e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Massive Catch-Up Issue #1413 (Games, Virtual Worlds, banking concepts and more)

Custom Laser-engraved Moleskines: me want

Google announces OpenSocial 0.8: more data portability

Scientists to Build Concept Bank: "Information scientists announced an agreement last month on a “concept bank” programmers could use to build thinking machines that reason about complex problems at the frontiers of knowledge—from advanced manufacturing to biomedicine." ...do you get a receipt for ideas that you deposit in a concept bank? (Link to the Ontology Summit 2008)

Web 2.0 in Business: Nice article from CIO magazine urging people to get out there are try some 2.0 stuff "My advice to all executives today is just get in there. Set up accounts at Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Dopplr and Twitter. You can't begin to understand the real value (and therefore what the right approach is for your company and your customers) until you experience it for yourself."

Ben 10 Alien Force Game Creator: So I find my 8 year old son hunched over his computer the other day and I say - wat'cha doin? And he says  - "Building a game" - and he includes that little note of disdain like somehow I should have intuited that from his posture of something. This tool is very basic but its so simple that an 8 year old is figuring out things like play balance and testing.

Yahoo! releases BrowserPlus: Extend the browser...(news coverage)...not quite ready for prime time but another in the 'extend the browser to the desktop' wars....as if on cue, here is a bit about Google furthering its efforts in this area...

Text2MindMap: I love me some mindmaps...

The MFA Is the New MBA: "Getting admitted to Harvard Business School is a cinch. At least that's what several hundred people must have thought last year after they applied to the graduate program of the UCLA Department of Art-and didn't get in. While Harvard's MBA program admitted about 10% of its applicants, UCLA's fine arts graduate school admitted only 3%. Why? An arts degree is now perhaps the hottest credential in the world of business."  ...hmmm, design anyone?!?

Grockit Gets $8M Series B for "Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game"

Updated virtual world data for Q2 2008: Nice visual of the virtual world universe...

Virtual Worlds Management Industry Forecast 2008

MPEG Issues Call for Requirements for "Information exchange with Virtual Worlds" Interoperability Project

Mark Kingdon: For Second Life "Inworld collaboration is going to be a killer application."

Vollee to include iPhone support for their mobile Second Life client: Well, that should be cool over 3G...

Wireless Social Networking To Generate $2.5 Trillion By 2020: Geez! That's with a freaking "T"!

Will Thalheimer and the Answer to Who Learns What from Where

---First, apologies if I cover ground pounded by others elsewhere, but I'm still catching up from the Guild Annual Gathering (have some more on that coming soon).

Will Thalheimer just brilliantly asked a great question - who do you learn from? He asked this of retail clerks but you have to wonder how different the results would be for the typical office worker population. Will highlights several key results on his blog; a couple of them are:

• People learn the most from those who they work closely with.
• People learn the most from their experience doing the job.
• People learn the most from their self-initiated efforts at learning.

Is it just me or are these things that seem to be fairly self-evident? The question then has to become, if you believe that they are self-evident, what the hell happened to our design and budget priorities? Seriously, look at the chart people - e-learning comes in at "Learn Some"...square in the middle. Look at the power in the hands of the 'head clerks' in the individual departments. How much of your corporate training is focused in a 'train the trainer' mode of those people?

Maybe we all need to read SWAY: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior and try to understand how we got here.

Big Basket of Stuff #3..the last for today...and short

Adobe's Kevin Lynch on AIR's Open-Source Road to the Desktop (WIRED):"This week, Adobe released version 1.0 of it's Adobe Integrated Runtime (or AIR for short) a mechanism that allows applications created for the internet to run on the desktop completely independent of the web browser and across multiple operating systems. You can read our initial coverage of AIR's release on the Compiler blog."

        BookletCreator - is a free online tool that allows to create a booklet from a PDF         document. It reorders pages so that after printing and folding the pages you get         a small book.

iotum: "FREE Conference Calls is the perfect conference call service for Facebook users to organize a business conference call, or hold a family call. Every conference call becomes a Facebook event complete with invites, attendees, calendar entry, reminders, plus SMS and moderation features. Try FREE Conference Calls!"

Big Basket of Stuff #2...in which even amnesiacs can remember games...students get connected and wikis get adopted..

<must resist urge to open more links...getting weak, must hurry...>

Readers should get game-literate - Far from spelling the end of proper storytelling, video games point towards its future: "When the popular novel was as new an idea as video games, the great and good were certain, as they were with early cinema, that no sophistication could come from this prose business, especially the sort of filth Samuel Richardson scribbled about."

Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normals and Amnesics: " Robert Stickgold caused 17 different people to have the same dream. In doing so, he added to evidence that the purpose of sleep is to process information -- to take the jumble of a day's events, filter it, and send important impressions to the brain's memory centers. (Tetris Effect)

Special Reports 10 Emerging Technologies 2008 (Technology Review): ..includes Offline Web applications, Connectomics, and reality mining.

Connected: The Movie: "What might a university look like with a fully deployed program of converged devices like the iPhone? Connected is one possible vision. This fictional day-in-the-life account highlights some of the potential benefits in a higher education setting when every student, faculty, and staff member is "connected." Though the applications and functions portrayed in the film are purely speculative, they're based on needs and ideas uncovered by our research - and we've already been making strides to transform this vision of mobile learning (mLearning) into reality."

The Top 10 Free Educational Video Games (John Rice)

Game programming tools (Tony Forster )

21 days of Wiki Adoption (Stewart Mader)

Wikis at Work: Benefits and Practices by Jeanne C. Meister: "According to a Gartner forecast, 50 percent of U.S. corporations will have implemented wikis by 2009. And they’ll only grow in interest as more “Net generation” employees enter your company."

99 Sites ALL Designers Must Know About

Web Game Builder: "...your best resource on the Internet for learning how to create your own online games. Whether you are here to participate in our forums, read a tutorial or you want to join our community game development project, webgamebuilder.com has something to offer."

This graphical history of Sharepoint made me dizzy (Sam Lawrence): "I know I talk about Frankensuites all the time but rarely do I get to peer into the belly of one and see the mania."

Retiring Baby Boomers + Gen X/Millenials + Technology=Virtual Mentoring?: "It occurs to me this morning that with the impending wave of retiring Baby Boomers and a mounting need for Gen X and Millenials to receive ongoing guidance, technology-enabled mentoring might fill a real gap."

Big Basket of Stuff #1: Wikis, IMs, and 3D

Pardon this hodge podge but I have waaayyy too many items to get through them individually and quite frankly the number of tabs I have open is getting a little scary.

Agencies Share Information By Taking a Page From Wikipedia: "That's right, the Office of Management and Budget, where caution and precision rule, has embraced Wikipedia as a model, hosting an online place where federal officials can swap information and ideas outside traditional boundaries."

Meebo announces new features and partners: "First off, they have introduced a developer API for their Meebo Rooms product. This will allow people to integrate a Meebo Room into their own Web site. Meebo has said that this API will "...further accelerate the widespread adoption of Meebo rooms." Meebo is hoping that Web site owners will take this as an opportunity to build a community."
**Seriously, I've been using Meebo since it came out and it is growing up nicely....be sure to check out the "Room" feature...

Make3D turns your vacation photos into 3D worlds: "Ever wish you could recreate the effect of those neat multilens 3D cameras without having to buy the hardware? Lucky for you there's some cool 3D technology coming out of Stanford called Make3D. The service uses machine learning to go over your photograph and recreate depth and perspective in three dimensions."

SpeakLike translates chatting as you go: "It appears like an ordinary chat application as you type. Choose which languages you want to speak in. You can see what you're typing in your own language and what the other person is seeing translated. If a word or phrase is more complex, SpeakLike will go to a human translator and make sure it's accurate. The company says the more you use it the smarter it becomes and the faster it will return results in the future."

Xtranormal: If you always wanted to direct: "Xtranormal makes a fun tool for making animated shows with cartoon characters. It could also be a tool for making machinima, if the company manages to license characters from game companies."

Seven Strategies for Implementing a Successful Corporate Wiki:

Catch Up Post: Virtual Worlds Saving Lives, Experience Design and an RFI for an MMO for NASA (acronym attack!)

NewsGator RSS products now free: No really. In case you missed this in the past like 2 weeks and you happen to be looking to try out a suite of great aggregator products read this story or visit this site.

Is Pedagogy Getting in the Way of Learning? Read it and then read the comments.

Experience-Enabling Design: An approach to elearning design: From a 2004 post from elearning post. I need to read this one carefully, but I like this quote; "Every     time we use a product or a service, we essentially consume the experience     it enables. The product is not a thing. The service is not an act. They are     vehicles for the experience that their designer intends to bring about."

Review of Ted Castranova's latest book: Exodus to the Virtual World

NMC gives away free copies of Virtual Reality Room for Second Life.

Staying on the SL trip, try AR Second Life (that's augmented reality). This story from New World Notes lays out the attraction here nicely (also shown in a couple of YouTube videos); "it's a technology that lets you export and merge SL video with real world video in such a way that the image appears in proper perspective, and proportion-- in other words, to make Second Life elements convincingly look like they're part of the real world."

