Rough Book and 3 Idiots

Here is a story you shouldn't miss. Rough Book is a movie built somewhat parallel to the theme of the movie 3 Idiots and has some common reflections on commercialization with the Nana Patekar movie, Paathshaala. Rough Book is a muted drama focused on the teacher and her friends in a K12 setting - preparation...

Courage, Craft and Character

There are three things I believe are necessary for success in product development, and perhaps in other endeavors in Life as well. Courage. You need the courage to dream on a very wide canvas, the courage to fail and make mistakes, the courage to acknowledge what can defeat you and persist in your efforts to...

2015-Slow year for edTech

This past year has been very eventful. Here are some of my impressions of 2015. xMOOCs have strengthened this year. The major players have received lots of new funding, added 1800 new courses, 100 new credentials, doubled enrollments to 35 mn students and co-opted many new partners from academia (over 550 universities in all) and...

Rethinking Learning Environments and Class

Do you go to the football field to learn music? Or to the art gallery to learn fencing? Or to a library to learn oratory? You don't. However, irrespective of whether you are studying history, economics, physics, languages or architecture, you go to that one singular invention - the classroom.In the age of networks, this...

On Teacher’s Day

There is a teacher in everyone of us. It is useful to acknowledge that a whole lot of things are learnt without someone actually teaching us, and that perhaps someone is right now learning from us without our even knowing it. On the Internet, this is possible at a very large scale. We learn from...

Blended Learning in India

There are many positives happening in EdTech in India. A government led mission called the National Mission on Education using ICT (NMEICT) has created massive amounts of content for engineering, arts and humanities, social sciences and natural science. It has also delivered the under 50 USD tablet, Aakash and a slew of innovations including Virtual...

The Learning Revolution is Here

I didn't know it at that time, having been born just a few months later, that the revolutionary Open University, UK was born in January, 1971 with 25000 students. Of course, my parents didn't know that either when they named me Viplav (my Sanskrit origin name literally means "revolution"). It's just one of those weird...

MOOCs as instruments of democratic politics

Democracy requires intellectually armed political activism to succeed. MOOCs (cMOOCs) provide an unprecedented occasion to demonstrate the power of connective learning for democracy, just as much as they demonstrate the democracy of connective learning. The four letters that make up the MOOC abbreviation are as apt as a stage for political protest as for our...

xMOOCs: Inside the box thinking

I had an occassion to present a session on MOOCs to some really bright people a few days ago. My thesis was that MOOCs (cMOOCs) represent an invention (they add vocabulary), while other models (xMOOCs, Flipped Classroom etc.) represent innovation that is more inside the box than outside it.

MOOCology

The discussion on what is a MOOC or how do we classify MOOCs is gaining momentum. First we had George explaining the difference by saying that there are xMOOCs and cMOOCs. Now Lisa Lane has come with a different taxonomy (network/task/content based) with some interesting distinctions. Dominic came up his own understanding of the "features" of a MOOC....

Unflipping the flip

I have been really curious and a little wary of the "flip" (flipped classroom, flipping the classroom) kind of frenzy recently. Basically, it seems to mean that we flip: Students into teachers Homework into Classwork Classwork into learning by self or network, guided or unguided Hallways and Social spaces into Classrooms Closed curriculum to open...

Distributed Educational Systems

(Following is a paper I wrote a few months ago. The conference where I submitted it perhaps did not think much of it, but I hope you will!) Introduction Worldwide, there is immense concern on how we will meet the educational needs of a rapidly growing young population. The challenge is compounded by many other...

Scaling the MOOC

I read with interest Audrey Watters' commentary on Scaling College Composition. Some of the work I did in this area (I call it Connectivist Metrics) and the recent discussions I had with Stephen Downes in New Delhi during the EDGEX conference around intelligent environments for assessment, as well as all the great work that is happening...

Educating Educators

One of my favorite rants is that "you cannot educate teachers using the same methods you use to educate your students". Teachers are going through no different a process than their students. The National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education document states (quoting the National Curriculum Framework 2005 document): Experiences in the practice of teacher education...

Report on Open Distance Learning in India

The following is a brief summary of the Madhava Menon report on ODL in India titled "Report of the Committee to Suggest Measures to Regulate the Standards of Education Being Imparted through Distance Mode". The report was released in 2010 it seems. The report defines Open Distance Learning (ODL) as a term that encompasses the "open"...

