Recently Amit had written about how the eLearning industry and digital media in general has been driven to HTML5 by the rapid adoption of tablet computers, namely the iPad. To further reinforce that thought, Adobe announced just yesterday that it has ceased development on the Flash mobile browser plug-in. Meaning there will be no updates to those plug-ins and future versions of Android and Blackberry Playbooks may not be able to render Flash content.

Every now and again, I’m blown away by the imaginative apps I see in the iOS App Store, as did this one: Ghost Guitar.

The app utilizes the iPhone or iPad 2’s front-facing camera to track your hands. You strum with your right hand and fret chords with the left. Quite a simple mechanic that has been exceedingly well-implemented. The use of augmented reality as an interface has mostly been gimmicky.

Adobe, recently announced moving their open-source development to Sourceforge. Looks like a desire to speed up their open-source development around the Flash platform. The new portal called Open@Adobe will hold Adobe’s open source projects in coming days.

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.

I am currently traveling in the US meeting clients and prospects in various domains and of varied business sizes. The one thing that strikes me is the immense interest in the mobile learning solutions that we provide. I’ve earlier written about what I believe is the future of learning technology and it seems from my interactions, yes, mobile (or m-learning) is the future of e-learning.

Just before I went on holiday recently I was asked how human learning has changed with the advent, penetration and increasing ubiquity of computing technology.

My answer was simple – it hasn’t.

Human learning hasn’t fundamentally changed over the last fifty years. Our ability to learn is something honed over several hundred millennia, it’s what set us apart from the primates in the first place.

While we written about Microsoft’s Project Natal in the past, the interweb has been abuzz about a start-up from Israel that’s going to compete – Omek.

Their technology claims to “translate natural body motion into seamless 3D movement onscreen”.

The technology is claimed to be ground-breaking; you can judge from yourself; take a look at the videos.

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.

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.

1. Do Serious Games Work? Results from Three Studies
Some studies help answer some of the questions now surrounding serious games-or games whose primary purpose is something other than entertainment, such as military training, education, physical therapy-and determine the relationship between the use of video games and learning as measured on standardized tests. More research is needed, but these findings provide some answers to both skeptics and supporters.

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.

On Feb 15, 2010, at Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced Adobe AIR for mobile devices, a consistent runtime for standalone applications which is an outcome of Adobe initiated Open-Screen project. As quoted by Adobe, the Open-Screen project has grown to around 70 ecosystem partners world-wide, which means many devices would be made capable of supporting the outcomes of this Adobe initiative. To begin with it will be available on Android in 2010. Adobe also unveiled Flash player 10.1 beta to developers and content providers at the same event.