1. 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.

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.

I’ve been occupied with writing a paper to promote the adoption of mobile learning amongst corporates and enterprises. While trawling through multiple web-links, a pattern of myths about mobile learning emerges. Quite a bit of back and forth about these myths – I’m taking the liberty of listing and describing the five that struck me as odd, and am attempting to debunk them to an extent. I’ll be the first to admit there is always an element of truth behind myths; but with the rate of technological change, quite a few of those ‘truths’ would seem like falsehoods today.

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.

Yes, I know haven’t posted anything interesting last few days. That’s because I’ve been in training this week; and would you believe it was Retail Sales training. What’s an instructional designer doing attending sales training?

Traditionally at Upside, we’ve always used one Saturday every month for training. Typically, this training is designed for functional groups and is followed by a creative activity where there is cross-functional participation.

There’s more talk about Digital natives going around; Jeremiah Owyang blogged from the Corporate Social Networking Conference in Amsterdam. Time and again, this talk about Digital natives and the millenials comes up, and there still isn’t much agreement about the key issues at hand.

We discovered ‘The Ten Commandments of eLearning” as elucidated by Cath Ellis and Clive Shepherd. We’ve decided to follow in the same vein and list our commandments. First off, we thought ten is too many to remember, so we cut it down to five. There are some similarities to Cath and Clive’s commandments but that is to be expected given the nature of this post.

There’s been some buzz around Augmented Reality applications that are starting to show up on the web. BMW, GE and Toyota already have this technology at work on their websites.

In Learning Circuits’ Big Question for March, most experts agree that social learning is here to stay, differing only in the degree to which it’s used. The workplace culture of an organisation is identified as the biggest challenge in implementing social learning.

Microsoft Surface was formally launched and is now available in 12 countries. A school in the UK used it for a day; here’s what they did with it:

Last month, Ron Chapman suggested that eLearning was just a passing fad. This created much furore, and several learning and training experts refuted his claim.