The theme of the article is summarized in the initial paragraph copied below:

“New learning management systems arrive on the scene almost daily. These technologies include both key functionalities and features you expect to find as well as additional capabilities that, in some cases, go above and beyond those found in some of the best-known pre-existing systems. Here are five up-and-coming LMS providers to watch.”

Here is what the note for UpsideLMS in the article says:

“Upside Learning: Upside LMS is another example of a social learning management system. The system has real-time Twitter feeds built in, allowing learners to see the tweets of those following them or those who are friends of theirs within the LMS. They also can see their friends’ tweets from outside the system.

The LMS also includes a WordPress blog that learners can post to, and postings can be viewed both from within and outside the system. Further, while the system’s wiki resembles Wikipedia, the discussions section looks similar to LinkedIn group discussion pages. Also included are features to enable the creation of communities, as well as the ability to create photo albums and upload videos. Similar to YouTube content, these videos can track who uploaded the content and when the videos were uploaded or updated and monitor the number of views.”

The UpsideLMS comes with a unique social learning framework that lets users access social tools from within the LMS in a robust and secure environment. This framework provides a unique way to capture various types of knowledge that are prevalent in the enterprise. It goes beyond the conventional view of courseware, assignments and assessment, to become a system fundamental to an enterprise and its employees’ success.

Making it to the watch list of one of Five Emerging Learning Management Systems by Brandon Hall – a well-respected independent eLearning research leader, has come close on the heels of being the only LMS to collect 3 awards in 2009 Brandon Hall Awards for Excellence in Learning Technology. The product we have today is clearly a leader in the learning management space when it comes to integrating social learning with more ‘conventional’ formal learning.

In the time to come, we will see more recognition for the UpsideLMS.

We had a total of 45 donors—not bad for starters! Some were hardened old hands, while others were first-time donors. Many had signed up to take part in advance; some, seeing their friends and colleagues surface unscathed, were inspired to join in. Or maybe it was just the promise of your choice of tea, coffee, and/or juice, with biscuits and fruit, that was the greatest draw…

The activity had the full support of the management team and seniors in all domains who made sure that the day’s training schedules were designed so as to accommodate donor batches.

Glad to have had such a positive response and experience, we see this as the first step towards a series of more regular and diverse social activities, starting with blood donation camps planned every four months.

We were informed that the UpsideLMS was a finalist in three categories and we were waiting to find out what award we were going to win.

The final tally, for UpsideLMS, after the ceremony stood at an impressive – 1 GOLD, 2 SILVER:

	Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for Blended or Informal Learning
	Best Advance in Social Learning Technology
	Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses

This was the first year of these awards for Excellence in Learning Technology by Brandon Hall and we won in all categories we submitted our product in. You can find the complete list of winners here.

These three categories require an LMS designed specially to cater to the specific needs of customers who are looking for such solutions. The fact that our flagship product – UpsideLMS, offers solutions across these categories just by simple configuration is a major achievement for us. UpsideLMS can be configured to offer a very minimal set of functions good for training companies or small businesses and can also be configured to offer full scale enterprise-scale features including social learning tools for enterprise customers.

I’d like to congratulate everyone at Upside Learning for this achievement and recognition.  This is a major milestone for us and one that motivates the entire team at Upside to work harder and reach new milestones in the near future.

Cheers!

We’ve been experimenting with Augmented Reality and Virtuality, we posted about that earlier here. We found Layar really interesting and wanted to develop a layer just to see how it works and to understand what the user experience is like. Additionally, we also wanted to investigate and understand what learning applications are possible using such technology.

Let’s take a quick look at how it works – use your Android Smartphone or iPhone to download and install the Layar application free. Launch Layar, and choose the ‘Pune Layar’ in the local layers tab. Layar switches to the view from the device camera, and retrieves Upside’s Pune layar. You first get a filter to let you choose a radius for your search and limit it to specific categories. This is useful when you are looking for a specific landmark.

As your phone retrieves data over the internet, you’ll be able to see various points of interest appear on the radar in the upper right corner of the screen. Point your phone camera in the direction of the points and you’ll see them pop-up as icons. Touch a point that interests you and it’ll bring up information about that location. You can then easily find more information about the landmark by looking it up on Wikipedia. Pune Layar also allows you to rate a POI depending on your liking or just view the ratings given by others.

