Our HR team is getting really busy since a last few weeks. After being slow (well almost non-existent) for a couple of quarters, hiring is back on the agenda. And with a bang! New project wins have been quite impressive in the last couple of months and all indications are towards a stronger demand in coming quarters (hopefully years!). No wonder some of these requirements are URGENT! You know how it is after clients sign on the dotted line. They want everything as on yesterday. No worries – that’s anyways – what I call – “a good problem to deal with”.
Looks like a season for Awards; and as a vibrant community, it was about 
time LearnTrends joined in. Tony Karrer, Jay Cross and George Siemens have announced the first-ever LearnTrends2009 Innovation awards. They say “The awards will recognize products, projects, and companies that represent significant innovation in Corporate/Workplace Learning and Performance.” I like the idea, a focused award for innovation.
Last month Tony Karrer posted this interesting piece on the Business of Learning on his blog – eLearning Technology. It provoked a discussion on the topic with many different perspectives brought to bear.
Six in ten people (more than 4 billion individuals) around the world are carrying a powerful computing device in their pockets and purses. They don’t realize it, but today’s mobile phones have the computing power of a personal computer from the mid-nineties, while consuming a fraction of the energy and are made at significantly lower cost.
Upside Learning has picked up 2 awards at the 21st Annual Apex Awards for Publication Excellence 2009. You may ask – what is a learning solutions company doing at publication awards? Well, the core of what we do is communication and Apex has categories for the kind of work eLearning vendors do.
Recently we’ve been developing mobile applications for the iPhone. Mostly, this is a casual quiz game-type application where the user is presented with multiple choice questions. Based on the responses the user is presented with feedback about the efficacy of managing his time.
We picked up something from ICT results on 24th June – more amazing stuff that’s changing the way we interface with computers. This time it’s emerging from Cogain (Communication by Gaze Interaction), an EU-funded project under eInclusion tasked to use expertise on interface technologies for the benefit of users with disabilities.
I was digging through some older GDC related posts during the course of some research yesterday. In a keynote that Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata delivered to a packed house at this year’s Game Developers Conference. He mentioned the “Four I’s” that Nintendo uses as a standard for the games it develops.
Elearning development tools: only Adobe?
Over the last ten years or so, major elearning developers have preferred to use tools like Flash, Authorware and Director from Adobe (earlier Macromedia). The reason was simple– it was an easier way to achieve the multimedia integration needed to deliver engaging content over variety of media (standalone CD based and then transitioning to web based).
Workplace Learning is changing!
While we spoke about putting the board games created during Upside’s board game creation exercise up for download, it’s taken us a couple of weeks to get here. Designing, prototyping, developing and play-testing a board game is one thing, packaging it for everyone to play is another. The individual who was lucky enough to convert it from physical prototype to a printable version learned much about game design while creating the PDF.
If you’re on Twitter and have missed Spymaster – where in the world have you been? All the rage last week, you’ve probably seen the many #spymaster tweets from tweeps in your network. You’re into it, or just plain confused about what the objective of the game is; either way, there’s no way you can ignore it’s huge presence on Twitter.
