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From DSC:
How will these types of technologies affect what we can do with K-12 education/higher education/workplace training and development? I’d say they will open up a world of new applications and opportunities for those who are ready to innovate; and these types of technologies will move the “Forthcoming Walmart of Education” along.
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Google Apps taking commercial vendors to school — from blogs.wsj.com by Michael Hickins
The Google Apps for Education application set is gaining traction among school districts across the country, in many cases replacing commercial vendors like Microsoft. Google signed up Oregon and Iowa for its suite of Web-based email and collaboration applications last May and June, respectively, and three other states have joined since then, most recently New York State, according to Shan Sinha, group product manager for Google Apps.
There are now more than 10 million students using Google Apps, including many of New York State’s 3.1 million student population, said Sinha. In addition to the applications used to do things like send email or edit documents collaboratively in real time, the suite includes access to third-party applications like Endgrade Gradebook and lesson plan software for teachers, and administration applications like Class.io or Thinkwave for IT administrators. The apps are available through the EDU category of the Google Apps marketplace.
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From DSC:
Cool Tools – Rapid e-Learning with Brainshark or Captivate — from Blackboard’s Next Level Learning blog
Let’s say your company has a new product update and you need to get the information out fast to your team of sales and product managers. Or maybe your company is growing quickly and you need to train a brand new team in a matter of days. Did a new certification just get released and you need to get information out to your association members ASAP? No problem! This is where Blackboard and rapid e-learning tools like Brainshark and Captivate come in.
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Biology professors use cloud computing to reach students — from The Chronicle by Tushar Rae
Five high-tech business trends — from Reuters
1. 4G Connectivity
2. Tablet Takeover
3. Apps Everywhere
4. Online Communications
5. Cloud Computing
IBM’s public cloud is near — from forbes.com by Quentin Hardy
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From DSC:
The other day, I created/posted the top graphic below. Take the concepts below — hook them up to engines that use cloud-based learner profiles — and you have some serious potential for powerful, global, ubiquitous learning! A touch-sensitive panel might be interesting here as well.
Come to think of it, add social networking, videoconferencing, and web-based collaboration tools — the power to learn would be quite impressive. Multimedia to the nth degree.
Then add to that online marketplaces for teaching and learning — where you can be both a teacher and a learner at the same time — hmmm…
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From DSC:
Then today, I saw Cisco’s piece on their Videoscape product line! Check it out!
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To “appify” old media, we need a new approach — from gigaom.com
The publishing industry is keeping its formerly inky fingers crossed that mobile devices, including the seemingly ubiquitous iPad, will save its behind. With the mobile market still in its infancy, it’s a tad early to be calling definitive trends, but there is one interesting tendency underway that may endure long-term — and that is the “appification” of media content.
This “appification” is being driven by one question — what is it that the audience wants? And the answer resoundingly is this: don’t just replicate the brand, give us something different.
Vuvox: A tool for digital storytelling — from Instructional Design Fusions by Dianne Rees
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Dianne mentions that Vuvox provides some helpful videos to get you started:
From DSC:
Steve Taffee makes some good points in his blog posting entitled, “What if your cloud evaporates?”
When vendors offering cloud-based apps and services suddenly no longer support or offer a product line or they begin charging for what was previously free, etc. — this creates a significant issue. Quoting Steve’s posting:
The off-again, on-again fate of the social bookmarking service Delicious led to considerable angst among its users, with the discussion among some educational technologists broadening to include all cloud-based services and scenarios of suddenly being without access to mission critical services.
This is another reason why I entitled this blog Learning Ecosystems — because all of the people, tools, and things that can contribute to our learning are often in a constant state of flux/change. So we are forced to adapt. However, this is easier said than done when suddenly 10,000 students can’t access application ABC or service XYZ on the cloud. This is a truly problematic situation. It won’t stop cloud computing from moving forward, but it would sure be helpful if vendors would be required to give some sort of “heads-up” to help us address this issue and find alternatives well in advance of having to make a switch.
DocVerse–Now Google Cloud Connect–Head Shan Sinha Talks About Web-Based Biz Apps — from kara.allthingsd.com
Apple Pushes Into the Cloud — from The Street
Towards a new-digital learning ecosystem based on autonomic Web services — from IEEEXplore Digital Library (emphasis below from DSC)
Abstract
With the latest advances in information and communication technologies, learners can now engage in continuous and rich learning-sessions that characterize today’s digital learning ecosystems. In these ecosystems, learning resources are pervasive and dynamic. A key challenge is to develop a scalable learning system that addresses the inherent complexity of learning sessions and cater for the specific needs and requirements of individual learners. In this paper, we adopt autonomic Web services to capture disparate learning resources and build an autonomic digital learning ecosystem that reconfigures itself in response to changes in the environment such as learners’ profiles, resource availabilities, and type of instructional material. The use of autonomic Web services permits to abstract the learning resources into distributed and uniformly structured objects and to record learners’ attributes into a packaged profile. These Web services sense the learning context and coach learners in their pursuit of constructive instructional sessions. A service-oriented architecture is proposed to connect learning resources, learners’ profiles, and contextual indicators. A prototype is, also, illustrated in the paper to show the feasibility of the proposed solutions.
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