The past weeks have seen a flurry of Web activity – bloggers making predictions for the coming months; retrospections on the year gone by; new product releases; top lists, summary posts being pulled up, and more.

At Upside Learning, we have been doing our bit in spreading knowledge. In continuation to our weekly roundup of the best links shared on Twitter and Facebook, here is a collection of our top 15 links from the last week, each accompanied by a quick brief. This week we deliver you a dose of the latest in mobile learning, Web design & development, eLearning and Social Media.

I found this talk by Jason Fried  about how we work in an office quite interesting.

“The real problems in the office are the M&Ms” – managers and meetings make employees unproductive.

All the more reason for eLearning, anytime, anywhere; let people decide what’s appropriate to learn and when to learn it. You can’t do that with scheduled training.

Mobile learning is certainly a hot discussion topic with elearning and training solutions providers in Australia – like anywhere else in the world. In my meetings with clients and prospects in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne over that last couple of weeks, it is clear that the interest in mobile learning is very strong. Yet, the most common question is – how do we actually use it in workplace?

I’m of the opinion that there are 3 primary types of usage for mobile devices in the context of learning.

John Hegel lll and John Seely Brown have written an article titled ‘Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work’ on HBR blog. The article summarizes the ideas from their new book – The Power of Pull.

I just concluded a week-long trip to Saudi Arabia – my first to the middle-east region. Apart from a delayed immigration & customs clearance at Riyadh (which I am told is a norm at Riyadh) the experience was wonderful. Saudi Arabia is like any other developed country – you can see wide roads, big cars (GMC trucks abound), tall swanky buildings, malls with all the expensive brand names. The usual transnationals – McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks, and Dunkin Donuts all make their presence felt. I also found some great Indian food too.

In a couple of years, microblogging tools have become very popular.  Twitter has become the number 1 tool for learning in just three years – voted by hundreds of learning professionals in this survey at Jane Hart’s site. Microblogging platforms are a great tool to keep you updated with latest trends & get real time support or answers to questions. You could even search for information on these tools themselves and get some good links to follow.

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 –

The iPad is here. After all the hype, which it didn’t quite live up to, there was a lot of commentary web-wide on whether it’s suitable for elearning, or a specific type of learning. Here at Upside our camp is divided, there are iPad lovers and there are iPad baiters. The lovers are typically Apple fan-boys who are crazy about anything Apple, so their devotion to any bit of technology that Steve Jobs throws into the market is taken for granted. The baiters are mostly alternate technology lovers and who will hate pretty much anything that Apple develops; simply because of Apple’s “captive/lock-in users” business model.

From Wikipedia – Microlearning deals with relatively small learning units and short-term learning activities. Generally, the term ‘microlearning’ refers to micro-perspectives in the context of learning, education and training. More frequently, the term is used in the domain of E-learning and related fields in the sense of a new paradigmatic perspective on learning processes in mediated environments on micro levels.

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.

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.