The tensions at EDGEX2012

Speakers at the EDGEX Conference debated many tensions and challenges apparent in education today. George Siemens evocatively questioned the use of the word “disruptive” and asserted that we should call for transformation instead. Given the broad societal transitions to a networked and complex ecology, he talked about how initiatives like Coursera, Udacity and the Khan Academy provided...

My life is a MOOC

I have been meaning to catch up with the interesting discussion happening around MOOCs. I believe that there will be and should be plurality of approaches and intentions - they are the inevitable accompaniment to change itself. The top tensions in the conversation are: How do MOOCs compare with other initiatives like the Stanford AI? Should...

EDGEX2012 – Nearly There

Less than two weeks to go for EDGEX2012! EDGEX is conceived as a platform that would connect people with different passions for education to come together. There are plenty of disruptive things happening in education around the world and EDGEX aims to kindle some conversations within and across learning communities - whether they be organized in some way...

Assocham Conference, New Delhi

The Associated Chambers of Commerce held a one day conference called the Assocham National Conference on E-Education & Distance Education - Innovative & Creative models in Higher Education on Dec 8, 2011. This conference was a small gathering of people from different parts of the education sector. I tweeted some of the proceedings with the hashtag...

EDGEX 2012 Conference New Delhi

It gives me great pleasure to announce a unique conference on educational research and innovation called EDGEX, to be held at the Habitat Centre, New Delhi from March 12-14, 2012. The two main themes of the conference are: Learning X.O - marking the significant and ongoing developments in learning and teaching, particularly in informal learning, connectivism...

The Education World is changing

Over the past few months, I have seen the signs of what could be the next generation of teaching - learning experiences, the signs that show how traditionally accepted models and conceptions of tools are being superseded and are gaining focus and importance from education companies, vendors and users, not just innovator-entrepreneurs who have a good...

Epistemic Games

Clark Quinn pointed me to the work of David Williamson Shaffer and the work around Epistemic Games, the site provocatively taglined Building the Future of Education. Defined: Epistemic games are computer games that can help players learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, lawyers, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools they need...

Learning Histories

What happens to learning histories? Traditionally, in the school or college system, we treat textbooks and references built by experts as the starting point of our education. Students are encouraged to discover through the texts and teacher led activities. However, from one group of students to the other, from one year to the other, it...

MOOC, DIY-U and Edupunk

I was reading with interest Stephen Downes' critique of Anya Kamenetz's approach in her book DIY-U. I am reading Anya's book, but could not help writing this post, even though that exercise is incomplete, so I beg your indulgence. The point Stephen is making is definitely not just academic. The term DIY (do-it-yourself) affords primacy...

Holographic eLearning

This has got to be more than awesome. I found this article on Samsung's use of holography to position a new product and then went on to look at Dimension Studio's Holographic Projection System. Further investigation got me to the first holographic training session from OnTrack, a paper presented at the InSITE 2010 conference on...

Consumer Choice in Education

A chance conversation prompted me to think - why and how does a consumer student/learner decide on taking a course? The answers are many depending upon the stage in the student lifecycle, context and many other factors. So it is interesting to see how marketing and sales functions view the problem of student acquisition, how...

Managed Simulations

I have been researching management of simulations and other complex entity based learning implements such as serious games. The challenge here is that the traditional SCORM/AICC paradigm allows limited reporting capabilities. Another challenge is storing state for later resumption (bookmarks) and the third challenge is to be able to set simulation parameters. Another related challenge is...

BIG Data and Journalism

An interesting post, over at GigaOm, on When big data meets journalism, talks about how companies are using the power of tools that allow journalists to analyze information. At the least, through simply analyzing content for times, dates, places, phone numbers, data (structured and unstructured) and people references, a lot of connections to a resource can...

Skillshare: Democratizing Education

The concept of Skillshare is to connect teachers and learners within a local community context. It is Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Skillshare CEO/Co-Founder, who makes a clarion call for democratizing education. Read more at FutureLearn!

EY Reports – Higher Education in India

During the EDGE2011 conference, Ernst & Young, came out with a report called 40 million by 2020: Preparing for a new paradigm in Indian Higher Education, building on its earlier report with FICCI (Making Indian Higher Education Future Ready, 2009). This post deals with the salient analysis of and in the report. At the outset, overall...

The quality of educational administrators

I think this is a key challenge, not only in India, but across the world. It is every bit as important as the quality of educational technology and content in our classrooms. I am, so far, largely untouched by what I see in India (and maybe I have limited experience).  The first problem, and the most important...

