Engaging children with the siren call of the app — from the New York Times by Geraldine Fabrikant
Excerpt:
Each summer for several years, a two-week seminar at the American Museum of Natural History has allowed 25 youngsters to use technology to resurrect a prehistoric marine animal by designing realistic 3-D models and sea environments.
Every year, the program, “Virtual World Institute: Cretaceous Seas,” for children ages 11 to 14, fills up quickly.
Yahoo! and Samsung form multi-year partnership to deliver Interactive TV — from dailyfinance.com by Business Wirevia The Motley Fool
Partnership to provide real-time, enhanced entertainment and advertising to homes across the United States
Excerpt:
SUNNYVALE, Calif. & RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Yahoo! (NAS: YHOO) and Samsung today announced an expanded multi-year partnership to integrate Yahoo!’s Broadcast Interactivity platform into Samsung 2012 Smart TVs. Yahoo! Broadcast Interactivity, powered by its automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, SoundPrintTM, will be deployed in Samsung’s SyncPlus platform, enabling new opportunities for intelligent content discovery, advertising and engagement, bringing an unprecedented level of interactivity in the living room.
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From DSC:
Another steps towards:
![The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV](http://danielschristian.com/learning-ecosystems/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Living-Class-Room-Daniel-S-Christian-July-2012.jpg "The-Living-Class-Room-Daniel-S-Christian---July-2012")
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A fifth of TV sets connected to the Internet by 2016 — from digitaltvresearch.com
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Welcome to Star Scholar U., where a personal brand is the credential — from The Chronicle by By Jeffrey R. Young
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Keri Rasmussen for The Chronicle
Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason U., helped build an online-education site, Marginal Revolution U, based on a blog he runs with Alex Tabarrok. “In part we did it just to show it could be done—that you can have a Web site which looks nice and works,” Mr. Cowen said.
Excerpt:
A new kind of university has begun to emerge: Call it Star Scholar U.
Professors with large followings and technical prowess are breaking off to start their own online institutions, delivering courses with little or no backing from traditional campuses.
Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.
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5 perspectives on the future of the human interface — from techcrunch.com by Alex Williams
Excerpt:
The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers.
Also see:
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Rethinking carrots: A new method for measuring what players find most rewarding and motivating about your game — from gamasutra.com by Scott Rigby, Richard Ryan
Excerpt:
The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model (PENS) outlines three basic psychological needs, those of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, that we have demonstrated lie at the heart of the player’s fun, enjoyment, and valuing of games. By collecting players’ reports of how these needs are being satisfied, the PENS model can strongly and significantly predict positive experiential and commercial outcomes, in many cases much more strongly than more traditional measures of fun and enjoyment. And despite the simplicity of the model conceptually, it shows promise as a “unified theory” of the player experience by demonstrating predictive value regardless of genre, platform, or even the individual preferences of players.
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Pearson project will let professors mix free and paid content in e-textbooks — from The Chronicle by Alisha Azevedo
Excerpt:
Pearson, a major textbook publisher, continued its push into digital education on Monday by introducing a service that allows instructors to create e-textbooks using open-access content and Pearson material.
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A river of data — from educationnext.org by Bror Saxberg
Making the learning experience more effective
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How should teaching change in the age of Siri? –– from MindShift
Excerpt:
Short of banning smartphones (a short-term solution, at best), the evolution of artificial intelligence services like Siri means that there will be a shift from a focus on finding the answer as the endpoint to a greater focus on analysis. You have the answer, but so what? What does that answer mean in a real-life situation?
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Degreed launches crowdfunding campaign for reimagined ‘digital diploma’ — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
San Francisco startup Degreed is challenging the traditional college diploma with an online service that tracks and scores educational achievements from established institutions as well as new online learning platforms. Ahead of a public launch in 2013, Degreed this week began a crowd funding campaign.
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A capitalist’s dilemma, whoever wins on Tuesday — from the New York Times by Clayton Christensen
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
In a way, this mirrors the microeconomic paradox explored in my book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which shows how successful companies can fail by making the “right” decisions in the wrong situations. America today is in a macroeconomic paradox that we might call the capitalist’s dilemma. Executives, investors and analysts are doing what is right, from their perspective and according to what they’ve been taught. Those doctrines were appropriate to the circumstances when first articulated — when capital[From DSC: or from an educational perspective, we could use the word information] was scarce.
But we’ve never taught our apprentices that when capital is abundant and certain new skills are scarce, the same rules are the wrong rules. Continuing to measure the efficiency of capital prevents investment in empowering innovations that would create the new growth we need because it would drive down their RONA, ROCE and I.R.R.
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Gartner sees 821M unit smart device mkt in 2012; 1.2B 2013 — from forbes.com by Eric Savitz
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Papers/tracks
(You can view the abstracts or complete papers where available.)