...'cuz it's only been reported 10,000 times; "Boy Saves Sister from Moose Attack with Skills Learned in Warcraft Video Game" and its corollary "Man Imitates America's Army, Saves Lives"

Some 20,000 soldiers a year may be trained with Sandia-enhanced simulation video game: "ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —Some 20,000 soldiers a year may soon be trained in interpersonal skill building and cross-cultural awareness using a videogame recently developed by researchers from Sandia and BBN Technologies. Funded through Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the nine-month project resulted in the instantiation of Sandia’s adaptive thinking training methodology that prepares warfighters for difficult situations in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, says project lead and scientist Elaine Raybourn."

(RFI) DEVELOPMENT OF A NASA-BASED MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE LEARNING GAME: "A NASA-based MMO built on a game engine that includes powerful physics capabilities could support accurate in-game experimentation and research. It should simulate real NASA engineering and science missions in a medium that is comfortable and familiar to the majority of students in the United States today. A NASA-based MMO could provide opportunities for students to investigate STEM career paths while participating in engaging game-play. Through a NASA-based MMO, students will gain insight into a wide range of exciting career opportunities and be encouraged to make educational choices that lead them into STEM fields of study and eventually the STEM careers needed to fulfill NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration. Learning Technologies is seeking input on how to accomplish those goals."

A Collection of Top Ten Lists / Predictions Posts (feel free to add your own!)

I'm a big collector of these.....please feel free to add your own favorites in the comments section.....

The first stop MUST be the Learning Circuits Blog "Big Question"

The top Enterprise Web 2.0 stories of 2007 (Dion Hinchcliffe)
Highlight: Widgets, gadgets, and roaming desktops on the Web showed enterprises how portals should really work as well as be dis-intermediated.

12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008 (Dion Hinchcliffe)
Highlight: Unstructured information from blogs and wikis will proliferate, driving demand for solutions to extract and consolidate business information.

The 10 best downloads of 2007

2007 Edublog Award Winners and of course, Stephen Downes' Not the eduBlog Award Winners List

The Top Inventions Of 2008
Highlight: "By the end of 2008 the Project Gutenberg Library will be as large -- or larger--than the average United States Public Library."

10 New Years Resolutions Every Geek Should Make
Highlight: "On the other hand, folks with the Apple laptops are always expressing their condolences and telling me how super-great Leopard is. They’re finally starting to wear me down. I want to be one of the shiny happy people now. The Hare Krishna act has finally worn me down. At some point next year, I suppose I’m going to need to drink the Apple Kool-Aid, and hope the increased productivity is worth the sack to my identity as a PC guy."

Top 10 educational stories of 2007 - connectivism!
Highlight: "I can choose. And I have to choose. I can’t be everywhere. Every educator is having to decide where they will stake ground. To twitter or not to twitter."

Web achievements 101: Things to do before you die
Highlight: "Get publicly slammed by Dave Winer. If you don't know who Dave Winer is, he probably doesn't know who you are either. Winer, who helped create the Web standards for podcasting, blogging and RSS is well known for writing or saying snarky things ranging from people to products."

Wow....Has it been almost a month?! Let's Talk 2008...

Geez. I can't believe its been almost a month since I blogged. I can't remember the last break I took like that. It is tough to think about the catching up that faces me after a break like that but what the heck, I'll take a shot. So I started looking around for how to jump back in and I came across The Big Question from the Learning Circuits Blog...."What are your predictions for learning for 2008?"

Turns out I'm feeling a little grumpy as I start back into blogging, so I'll say that as far as "learning" goes...I predict humans will keep doing essentially the same way they have for thousands of years. Learning won't change people...the way we seek to address it as it relates to our specific corporate, personal, and academic requirements will. Let's pretend though that the question was...what are your predictions for the e-learning/learning/training industry for 2008?

Continuing along the grumpy line (even though I am secretly pleased that my 2007 predictions in eLearn Magazine got a (generous) B- from Stephen Downes!), I'll say that:

1. Organizations will continue to fail to appreciate the strategic and differentiating nature that rich training and learning opportunities provide, that part of that failure will continue to rest with training departments' inability to articulate their alignment with the larger business goals.

2. We will all continue to go to a lot of conferences and will probably fail to implement about 90% of the great ideas that the discussions and networking generate there and we will all feel this as a vague dissatisfaction but we will be unable to articulate this to a degree that we (or more likely, an interested vendor) will be able to design a better alternative. That part of this failure is driven by the fact that the preservation of the current conference model has so much money tied up it and that the majority of the folks putting on these conferences (many of which I attend and support myself) have trouble seeing past not only the conference model but the business model as well.

3. Somewhere between OpenSocial and Facebook API, we will find a way to link the multitude of social networks that are fracturing our awareness.

4. We will continue to underestimate the differences and difficulty in bringing game design and instructional design together to exploit the best of both camps.

5. We will continue to think about Web 2.0 tools and methodologies as primarily technological issues as opposed to mainly cultural and organizational issues.

