It’s been a trying time of the year; erratic schedules, vacations and finding time to introspect has meant I’ve not blogged over the last month or so. As I get back on track, it’s time to start blogging in earnest again. We’ve gone from attending eLearning conferences to mLearning conferences; it’s just around the corner from mLearnCon 2011. As mobile computing becomes mainstream, it is worth thinking about the nature of learning in the future. As technology permeates our daily lives and goes on to become an essential part of it, the impact promises to be far-reaching.
The news that IBM’s Watson had beaten the humans on Jeopardy didn’t really come as a really big surprise for me. It’d been coming since Kasparov left the room in tears after losing to Deep Blue.
The argument then was that chess is about finite number of possible moves. The use of intensive mathematics, brutal processing logic and speed make chess a well defined challenge – computers were appropriately designed for such a challenge. However, natural language is very different. Modeling natural language mathematically is very challenging, and at the time (of deep blue vs. Kasparov), even natural language processing researchers admitted we were many years yet before computers would understand queries and respond to them in human language. I’ve banged on about intelligent personal learning agents based on semantic technologies in the past, and Watson – a ‘natural language processing’ ‘pattern recognizing’ ‘world aware’ engine – is a huge step towards making that happen.
Earlier today, I stumbled on this bit of research on the Gartner site; while it dates back to August there’s some interesting speculation about the Future of Work.
“People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,”
“In addition, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”
- Tom Austin, Vice President and Gartner Fellow
It’s been in the rumor mill for some months and was confirmed by Blackberry only recently. Now, they’ve gone ahead officially revealed the product and begun the marketing blitz.
Thanks to a tweet from @ChrisLAtkinson I reached this blog post and from there the 21st Century Education website. The site features 12 videos by educators explaining what works and what does not in our education system. They argue what should be done to actually deliver 21st century education. Below are a couple of those videos.
Am I glad to hear this; it was high time India jumped on the low-cost tablet and its happened!
Kapil Sibal announced it, and described it as a dream project. The tablet is intended for children from the primary to university level. With a package pricing approaching 35 USD, and finally to cost even less, it seems economical as well.
Haven’t had enough time to blog, the result of preoccupation with a large project.
Having mentioned Web 3.0 often in the past, I continue my research into it. Last evening, this particular slide share presentation about Web 3.0 and beyond popped into my inbox. Steve Wheeler at the University of Plymouth put it together.
Cisco announced its Cius tablet computer yesterday. More evidence that more IT majors are turning to tablet computing as the future. It’s very interesting that a company that rarely ventured into consumer hardware is taking its first steps into the business. Strangely, Cisco has said that it doesn’t want the device to be perceived as a consumer device or as a direct competitor to the popular Apple iPad.
Just very recently Google announced the release of CloudCourse, calling it both an internal learning platform and also a course scheduling system. Built entirely on Google’s App Engine, it is primarily a scheduling platform which integrates with Google Calendar. From the videos and the pages put up on the link http://code.google.com/p/cloudcourse/, I could only figure out that it is a basic scheduling tool and not quite there to call it a learning platform.
A nice talk about the need for a ‘learning revolution’. Sir Ken Robinson makes some cutting comments about education today. Poignant at times, funny at some – well worth the 17 minutes.
“…teenagers do not wear wrist watches, I don’t mean they can’t or they’re not allowed to, they just often choose not to. And the reason is you see, we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us above 25 and so for us, if you want to tell the time you have to wear something.
Came across an interesting video this morning via the elearningpost blog. Felt it was worthwhile sharing. A whole bunch of individuals talking about the semantic web, including one of my favorite writers/speakers – Clay Shirky. While I’ve written about the semantic web on this blog before, this video is a succinct way to understand what Web 3.0 is all about.
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.
