Thanks to a tweet from @ChrisLAtkinson I reached this blog post and from there the 21st Century Education website. The site features 12 videos by educators explaining what works and what does not in our education system. They argue what should be done to actually deliver 21st century education. Below are a couple of those videos.
Am I glad to hear this; it was high time India jumped on the low-cost tablet and its happened!
Kapil Sibal announced it, and described it as a dream project. The tablet is intended for children from the primary to university level. With a package pricing approaching 35 USD, and finally to cost even less, it seems economical as well.
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.
Cisco announced its Cius tablet computer yesterday. More evidence that more IT majors are turning to tablet computing as the future. It’s very interesting that a company that rarely ventured into consumer hardware is taking its first steps into the business. Strangely, Cisco has said that it doesn’t want the device to be perceived as a consumer device or as a direct competitor to the popular Apple iPad.
Just very recently Google announced the release of CloudCourse, calling it both an internal learning platform and also a course scheduling system. Built entirely on Google’s App Engine, it is primarily a scheduling platform which integrates with Google Calendar. From the videos and the pages put up on the link http://code.google.com/p/cloudcourse/, I could only figure out that it is a basic scheduling tool and not quite there to call it a learning platform.
A nice talk about the need for a ‘learning revolution’. Sir Ken Robinson makes some cutting comments about education today. Poignant at times, funny at some – well worth the 17 minutes.
“…teenagers do not wear wrist watches, I don’t mean they can’t or they’re not allowed to, they just often choose not to. And the reason is you see, we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us above 25 and so for us, if you want to tell the time you have to wear something.
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 –
