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.

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.

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.

A couple of weeks back we posted about Silverlight posing some (at this time, actually little) competition to Flash. Now we have HTML 5 coming up – this makes the race hotter. Or does it?

Recently we’ve been developing mobile applications for the iPhone. Mostly, this is a casual quiz game-type application where the user is presented with multiple choice questions. Based on the responses the user is presented with feedback about the efficacy of managing his time.

We picked up something from ICT results on 24th June – more amazing stuff that’s changing the way we interface with computers. This time it’s emerging from Cogain (Communication by Gaze Interaction), an EU-funded project under eInclusion tasked to use expertise on interface technologies for the benefit of users with disabilities.

When writing the whitepaper about Casual games, I did a fair bit of research and looked at several hundred web links. While doing so, I documented a few of the better ones. I’d been mulling posting these to the blog. So here they are – a Top 100 Learning Game Resource list. If you are already developing learning games, these links will broaden your horizons, as they did mine. If you are contemplating beginning – it might help to look at links that interest you to get some grounding ideas.

I was digging through some older GDC related posts during the course of some research yesterday. In a keynote that Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata delivered to a packed house at this year’s Game Developers Conference. He mentioned the “Four I’s” that Nintendo uses as a standard for the games it develops.

Adobe has launched a limited free preview of its BrowserLab, an online service that allows users to preview web pages in different browsers and operating systems to identify potential issues. Registration for the free preview access is currently closed, although the site’s Wiki section mentions that it would be made available again soon.

If you’re on Twitter and have missed Spymaster – where in the world have you been? All the rage last week, you’ve probably seen the many #spymaster tweets from tweeps in your network. You’re into it, or just plain confused about what the objective of the game is; either way, there’s no way you can ignore it’s huge presence on Twitter.