Apple TV and the transformation of web apps into tablet and TV dual screen apps — from brightcove.com by Jeremy Allaire
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Excerpts:
Importantly, designers and developers need to shed the concept that “TVs” are for rendering video, and instead think about “TVs” as large monitors on which they can render applications, content and interactivity that is supported by a touch-based tablet application.
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The key concept here is that this pervasive adoption of TV monitors is the tip of the spear in creating a social computing surface in the real world.
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Specifically, Apple has provided the backbone for dual screen apps, enabling:
- Any iOS device (and OSX Mountain Lion-enabled PCs) to broadcast its screen onto a TV. Think of this as essentially a wireless HDMI output to a TV. If you haven’t played with AirPlay mirroring features in iOS and Apple TV, give it a spin, it’s a really exciting development.
- A set of APIs and an event model for enabling applications to become “dual screen aware” (e.g. to know when a device has a TV screen it can connect to, and to handle rendering information, data and content onto both the touch screen and the TV screen).
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[Jeremy listed several applications for these concepts: Buying a house, buying a car, doctor’s office, kids edutainment, the classroom, retail electronics store, consuming news, consuming video, sales reporting, board games.]
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Also see:
From DSC:
Graphically speaking — and approaching this from an educational/learning ecosystems standpoint — I call this, “Learning from the Living [Class] Room.
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Related item:
Created by Knewton and Column Five Media
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Also see:
The game introduces players to critical financial concepts through the virtual management of college rental houses, making players responsible for expanding and maintaining their houses by effectively utilizing their finances.
Paying bills on time, allocating funds to the proper accounts and monitoring monthly spending ultimately allows players to purchase rooms to expand their houses, host social events to attract future tenants, and increase their overall credit scores.
In each game episode, you play as Dak, Sera, and young Hystorian Riq as they travel back in time to fix one of the Great Breaks. Use your Hystorian’s Guide to discover what has gone wrong in history. Then, the story continues as you explore the open environment and play mini games such as lock picking or white-water rafting. Along the way you will also complete side quests and speak with historical characters who will aid you in — or perhaps deter you from — your quest.
The Infinity Ring game boasts an immersive open-world environment in which players are free to explore a 3-D representation of sites around the globe and throughout time. The game is available on desktop computers. Coming soon for mobile and tablet devices.
Also see:
Scholastic goes global to promote its latest transmedia epic — from digitalbookworld.com
NEW MULTI-PLATFORM TIME TRAVEL ADVENTURE SERIES infinity ring™ LAUNCHES WITH global promotional campaign
FROM SCHOLASTIC
KIDS CAN PREVIEW THE INFINITY RING ONLINE GAME ON WWW.INFINITYRING.COM STARTING TODAY
Scholastic (NASDAQ: SCHL), the global children’s publishing, education, and media company, today announces a massive worldwide campaign to promote INFINITY RING™, a new multi-platform time travel adventure series for children ages 8-12, launching on August 28th simultaneously in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand with “Book 1: A Mutiny in Time” by New York Times bestselling author James Dashner. As the pioneering force behind the groundbreaking and international bestselling The 39 Clues® series, Scholastic expands its innovative multi-platform publishing program with Infinity Ring, a fully immersive reading experience which combines books, an interactive “Hystorian’s Guide” map, and an online game experience where readers travel back in time to “fix” history.
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20 schools innovating with digital tools — from Getting Smart by Tom Vander Ark and Sarah Cargill
Excerpt:
Hans Renman in Stockholm (@tankom_hans) asked on Twitter, “Do you know any US schools that are REALLY using digital tools in an INTERESTING way for communication, marketing, or learning?” That tweet kicked off a few days of snooping around. Here is the list of 20 we came up with. We look forward to your additions!
Your future TV is not about Tele-Vision — from FastCompany.com by Kit Eaton
Excerpt (emphasis below from DSC; also see the above categories to see how I see this as a highly-relevant component to our future learning ecosystems):
Then imagine what a hybrid of Apple’s tech and efforts like GetGlue, Shazam, and other interactive systems will be like when they’re more integrated into your 2017 smart TV. The big screen in your living room won’t be a one-way window into another world you can’t touch anymore. It’ll be a discovery engine, a way to learn facts, interact with the world, talk to people, find new and surprising content to absorb. Advertisers will love it, and companies like Nielsen–which largely has to guess all those stats about who watches which show at primetime nowadays–will be able to get accurate data…which may mean more appealing shows.
Also see:
The 20 best blogs about game-based learning — onlinecolleges.net
Excerpt:
Because the push toward incorporating these resources still exists in a comparatively inchoate state, anyone curious about how they apply to educational settings should keep up with the latest movements and technologies currently shaping the movement’s future. Blogs can help with that.
