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.

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.

With our focus on mobile learning, we’re constantly attempting to address the multifarious platforms in the mobile technology space.
These days, phones are sophisticated, and some come with operating systems that allow for installation and removal of applications on the device. While this is a common and accepted paradigm on computers, its still relatively novel for mobile devices. Mobile devices in the past came with fixed features that couldn’t be altered, and a user had to make do with the functionality that shipped with the device.

A Google search on ‘Apple iPad’ throws up an excess of 30 million results!
Clearly the Apple iPad has drawn much applause and an equal amount of criticism in the last few weeks. At Upside Learning we’ve been thinking about ways the Apple iPad can be useful for eLearning – especially in the workplace. You can’t disagree that the iPad looks very cool.  Some people (as their tweets suggested in last few weeks) would buy it just to have one in spite of not needing one. However there are quite a few things about the iPad that suck (here are 8 that gizmodo listed).

I think the iPad in its current form – sans Flash, multitasking, & camera – has very limited uses in workplace learning.

The web is abuzz with talk of Google Buzz.

So what is Buzz – simply put it’s a personal aggregator that is coupled to your Gmail account. Buzz is to email what Wave will eventually be to real-time collaboration around email thread and embedded documents or media.

What does buzz do? Let Google do the explaining –

The iPad is here. After all the hype, which it didn’t quite live up to, there was a lot of commentary web-wide on whether it’s suitable for elearning, or a specific type of learning. Here at Upside our camp is divided, there are iPad lovers and there are iPad baiters. The lovers are typically Apple fan-boys who are crazy about anything Apple, so their devotion to any bit of technology that Steve Jobs throws into the market is taken for granted. The baiters are mostly alternate technology lovers and who will hate pretty much anything that Apple develops; simply because of Apple’s “captive/lock-in users” business model.

1. ELIPS Studio 3
ELIPS Studio 3 is a cross-platform mobile application SDK based on Adobe’s Flex Builder. Now software developers and creative designers can quickly develop for rich, connected or non-connected applications for mobile devices and deploy them on any mobile platforms they want. ELIPS Studio 3 is based on native compilation. It will automatically generate, optimize and package your Flex applications as native code for industry-leading platforms, including iPhone, Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile.

After having a great first day at the Learning Technologies 2010 I was looking forward to an exciting second day. Apart from the sessions at the conference that I recap below, there was an opportunity to interact with practitioners from the domain. Discussing their current concerns around learning and development gives us a glimpse into their world and that’s valuable.

Here’s a summary of the sessions I attended on Day 2:

1.   HipLogic
HipLogic is a new real-time, web-based platform intended as an alternative user interface for some mobile phones. This free download currently delivers applications like Facebook, news, and Twitter to both Windows Mobile and Symbian devices with plans to offer an Android version of their software sometime in the future.

Learning is fast turning Social, Informal, & Mobile.

That’s the message I’ve been hearing loud & clear from Learning Technologies 2010. While what’s being said in most of the sessions isn’t entirely new to us, it does reaffirm the direction in which things are going. The level of participation in these areas was clearly visible at the event which is a good sign. Adoption, after all, will happen only when L&D professionals start making some sense of it in first place.

Here are some highlights from the Day 1 sessions I attended:

1. Printliminator
The Printliminator is a bookmarklet with some simple tools you can use to makes websites print better. One click to activate, and then click to remove elements from the page, remove graphics, and apply better print styling.

2. Apple’s Tablet Interface
The design of interaction is often restricted by the user interface paradigms in current use. There is speculation that the Apple Tablet (if there is one) will push the envelope of UI design. This links to a post in Gizmodo – worth a read. Haptics and touch technology are already transforming the user experience, couple that with a sophisticated UI and it offers learning interaction designers new avenues to explore.