I have been thinking about penning this one for a couple of weeks now, but just couldn’t do sooner.  And as I worked on this one I realized some of them have already faded away from my memory. So I had to rely on the session videos put up on Game Based Learning website and my own notes from the sessions. Also in order to make it happen I would be putting my Day 2 recap in 2 or 3 parts covering the sessions I liked.

This is a fantastic talk by 12 year old Adora Svitak about what adults should learn from children.

Key points for me:

- Children think of possibilities and dream about perfection.
- Learning between teachers and students should be reciprocal but the reality is not that because of trust or rather the lack of it.
- Children love challenges. Adults must learn to trust them and have high expectations from them.

“How To” is a procedure which is defined by someone in number of steps. The web is full of sites that share information and tutorials about “How To” design and develop characters. However it is also important to know the “Why” to designing a character. Knowing the answers to “Why” helps one take decisions about the design process.

The Tuts+ (pronounced tutsplus) education network which has tons of “How To” tutorials is now focusing on “Why” tutorials as well.

The LMS market is heating up by the day for past many months now and it looks like it is going, more or less, as predicted by Bersin & Associates about 6 months back – The LMS market: hotter than ever. I have seen a significant increase in attention towards LMS both in terms of technology and also in terms of the end value being delivered by it to an organization, its end users (learners, instructors, and administrators). To keep up with the happenings, trends, innovations, and other information on LMS and to ensure our teams at Upside involved in core LMS development, client implementations, client support and Innovation team are in tune with the industry we follow a host of blogs that focus specifically on LMS, learning technology, and related topics.

The war between Adobe and Apple just got hotter. With the announcement of iPhone OS 4.0 Apple has revised the Developer Program License Agreement to ban the use of cross compiler tools like Unity3d, Appcelerator’s Titanium, Adobe’s Flash CS5 etc. for developing iPhone and iPad applications. As per the new agreement developers can use only C, C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript to develop iPad/iPhone apps. Some companies like PhoneGap, Appcelerator and Unity3d having cross compiler products [that can publish the same code for iPhone/iPad or other mobile devices] have clarified or assured that the apps developed using their tools would still be accepted by Apple but there is no official response from Adobe on this.

As I picked up a tonne of junk mail this morning a flyer fell out that took me by surprise. It advertised a product called iProf . It’s being touted as India’s first personal education tablet, and iProf claims it’ll revolutionize the way India studies. iProf brings study material in multiple electronic formats such as audio-video lectures, animations, structured tests to a touch-screen based device similar to a tablet.

This month’s Big Question on Learning Circuits Blog seeks to understand how we are keeping up with the increasingly complex tools and technologies landscape.

I reflect on this question from an organization perspective as opposed to an individual’s perspective. Here’s what we are doing in our organization:

Anniversaries are a good time to reflect on what’s been achieved and plan for the year ahead. We celebrated our 6th Anniversary on 7th April, 2010, and I realized that Upside Learning had come a long way since its inception in early 2004. We started this company with a passion for delivering innovative and effective learning solutions and I think we have achieved that to some extent.

I’ve been continuing my research into user experience and interaction design. I stumbled on this really great presentation on SlideShare by Whitney Hess – 10 Most Common Misconceptions about User Experience Design. She makes points about user experience design that instructional designers could learn from. I’m taking the liberty to reproduce and rehash the points she raises from an eLearning perspective.

A recent post on our blog poked fun at Learning management systems and underlined the disconnect that is possibly present in organizations that use an LMS to create, deliver and manage learning. In this post I attempt to illustrate how, by adopting some simple methods, you could use the LMS better and also get some aid in Learning measurement.

Learning measurement, it looks like, is not an easy term to define. I couldn’t find it on Wikipedia and Google didn’t help much either.