Like what you see? Want to visit that location? If you have the Google maps application installed on the phone, a simple click of a button will find it on a map, and another click can get you accurate directions to the location. Looking for a landmark you couldn’t find? You can add landmarks by visiting Add POI page, either using your smart-phone or a desktop computer.

Go fire up Layar on your smart-phone – explore Pune and its significant landmarks.

We figured there must be a simple way to check this out, so we created a small game like application to see for ourselves. It’s based on simple word identification. The user is given a select set of words at the top. He has to identify those same words in the falling streams of words in the two windows side by side. He needs to either multitask – to monitor the word streams and identify the words that occur in the set, or he must constantly switch focus from window to window. Either way, the idea is to identify correctly to get a point, click the wrong word you lose a point. Each round will last 30 seconds and subsequent rounds will include faster word streams. There isn’t an end state in the game; it just keeps increasing the difficulty.

Click On The Image Above To Launch The Application

We aren’t drawing any conclusions just yet and wanted to share this so you can try it out and reach your own conclusions. The application and data XML is available here for download. You can tweak it to try variations of the experiment. Try it out and comment here about what your take on the multi-tasking vs. attention switching debate is. Experiencing what happens as your perception and cognition cope in such a situation is quite a learning experience. That very learning can apply in the design of learning solutions. Hope you find it interesting.

Key points for me:

- Children think of possibilities and dream about perfection.
- Learning between teachers and students should be reciprocal but the reality is not that because of trust or rather the lack of it.
- Children love challenges. Adults must learn to trust them and have high expectations from them.

I reflect on this question from an organization perspective as opposed to an individual’s perspective. Here’s what we are doing in our organization:

1. Blogs: Subscribing to a host of blogs helps our team to be aware of what’s new out there and what others are thinking and doing with it. It’s a good starting point for us to think with and explore more if something looks interesting.

We have an Innovation team (INP) which has the primary responsibility to keep track of the new trends. We discuss those trends internally to decide which of those needs further exploration. INP members have been assigned an area of interest and they create articles and presentations about those trends and discuss with the entire team. The article, if we think worthwhile for blog readers, is also published on our blog.

Here’s our list of Top 74 Workplace Learning Blogs that we follow. We follow several others that cover technology trends namely TechCrunch, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, Wired, Mashable, and several others too numerous to list. Individuals also have blogs they follow that match with their interests. This brings lots of cross domain information into the workplace, subtly influencing our teams.

2. Aggregators: eLearningLearning by Tony Karrer and Workplace Learning Today from Brandon Hall are two great sources of links to the best blog posts and articles.

3. Webinars: Attending webinars from Brandon Hall, eLearning Guild and others are helpful in exploring specific areas of learning in more detail and sometimes to see some case studies and real life implementations in other organizations. eLearningLearning is a great source that points us to what’s happening in our fields.

4. Conferences: Lately we have been attending various conferences to get it straight from the gurus and experts in the field. It is a great way to keep in touch with the latest thinking, while sometimes there is a disconnect between what the experts say at the conferences and what is being sold by the vendors in exposition areas. In spite of that, such conferences lets one see area of learning the workplace learning market is interested in.

5. Internal Presentations: To ensure more of our employees are able to keep up, we have our INP team presenting each week (I concede, we skip some weeks) about what they have been exploring recently and how it may affect what the team does in short and long term.

6. Pilots: ‘Keeping up’ for a development vendor like us also means translating all the knowledge into demonstrable samples to share with our prospects and existing clients. It’s useful in making prospects and clients believe what’s possible – like these iPhone App and Augmented Reality samples. To transfer the knowledge and help develop the skills in the development team, the INP members provide basic training to the team and then create some trial projects to try out. The objective is to be ready with skills, just before the demand from our clients start coming in.

Personally the journey so far has been enriching and satisfying, although it’s been challenging at times. I take this opportunity to thank our readers for their continued patronage. We’ve had several important milestones in these six years, put in a presentation by our fine marketing folk.

In the process of writing & sharing our thoughts, we now have a whole bunch of people (bloggers) at Upside who follow a large number of related blogs daily. Result: They are more updated and are constantly learning from the outside world. And there are many others at Upside who are trying to follow blogs to stay connected. We are also bringing some structure to our learning by having discussions on our and others’ blog posts. I see all this as some form of self learning culture being established, which is great benefit that we derive from our blog.

