It’s been a year since we started blogging (March 03, 2009) and we are raring to go another notch high. With 142 posts, over 75,500 page views, and 600+ subscriber base, it’s been an enjoyable journey so far. A big thanks to all our loyal readers for taking the time to read and for leaving your valuable comments. We sincerely appreciate your continued patronage. We look forward to a great 2010!
We first posted about Augmented Reality way back in April 2009. Since then, we’ve been extremely excited by its potential in workplace learning and recently our innovation team has been trying out various SDKs/classes. AR applications around the world are being developed using FLARToolKit, LAYAR, UNIFEYE, D-fusion platform etc. So far, we’ve implemented FLARToolKit and LAYAR in AR application development at Upside.
It gives us immense pleasure to share our first real sample in AR Street Racing.
1. Games Change Brains – There have been many important findings on the benefits of video games in the last few months. This was a great post that put those in perspective.
• Video gaming improves visual perception, processing and attention.
• Internet use engages more neural circuitry than book reading in the digital generation.
• Sizes of three structures in the brain can predict a video gamer’s success.
• Learning environments of video games can educate children effectively.
• Building computer games promotes critical thinking and creative thinking skills.
1. CopperLicht – fast WebGL JavaScript 3D Engine
CopperLicht is a JavaScript 3D engine for creating games and 3d applications in the webbrowser. It uses the WebGL canvas supported by modern browsers and is able to render hardware accelerated 3d graphics without any plugins. 
2. Google Buzz
Google has announced Buzz a new social media service that would be integrated within Gmail. Using Buzz you can connect to the other social media services like Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google reader. More information on how we might use it in elearning can be found in this post on our blog.
A large blank white wall is an invitation for creative individuals to express themselves. Some call it graffiti, some call it art, all in all its great fun. We had just such a wall at our offices in Pune.
We decided to make the best of it and let graphic designers and artists from the team have a go at it.
The results speak for themselves.
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.
That the LMS needs to incorporate social learning elements is no longer a point of debate but both a question of survival for the LMS itself and also a test of how the LMS handles the balance of both the elements of training and the ‘networkedness’ of the social learning. We’ve been hearing of experts commenting that LMSs today don’t come with appropriate social media technology built in.
We’d like to differ; the UpsideLMS comes with a unique social learning framework that lets users actually access such social tools from within the LMS in a robust and secure environment for connecting to and sharing with fellow users. Letting users move beyond routine training, into actual personal development.
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.
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.
During the course of a routine trawl of my news-feeds I stumbled on something interesting that I found relevant to my current research into mobile learning.
This particular post was from ReadWriteWeb and writes about a new type of iPhone application called PowerOne that in the post says ‘…wants to solve the “there’s not an App for that” problem that many professionals experience when they try to use their iPhones at work.’ I see mobile learning taking many forms, perhaps this is one of them.
