IBM’s Watson Jeopardy stunt unleashes a third great cycle in computing — from blogs.forbes.com by Mark Mills

The news is under Watson’s hood, which signals a new era of intuitive computing and wide horizons for IBM. The implications are far-reaching despite some misguided sniffs of derision from artificial intelligence cognoscenti, and are well beyond a single column. But let’s briefly consider two things; what it means for companies in IBM’s ecosystem, and what it implies about the emerging era of intuitive computing and The Cloud.

Watson is not the epitome but the beginning of the next era of intuitive computing. Sitting by itself, stationary in a studio, Watson did well.  Thrown in to the real world it would do less well with context-laden questions you might ask, far from home, about your flight delayed by storms.

Also see:

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.

Also see:

  • Brainshark Mobile & QR Tags: An Exciting Combination
    QR Codes 101
    :
    QR (“quick response”) Code or Tag is a square barcode that you can scan with your smartphone’s camera with the help of a QR Code app to immediately launch a link or URL on the mobile phone’s web browser.   Said another way, QR Codes are a simple way to connect the offline world with the online world. This represents a huge new point of delivery for Brainshark video presentations. Why is this important?  …Because you want your content available when and where your audience is primed for it.

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


Millions of TV’s (as completely converged/Internet-connected devices) = millions of learners?!?

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…

.

.

From DSC:
Then today, I saw Cisco’s piece on their Videoscape product line! Check it out!

.

.


.

.

.

.

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

vuvox.com.

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.


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.

Also see:

Apple launches Mac App Store today — from Apple.com; also see this article at FastCompany.com

Mac App Store - Launched on January 6, 2011

Excerpt from the FastCompany.com article:

The arrival of the App Store is causing much debate online about the changing nature of PC software. Much as the iOS App Store is the key to the iPhone and iPad’s success, and beats its competitors app store efforts, the Mac App Store has massive potential to upend the PC software vending market. Early indications suggest Mac Apps will sell for less than the traditional price brackets Mac software’s been sold at for decades. This could revolutionize the Mac market, turning it into something that could really allow Macs to challenge the traditional Windows market dominance in enterprise or at home–particularly as it’s a one-stop-shop for games, utilities and so on, and even handles updates in a way Windows can’t challenge.

Also see:
How the Mac App Store Changes Everything — from Mashable.com

2011 Cloud Computing Predictions For CIO’s And Business Technology Leaders — from Forbes.com by Ray Wang

The Bottom Line: Cloud Adoption Provides A Path To The Next Generation Enterprise
Cloud adoption is inevitable.   Business technology leaders will move beyond “try and buy” across the Cloud Stack for seven reasons:

  1. The cloud has moved from “when” to “how”
  2. As the economic climate improves, the cloud adoption discussions are moving from cost to value and from tactical to strategic
  3. Reducing hardware cost, increasing competition amongst vendors, and economies of scale have put the customers in a driver’s seat
  4. Customers have realized that TCO of software should be a vendor’s problem, and not theirs
  5. Cloud will deliver the optimization savings to pay for future innovations
  6. Future innovations will arrive cloud first and maybe never as an option on-premises
  7. Time to value, ease of use, and good-enough functionality will lead as the primary drivers for SaaS adoption
© 2024 | Daniel Christian