There has been some important learning too on the blog front:

1. Write Meaningful Posts:

We have learnt that writing good content is the key. People always like to read something that is coherent, useful and oftentimes entertaining.  So, we believe that we should get addicted to writing great content, and the hits and subscribers will take care of themselves. We have focused our articles majorly on eLearning, Mobile Learning, Learning Technology, Innovation, Future Technology, & Future Learning – domains that we specialize & operate in and domains that our readers like to read about.

2. Write Consistently:

We are also happy that we have been able to maintain (or rather, consistently increase) the posting frequency that is necessary to keep the community engaged. We have a team of bloggers in the company who take it up on themselves to write and share with the world what they are currently thinking or working on. This, we now understand, could be a real challenge and requires dedication and commitment from senior management in a company.

3. Choose Titles Carefully:

Our post on iPad (iPad Disappoints eLearning Industry) did not go down well with some sections on the web. Guess the problem was that we were speaking on behalf of the industry. We seriously felt it was disappointing for the whole eLearning industry but sure could have avoided using the word ‘industry’ in the title.

While we continue to write meaningful posts, we urge you to take the poll and help us understand what interests you as a reader.

If you haven’t been with us since the beginning, we’ve compiled a list of our 20 most-read posts from the past year to get you up to speed.

1. Top 100 Learning Game Resources
2. Top 50 Mobile Learning Resources
3. Top 47 eLearning & Workplace Learning
4. Our Top 10 Learning Tools
5. The Ten Commandments of eLearning
6. Using Silverlight/Expression Blend for eLearning Development
7. Mobile Learning in India
8. Apple iPad Disappoints eLearning Industry
9. eLearning Development: How long does it Really Take?
10. eLearning Development India: Results of Salary Survey 2009
11. Five Myths of Mobile Learning
12. HTML 5 and eLearning Development
13. Five Things Not to do While Selecting an LMS
14. eLearning Development India – The Unofficial Salary Survey
15. Upside Learning Completes Five Years
16. eLearning Outsourcing to India will reach USD 603 million by 2012
17. Learning Management: What does a Training Company need an LMS for?
18. The Right Way To Go About Open Source LMS
19. Adobe Flash: Now With Face Recognition
20. Learning Technologies 2010 – Recap

In conclusion, I want to thank you again for your support and encouragement and look forward to more suggestions and feedback.

Keep in tune with the latest in eLearning by following us on Twitter or subscribing to our blog through RSS.

It gives us immense pleasure to share our first real sample in AR Street Racing. Street Racing is a simple car controller ‘game’ (well, the game part is still under development) where you have to control the marker like a car steering to steer the car and avoid hitting obstacles. The idea of developing this game came from this YouTube video of similar AR application. While that was built using D-fusion platform, ours is built in Flash using AS3.0 classes – FLARToolKit and FLARManager. Both the AS3.0 classes are free to use for non-commercial projects under GNU General Public License, Version 3. FLARToolKit is the main AR class that identifies the marker and determines its position and orientation in real world while FLARManager is a plugin that makes it easy to develop the AR application using FLARToolKit. Note: FLARManager has good tutorials, documentation and also it’s very easy to use.

Here is a short video to demonstrating its working:

Instructions to play the game –
1. Click ALLOW on “Flash Player settings” popup
2. Download and print the marker using DOWNLOAD MARKER
3. Click START. The START button would be activated after successful camera detection. Make sure that the camera is not being used by any other application.
4. Use the marker to play the game. Your aim is to avoid as many obstacles as possible.
5. Scoring : -5 points for ever obstacle you hit and +10 points for every obstacle you avoid.

Enjoy the game and please share your suggestions in the comments section on what we should do in the next stage of development to make it better.

Amy Blankenship (http://twitter.com/amyblankenship) replied to our AR post “@UpsideLearning I’m confused…how is this Augmented Reality?” She’s got a point, its confusing because the application is somewhere between Augmented Reality and Augmented Virtuality. It’s not truly AR because the application does not superimpose any sort of data on a view of reality. We keep calling it an augmented reality application because it uses the FLARManager and FLARTtoolkit, and these are augmented reality libraries. Lesson learned, from this point on, we’ll be careful about what we call stuff released into the wild. On another note, we are actually experimenting with true augmented reality applications as well. We’re building a local layer for our city that’ll run in the Layar AR browser, and some other neat stuff.