6. The Catch-All Technology Prediction: Memory gets cheaper, USB and SD card capacities will get ridiculously large (I mean we can already get an entire LMS on an USB drive right?), Vista will continue to suck, Leopard/Boot Camp/Parallels will continue to win new converts over to Apple and I will wonder about the place of e-learning specific standards and specs in a Web-based world dominated by other Web standards and best practices (SOAP, AJAX, etc).

...and Catch Up #3...we're just getting warmed up!

EA and BP Collaborate to Include Climate Education in SimCity Societies: REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) and BP have collaborated to include climate change education within SimCity™ Societies, the next iteration in the genre-defining city-building franchise that has sold more than 18 million games to date. The collaboration brings together world-class game building skills and industry expertise on energy, electricity production and greenhouse gas emissions to highlight the impact of electricity generation on the emissions of carbon dioxide that are linked to climate change. The low-carbon electricity choices and monitoring of SimCity’s carbon emissions provide an entertaining, fully-integrated and accurate look at some of the causes and some of the major solutions available to combat rising levels of carbon and to help address the threat of global warming. SimCity Societies will be available at retailers across North America and Europe November 15.

Truphone routes iPhone calls over WiFi:  Truphone works on mobile phones that have WiFi and can route your calls over the data network instead of your cellular connection. Pretty useful for saving money, especially for international roaming, when calls cost a fortune. The big news is that the company has managed to port Truphone to the iPhone. So now you can make really good use of that WiFi radio in it. In the demo, the presenter showed a call from a phone with no SIM card in it.

Internet2 races 10 times faster: The research-oriented network has just boosted its network speeds to 100 gigabits per second, the Associated Press and others reported this week. That's a 10-fold increase from the theoretical 10Gpbs network connections offered today to its university, research and commercial members.

Predictify pays you to change the future: Predictify is a survey engine cleverly masquerading as a prediction market. On the site, users can answer questions that test their predictive abilities in various fields. If they prove to be right, they can win actual real money. Users even get a small payout for answering a question if they end up being wrong.

Google's International Cleanup Weekend puts maps to good use: (***I know its late but you could still clean something up) Google has just announced the latest project to bubble up out of Google Earth--International Cleanup Weekend, a coordinated global effort taking place Saturday, October 13, and Sunday, October 14, 2007, at locations throughout the world. Who's doing the organizing? You are, naturally, using Google Maps to plot cleanup sites. What began as an internal corporate eco-venture for local involvement has now been embraced by communities in 15 countries. Google Earth's outreach team is asking groups of six to 10 people to pick a modest project close to home, do it, then share their accomplishments by posting photos and videos to the team's Google Map.

Silverlight goes 1.0, adds Linux support: Silverlight is a cross-platform Web browser plug-in for displaying interactive Web applications and an alternative to Adobe's Flash Player, which has become the de facto standard for video on the Web. The Novell deal will result in a Linux version of Silverlight called Moonlight. Microsoft is also producing a version of Silverlight for Mac OS X.

...and Catch Up #2...and a question....

Google Alerts: what they are, and how to use them: (from Webware) So this is where someone would usually say , "Hey, these can be 'Learning Alerts'" ...or some other such nonsense. The truth is that  these alerts are a handy tool and one of the purposes the tool could serve is to help you track things you want to know more about.

Web 2.0 Document Compendium from Ed Yourdon

Vixy.net: This service allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online.

Nintendo's Wii gets Fit: "Wii Fit" goes on sale in Japan on December 1 for about 8,800 yen or $75, using a pressure-sensing "balance board" that looks like a bathroom scale and reads movement. It can be used to play virtual sports such as soccer and ski jumping, as well as training staples such as yoga and aerobics.

Google buys Finnish social-networking company: Google Inc. continued its acquisition spree with the purchase of Jaiku Ltd., a Finnish company that offers a social-networking service similar to Twitter. Jaiku describes the service as one that lets users share their "activity streams," which it defines as "a log of everyday things as they happen." An activity stream can include recommendations, details of events the user is attending, photos and questions. Users can post new items online, via instant message and on mobile phones using text message.

YouTube lets users map videos onto Google Earth: Google is offering a new YouTube video overlay on top of its Google Earth three-dimensional visualization software, which combines satellite images, maps, terrain and buildings of the world. By allowing YouTube creators to geographically locate their videos on a map of the world, Google enables Internet users to zoom in on locations around the planet and watch YouTube tied to that place.

***So here is one of the things that I'm starting to notice about the stories I'm posting here  - Google can now create Alerts (including video content), create 'activity streams', and allow users to map content onto locations onto a 3D geographical space. Are we seeing that level of innovation in the "learning/training" space? If so, where? ...and if not, is it just a matter of money?