Pushing the Frontiers of New Assessments – EDGE2011

My talk at EDGE2011 in Delhi was part of a panel that was presenting different thoughts on cutting edge developments in Assessments. I specifically focused on the tracking data, metrics and corresponding analytics that could be found by using games and simulations (or blends of the two). When I talk of Games and Simulations, I...

EDGE2011 New Delhi

The Emerging Directions in Global Education (EDGE) conference in Delhi was a power packed event. It saw a coming together of government, academia and private players in the education sector. It was an intriguing experience. There were some key ideas that I took away from the conference. I believe now that there is full realization...

LAK11: Big Data Small Data

Going through week 2 of LAK11, I could not help think which data is more appropriate - BIG or small.  In a discussion forum exchange, George Siemens volunteered his view on the definition of BIG Data. most discussion about big data centres on quantity. Chris Anderson considers the implication of big data (new methods of science). Marissa...

LAK11: From Tin Can and LETSI

I mentioned Project Tin Can before on this blog. To give you a snapshot of the top ideas in their forum (please contribute as much as you can), here are some of the user ideas on how learning experiences should be tracked: Distributed content - include content across organizational boundaries Transparency of SCORM runtime data Multiple collaboration...

LAK11: Metrics

There was a good discussion I had almost two years ago on LMSs and RoI. My observations were: Organizations use LMS metrics to measure employees' learning and development and derive RoI from training initiatives. Obviously tracking and automated flexible reporting of any sort is valuable to any organization in any function - provided it is accurate to...

LAK11: Learning Analytics with LAK11

Of course, the world changed with SoMe. No longer were we thinking about a central portal where everyone came to, rather the service became the medium for distributed communication - with distributed cores. Each core, each node generating intelligence, transmitting and amplifying information. We have started leaving data trails across various Web 2.0  and Web...

LAK11: Learning Analytics with egurucool.com

 My experience with Learning Analytics started about ten years ago with egurucool.com, arguably India's first large scale online learning initiative for the K12 segment, as its CTO. Charged with building the technology frameworks to support over 20,000 users and over 12,000 hours of learning content across grades 9-12, we designed and built a complete LCMS with...

The anatomy of a networked digital life

Our digital life is being extended in multiple ways every day, not only by new software but also by new hardware and experiences being created that merge the social, physical and technological worlds we inhabit. I have been trying to piece together a framework for describing where we are today from the perspective of the design of future...

SCORM X.O

Ben Clark from Project TinCan reached out and responded to my last post on SCORM. They have an amazing platform - not only have they been chartered with researching what the next generation of eLearning runtime communication should look like, but they have also employed a cool tool called UserVoice to crowd source ideas and opinions. TinCan is managed...

Revisiting SCORM

SCORM works on 2 main principles - as a way to package and sequence learning material, and as a way for learning management systems to track learning activity through a run time interface. It is based on traditional teaching-learning processes and provides additional promises of inter-operability and reuse through standardization of the way courses are organized and presented to...

On Innovation

For my 200th post, I thought it would be a good idea to write about a possible model to comprehend the spate of technological changes happening around us. There is a wealth of material available on defining what innovation really is. And, of course, multiple views and types of innovation have been identified and argued about. There is...

The Kahani of Learning

For those who are not aware, Kahani is the Hindi word for Story. And this gentleman tells a story like no one else I know. His use of metaphors is wondrous. The Torrent of Words, by the way, thunders down from the Sea of Stories into the Lake of Wisdom, who waters are illuminated by...

India: CLO Summit

I attended the CLO Summit (#CLOSummit) in Mumbai last week. It was an interesting conference bringing together the CLO and HR community - companies like Infosys, Wipro, Deloitte and GE, Government sector representation with DPE, NSDC, NABARD & others and vendors such as HBP, 24X7, LearningMate and many others. I went to the summit trying to get a sense...

BIG Data and Learning Analytics

I was going through Techcrunch's coverage of Jeff Jonas, Chief Scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group and his concept - BIG data. I think this is a wonderful way to look at how we make sense of the over abundant flow of information around us. Addressing the question what is data, Jeff says organizations are as...

PLE/N Tools

Really nice collection of links for this week's #PLENK2010 discussions. I especially liked Patterns of personal learning environments, Wilson. Wilson looks at patterns of use of and activity in personal learning tools and learning networks, revising a previous approach which was very functional and tool-specific. One of the ongoing challenges I have is with the...

The capacity of universities

George Siemens bemoans the emerging trend that "higher education is not in control of its fate as it has failed to develop the capacity to be self-reliant in times of change". Referring to a dilution of the stance against corporatization, and the way external innovation is driving change at the academy, George may just be right....

