Learning in ‘the Living [Class] Room’
From campustechnology.com by Mary Grush and Daniel Christian
Convergent technologies have the ability to support streams of low-cost, personalized content, both at home and in college.
From DSC:
Does Mindsy represent a new ingredient of — and/or model for — our future learning ecosystems?
Learning on demand.
Addendum from The Economist:
Mindsy’s website hosts more than 5,000 courses provided by vendors, many of whom are specialised in e-learning. Tens of thousands of users pay $29 a month to access as many courses as they would like in that time, a model some have compared to Netflix, a popular online film-rental service. Users pick and choose their courses, says Christian Owens, Mindsy’s founder, with many preferring to watch short modular videos on one topic before moving on to another area. Whereas TED provides lofty academia in easily-digestible formats, Mindsy prefers to focus on the practical. One of the most popular courses explains how to build a website. Swap the ankle boots on our TED Talks commuter for winklepickers, and the flannel shirt for a well-cut suit, and you have the young professional who makes up most of Mindsy’s user base.
Xbox, watch TV: inside Microsoft’s audacious plan to take over the living room — from by Nilay Patel
Can the Xbox One finally kickstart the TV revolution?
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Taking over your cable box also means the Xbox can overlay your TV signal with interesting information: a voice-activated channel guide, pop-up notifications when you get a Skype call and Xbox Live invites, a new NFL app that shows you real-time fantasy stats. You can even snap the TV window to the side of the screen while you play games. Your nasty cable interface is still there, but it allows the Xbox One to replace the cable box as the primary living-room entertainment device and go from gaming console to major new computing platform.
…
So the entire Xbox One is designed around what you might call a bold compromise: instead of directly integrating TV, the system hijacks it. Rather than plugging your cable box and Xbox into the TV separately, you first plug the cable box into the Xbox, and then the Xbox into the TV. Your cable box is still there, and still doing all the heavy lifting of providing TV, but now it’s doing it in service of the overall Xbox One experience. Smith describes it as “augmenting” the cable box experience in an effort to eliminate the friction of switching between games, apps, and TV.
From DSC:
The battle for the living room continues. I hope that we can eventually leverage these developments not just for entertainment, but for creating, contributing, sharing, absorbing, and discussing streams of content. The creative possibilities involving transmedia-based storytelling are exciting in this type of environment as well.
5 ways to reduce cognitive load in eLearning — from elearningindustry.com by by Matthew Guyan
Excerpt:
From DSC:
Thanks Matt for a well-written, concise, beneficial posting here. I especially appreciated the quick review of the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) as well as the 5 suggestions to reduce cognitive load (with the goal being to move content into peoples’ long term memories).

Streaming International: How the Internet has made TV a global medium — from sparksheet.com by Maura McWalters
Excerpt:
Television used to be one of America’s biggest exports. But the internet is bringing content from Asia, India and the Middle East into U.S. homes – and new advertising opportunities along with it, reports TV columnist Maura McWalters.