I’ve been working on some learning related material for children. Designing for children is a totally different ballgame from the workplace learning we are typically involved in. To put it mildly, designing for children is tough; to design for today’s children even tougher. The more I look at this demographic they call ‘digital natives’, I find individuals who take the digital world the internet enables for granted. To these individuals, the internet and its data services are just as mundane as electricity and phones were to us in older generations. I wrote about this group of people couple of years back.
1. Meaning Tool: Training Semantic Search With Feeds
Meaning Tool is a semantic engine that offers users a chance to extract concepts from text using specific semantic trees. You define your categories of interest by creating 
search parameters and training them with related websites or RSS feeds. A great tool to see how semantic trees can help search.
- Device tag support in HTML 5
Yesterday World Wide Web Consortium has reported that HTML 5 will support external devices, directly from your browser. Now your browser will access your webcam, microphone and other USB devices directly, no other software/plug-ins required.
- Google Dumps Gears for HTML5
Google will end Gears, an open-source plug-in project it launched two years ago to allow Web applications to function even when a computer isn’t connected to the Internet. Applications that used Gears include Google’s Docs and Reader.
However, new incompatibilities with Gears have cropped up. Although it works with Microsoft’s Windows, Linux and some Apple Mac OS X versions, it doesn’t work with Mac OS X 10.6, also known as Snow Leopard. Also As much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geo-location APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, it is natural for Google to Drop Gears in favor of HTML5. However Gears will continue to be supported for sites that already use it.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve met some prospective customers from the Telecom domain here in India. While they’re all keyed about mobile learning, they have serious reservations about how they (as telecom service providers) can leverage their own networks. I often point to some simple facts. Each of their employees carries a cell phone and is connected to the network 24 hours a day. These employees are scattered all over the Indian geography. This presents a unique challenge and opportunity.
Our innovation team spends a fair bit of time trawling the web looking for interesting stuff that’s related to learning and technology that might impact learning in general. Typically, we come up with a list that’s shared with across Upside Learning.
Trawling through my feeds earlier this weeks I came across this link-up post by Ricard Nantel over at the Workplace Learning Blog pointing to a blog post on Harvard Business Publishing about six social media trends.
Worth a quick recount:
I’ve spent an inordinately long time writing a whitepaper on mobile learning trying to expound our thoughts about it and how it might be used in the workplace. I’ve been doing some research around it and I’ve documented some of the better links I’ve come across. Again, as with the links I posted about Games and Simulation, these aren’t categorized in any way nor does the order assume any significance.
We constantly come across interesting user interface technologies; Microsoft’s Natal was one I’ve written about before. There have been others pushing the limits of human computer interaction. However these technologies are a long way from maturing and being available to average developers and users. Also, they demand a completely new way of thinking about user interfaces. Such is not the case with haptic interfaces, which are now rapidly going mainstream and are available with a variety of devices, ranging from mobile phones, to tablet computers and ‘internet devices’. While these may appear as simply replacing the mouse with a singular interface point touch-screen, that’s not always the case. Several of these devices support multi-touch, letting the users use not one but multiple fingers to provide inputs that go beyond just a point and click to gestural inputs. Additionally they also offer some form of force feedback, this admittedly is quite rudimentary at this time.
Interesting numbers about the Social media and mobile computing revolution, while we wont really vouch for the numbers, Gary goes to great lengths to provide sources and substantiation for the basis of his calculation.
More companies are looking to challenge Amazon Kindle’s hegemony in the eBook market. Sony has been in the fray for quite some time. Barnes and Noble made it clear several months ago that it too had designs on this market. Yesterday it released its dedicated eBook reader called the ‘Nook’ in New York city. The device has many features that distinguish it from the Kindle, including a color touch screen for control, and the use of the Google Android operating system.
In my last post (Semantic Web Cometh), I mentioned how the underlying principles of the Semantic Web should make it highly inclusive and provide a uniform descriptive language across all sorts of media and technologies and consequently let users spend more time immersed meaningfully in the learning process.