PLEs and Connective Environments

With a little help from Jatinder, a kindred soul in the making of simulators that happen to attract Brandon Hall Awards, I tried to visualize a model of PLEs operating in a connective environment. It started with a reply I made to Janet and Carmen on what I think should be: ...let us contrast the...

The eXtended Web PLENK discussion

Missed Janet Clarey's great interactive talk this Wednesday but caught up with the recording. I think it was a great session on many accounts. Janet brings her great experience in Corporate Learning Development research at Brandon Hall into the session she leads. Thanks, Janet! The main questions that she addressed were: What are Web 1.0/2.0 learning...

Connectivist and Constructivist PLEs

Is the PLE a connectivist construct or a constructivist construct? Or both? Or neither, just influenced by many theories? A statement by Wendy Drexler in her paper prompted this question. I quote: Principles of connectivism equate to fundamentals of learning in a networked world. The design of the teacher-facilitated, student-created personal learning environment in this study...

The Curation Debate – Plenk2010

Yesterday's session seemed to be interesting. I missed it but was catching up on the recording. One part of it, around Curation (at least where it initially started), was especially interesting, not only from the point of view of what was being discussed, but also as an interesting example of the anatomy of the "narrative...

PLEs are an Operating System for Learning

This is my first post for PLENK2010 and I am glad to be involved in this discussion. Thanks to the MOOC organizers for setting this up. I think of PLEs as Operating Systems just like regular operating systems are for computer users. In fact, I call the PLE a LearnOS. Thinking of a PLE as a LearnOS helps me...

The curious cat and other stories

After listening and reading a lot about the Hole in the Wall over the past 10 years or so and other such experiments and viewing Dr. Sugata Mitra's latest TED Talk, I am inspired to ask the question - what makes the cat curious? What if I did not put a high-speed PC with Internet...

Free Learning

I came across an interesting statement from Chris Anderson in his book "Free" (which incidentally seems to be available for free online viewing on Scribd for folks in the United States only). The context is his analysis around how computer processing power, digital storage and bandwidth are getting "too cheap to meter". He states: And...

Critical Literacies and Native Collaboration

The epiphany is that what I have been thinking around native collaboration and what Stephen and participants of the Critical Literacies open course (which I regret not being actively part of) have been discussing have a great deal of resonance. Like in CCK08, I was approaching the topic more from the tools and implementation perspective while the...

Of teachers and teaching

I came across John Merrow's post on Proof that Teachers Matter in which he talks about an LA Times story in which " Three reporters documented the effects that teachers have on their students’ test results."  The current shameful controversy and its continuing aftermath around the proclamation of a semester system in Delhi University brings a...

Look who is talking

I just read Will Richardson's thought-provoking post Who's Asking. In particular, this paragraph stands out / echoes my thoughts: So here’s the deal with the change that many of us in this conversation are clamoring for in schools: we’re about the only ones talking it. The townsfolk down at the corner store aren’t demanding “21st...

On tradition

I have now been going to school events - formal and informal - for about 5 years in my capacity as a parent. My 5 year old and my 10 year old are being programmed to show respect, listen attentively and obey authority by the school system. The way of doing this is to make doing yoga...

The Ontologies of Collaboration

I had written earlier about collaboration as native collaboration - the basic thesis being that we should perhaps be able to bring a new level of structured collaboration for learning that can assess learning defined as connectedness of an individual. I had looked at tools like IMINDI and sites like MindQuarry. The five aspects of native collaboration...

Learners as Educators

Sliced PLEs - that is the term I had thought of to describe the subject of this post. I wrote: Let us say I managed to slice through everything in my PLE and gathered relevant information (posts, entries, discussions etc) around a specific learning area. Then, suppose I had the tools to order and sequence...

Attaching more than the network to open courses

Alan Levine summed it up nicely: And frankly, the open courses, marched to the beat of a fixed time length syllabus, might be seen as an incremental step from (I guess they would be called) closed courses? Non open courses? Are there other models than attaching the open network to a fixed course? We have...

Innovative Learning Formats

I am looking at the history of web based training. Found an interesting timeline here and here. Google's timeline search throws up some more interesting links. In particular, I liked reading this 1998 thesis by Mattias Moser. I am sure I could be pointed to more (and it would be great if you could point me to more)....

Open Courses

This is in addition to the discussion on the Open Courses Educause article by George and Dave. Interestingly, being one of the 18 students who sought accreditation, I sought it because I believed that I needed to get personal attention and direct mentoring from an expert. The concepts I networked with were (and are) serious...

