Recently I made a presentation at IDCI about the basic differences between simulations and games, meant predominantly for beginner learning designers. At the end of the presentation I spoke about five ways to bring more gaminess into the learning interactions being designed by the IDs. One point I made was about the use of ‘narrative’ or ‘stories’. (I use them interchangeably, as they mean pretty much the same to me, perhaps wrongly.) While I ran out of time there, a nice discussion with great points about stories and storytelling being made. I wanted to quickly recap some important concepts I uncovered during my research about the use of narratives in learning.

We have been experimenting with development of Augmented Reality [AR] applications for some time now. Earlier this week we released the first Indian Layar app called Pune Layar and had earlier created a simple Car Game using FLARToolkit. While developing these applications we considered many alternative tools & technologies to develop such applications for learning. Here I share some of them that may be useful for our readers if they too wish to experiment with AR.

Moodle is a good LMS with which has grown over the years and offers a host of functionality and features that are very useful to have in an LMS. Add to it the fact that its open source which makes it free to use, has made it very popular.

Moodle has been able to sustain itself and keep evolving through its community, resulting in its emergence as a good option for anyone wanting to use an LMS. But is Moodle or any other open source LMS (there are a few good ones like the ones mentioned here) really free? Though they may be free at a tangible expense level, they do carry a cost which the organization implementing the LMS should be aware and careful of.

We believe Layar, the AR browser can have a significant role to play in mobile learning. We have been playing with Layar for a some weeks now and yesterday we released a layer for Pune city. This is our first public layer which would be useful for the public as well as (hopefully) provide us valuable feedback about Layar development.

Below I share my development experience of creating the Pune Layar.

About a year back we realized using AS 3.0 in the custom eLearning development would be essential. A few weeks back I wrote about the reasons for using ActionScript 3.0 [AS 3.0] in Flash based eLearning development. While training our team on AS 3.0 we collated some good tutorials and blogs available freely on the web, and I thought it would be good to share that list. Some of these resources will also help AS 1.0/AS 2.0 developers to quickly migrate to AS 3.0. This list also contains links to tutorials for some popular open source AS 3.0 classes like papervision, box2d and tweener.

Today, Upside Learning is thrilled to announce that we are augmenting reality in Pune, with a layer that’ll let you find significant landmarks in and around the city. If you have an iPhone or Android Phone and have the augmented reality browser Layar installed you can access this layer now.

We’ve been experimenting with Augmented Reality and Virtuality, we posted about that earlier here. We found Layar really interesting and wanted to develop a layer just to see how it works and to understand what the user experience is like.

As games continue to establish themselves into our daily lives, the future as we know it will not be the same. They don’t just hold the power to influence our life, but also have great implications for Learning.

Below are a few interesting talks from TED’s past, focusing on games, which are sure to get you thinking.

Recently during one of our discussions about the way individuals work and learn, we debated whether humans are inherently capable of multi-tasking, or is it a singular task at any point in time, but are capable of rapid switching of attention from task to task. As a general search on the web will reveal, there is quite a debate about multitasking and task switching.

I have been involved with Rapid eLearning Projects at Upside and also creation of our own Rapid Authoring Framework that sits in our LMS (UpsideLMS). Naturally I do a lot of sifting around Rapid eLearning. I thought it would be a good idea to share my list of top 25 blog posts on the subject. These posts cover varied topics around rapid eLearning including authoring tools, effective techniques, and decision considerations. Some of the posts are on specific tools (like Articulate) but generally you will find them equally useful for any rapid tool/framework you use.

One of the key challenges associated with mLearning development is to manage development across varied types of devices and platforms. With new devices being launched every week and no clear cross device platform to target, procuring myriad devices for testing is very difficult or at the very least expensive. Adobe’s Device Central is an application bundled with Adobe’s Creative Suite [which includes tools like Flash Professional, Photoshop, Dreamweaver etc.] of products and attempts to provide just that – the ability to simulate a variety of devices.

I’ll be making an online presentation about the fundamental differences between games and simulation at 11:00 AM IST on 24th April, 2010. The event is being hosted by IDC India which is a community of practice for instructional design professionals in India.

The presentation is meant for beginners, and will help them draw lines between simulations and games from a learning and learner experience perspective.