Augmented reality in a contact lens — from spectrum.ieee.org by Babak A. Parviz
Top 9 best augmented reality iPhone apps in 2012 — from blog.startappz.com
Excerpt:
The principle of augmented reality based iPhone apps is to use the superb multitasking and image processing capabilities provided by the iPhone. Even though the technology of augmented reality is still in an embryonic stage, these smart iPhone apps give us a small glimpse of what’s to come. Most of these apps are available at Apple’s iTunes App Store. So check out the top 9 best Augmented reality apps for iPhone in 2012 Here are some really cool iPhone apps with augmented reality features.
Canon announces mixed reality system for industrial design teams — from Core77.com
50-gigapixel camera is straight out of science fiction — from futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com
David Brady / Duke University
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The Abundance Builders — from wfs.org by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Progress occurs when inventive people solve problems and create opportunities. Here are just a few of the breakthroughs that offer the brightest prospects for a future that leaves austerity and deprivation behind.
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HealthTap debuts paid private medical consultations via mobile device — from betakit.com
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IKEA 2013 catalog has augmented reality — from augmentedblog.wordpress.com
And then some.
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3D printing: The game changer — from T.Rowe Price by Hug Evans
Excerpt:
From my vantage point, 3D Printing is right up there as one of the most exciting innovations I’ve seen in the 20 years I’ve been around here. I think it’s going to change the way goods are manufactured across many industries.
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DIY holodeck gaming system to be built by university students — from thecreatorsproject.com by Kevin Holmes
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iRobot and InTouch Health announce RP-VITA Telemedicine Robot — from spectrum.ieee.org by Evan Ackerman
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New 3D Printers From 2012 — from kraftwurx.com
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The 10 best games for learning about the stock market — from onlinecollegecourses.com
Excerpt:
Much like skydiving, playing the stock market is not an activity you want to learn through your mistakes. Fortunes are made and lost all the time by people who think (or thought) they had a handle on stock trading. If you have a few million you can afford to lose, or you’re investing with someone else’s money (you’re a bank, in other words), by all means, jump right in. But for the other 99%, we recommend simulating the experience of stock market investing first, to learn what to do and not do with your hard-earned cash. Here are the 10 best games to help you do that.
From DSC:
Apple has been putting together a solid ecosystem of hardware and software that allows for the creation and distribution of content. “Easy is hard” I like to say and Apple’s done a great job of creating easy-to-use devices and apps. They have a long way to go before iTunes U has all the built-in functionality needed to replace a Blackboard Learn or a Moodle type of CMS/LMS. But given their solid history of creating highly-usable hardware and software, they could deal a smashing blow to what’s happening in the CMS/LMS world today.
Plus, with Apple TV, Airplay mirroring, the growth of second screen-based apps, and machine-to-machine communications, Apple is poised to get into this game…big time. If my thoughts re: “Learning from the Living [Class] Room” come to fruition, Apple would be positioned for some serious worldwide impact on lifelong learning; especially when combined with the developments such as the use of MOOCs, AI and HCI-related innovations, learning agents, web-based learner profiles, and potential/upcoming changes to accreditation.
Too far fetched do you think? Hmmm….well considering that online learning has already been proven to be at least as affective as f2f learning — and in some studies has produced even greater learning outcomes/results — I wonder how things will look in mid-2015…? (That is, where is the innovation occurring?)
Addendum:
4 ways to gamify learning in your classroom — from tophatmonocle.com
Excerpt:
This post explores the role of gamification in education and provides four examples of how you can bring the learning method into your classroom.
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Top Hat Monocle closes $8M to bring gamification to university classrooms — from betakit.com
Excerpt:
Today another student engagement platform, Top Hat Monocle, announced it has closed $8 million in Series A funding led by Emergence Capital Partners and iNovia Capital, with participation from SoftTech VC, Version One Ventures, and Golden Venture Partners. The Toronto- and San Francisco-based company, which raised $1.5 million in seed funding in November 2011, launched their product in 2010 and has been used by 65,000 students at over 150 global universities.
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Gamified courses from Course Hero and Bunchball boost student engagement — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
Excerpt:
In some circles, the phrase “gamification” may have gone out of fashion, but Course Hero and Bunchball are intent on showing that it can still pack a punch in education.
In April, Course Hero, which uses free online resources to offer students digital study guides and other tools, launched a series of full-length online courses infused with game mechanics from Bunchball’s gamification platform. The companies Tuesday revealed some of the initial results from the partnership.
On average, users spend three times more time on the gamified courses than on all of CourseHero.com and total time on the platform has increased five percent since the Bunchball integration, Course Hero reported. The company also said that social sharing of achievements, which are awarded as students progress through the courses, has climbed nearly 400 percent since the Bunchball partnership.
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From DSC:
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Addendum on 7/19/12:
10 best colleges for game-based learning — from bestcollegesonline.com
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Excerpt:
If you were busy playing Call of Duty and you missed it, July 8 was Video Games Day. While most people’s experience with gaming involves mindless destruction or sports competition, educators have begun to see the value in the medium for helping students learn. While the research is still developing and some professors are still skeptical, these 10 colleges represent your best bets for learning while playing video and other games.
