, but passionate about few of them”. I think that sums me up pretty well. I live with my girlfriend of three years, Katri, a Finn, and I travel back to my country of origin (good old Blighty) about twice a year, just to let my family and friends know that I am indeed still alive.

I daresay that my personality, hobbies and interests will emerge through the course of my posts to this blog, so I will decline to say any more at this stage. However, if you are reading it would be wonderful if you could send me a comment or say hello, just so I know! Until next time then…