Learning and Architecture

I was prompted by Howard to think more about the intersection of Learning and Architecture. Howard states: I’ve been thinking about how to create educationally relevant physical and social spaces for networked everyday learning. The similarity is in the importance of physical space and tacit learning. And poses the question: So . . . how...

Connective Simulations

Trust Stephen to come out with another super presentation. The presentation titled The Representative Student seeks to explore two challenges related to the modeling - the role of simulations or models in both delivering and learning about learning; and the relationships between adaptive courseware and social learning environments. This comes close on the heels of the...

PLE Architecture

Rita Kop mentions Stephen Downes' charter/vision for a PLE extending on from a discussion of critical literacies and the eXtended Web, building on Steve Wheeler's Web 3.0, George Siemens' xWeb and Stephen's Web X, to which I would add some of my own thoughts from a couple of years ago on Learning X.0: The components that were...

Learning Innovation

To communicate an elusive and esoteric concept such as corporate values or leadership skills in a way that learners at all levels imbibe the spirit and passion with which the company has been created and is driven on a daily basis, is a task that requires continuous engagement and time. It also requires continuous reiteration...

We don’t need no education

I was reading with interest Will Richardson's Motivating DIY Learners and his links to Alan Levine's The Gaping M Shaped Void for DY Education and then following up on Anya Kamenetz who has written a new book called DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education which I have to read, and I...

The production of learning

I came across a recent article in Forbes titled What Educators are Learning from Money Managers. The article is rife with purported linkages between how corporations work and how education could be if it learnt its lessons from the "money makers". The point made is that if public money (and private funding in public education through...

Learner Responsibility

We have often, actually most of the time, decided to focus on teachers, teaching methods, institutional structures, assessments and certifications, but what is the responsibility of the learner herself in this experience? I am not talking about defining learners by the characteristics (autonomous, takes responsibility for her own learning...) under the category of responsibility, but...

New models for Indian Education

In this post, I would like to propose some new models/directions for Indian Education by addressing some core problem areas that I have been able to identify. I would like to focus on, in particular how some strategic new models could change the way we are addressing the huge scale and diversity in India. The...

Indian Education Services

I was discussing the formation of a specialized cadre, perhaps on the lines of the Indian Administrative Services, for providing a set of well trained educators and educational administrators that have a pan Indian impact. I was told that former Education Secretary, Anil Bordia, has been empowered to investigate this. Subsequently, I found a recent...

Future Ready Indian Higher Education

FICCI (the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) and Ernst and Young took out a report for the FICCI Higher Education Summit 2009. They called it "Making the Indian higher education system future ready". The report uses trends and understanding of the underlying structures in higher ed in India and proposes alternate educational...

EdFutures – Futures Map – India

Here is a brief CMap on what I think are some of the major components of a possible Indian educational future. There are trends (and data) to back a whole lot of these elements. Needless to say, this is a first attempt! Please click on the image to get a better view.

Schooling for Tomorrow

I came across this fascinating OECD-CERI project through Dave Cormier and George Siemens' Open Course in Education Futures. Please download the Schooling for Tomorrow StarterPack document here. It gives practitioners, administrators and other stakeholders a way to think about key questions such as: What is shaping the future of schooling? What might schooling look like...

HE Summit Keynote: Prof. Pillai

HE cannot be separated from other types of education. The challenge is to provide firstly, access (GER - Gross Enrolment Ratio - is 12% of 18-24 age group, world average is 23%); secondly, the quality of teaching learning is a bottleneck - if it improves, the GER will go up - this will improve by...

Digital Learning Higher Ed Summit 2010

A small group of educators, technologists, bureaucrats and private companies are sitting together to dliberate the use of Digital Learning in Higher Education in India. We have Prof. VN Rajasekharan Pillai, VC, IGNOU, Prof. Deepak Pental, VC, Delhi University, Prof. A K Bakshi, Director, ILLL, DU, Dr. B K Murthy, Director, DoIT and many more...

Should education be free?

...and should education be not-for-profit? The recent Right to Education Act being implemented from April 1,2010, is catching flak on a wide range of aspects. Advocates of the common school system, like Prof. Anil Sadgopal, want a school system that is defined as follows: Common School System means the National System of Education that is...

Digital memory against forgetting

In 1978 Milan Kundera wrote a novel , The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and said: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Now in 2010, in our context, perhaps, this statement might be revisited. Our struggle, in the digital medium, is not of forgetting our digital memories (look...

3D Immersive Technology – Some thoughts

Almost every kind of IT has a potential impact on education. If you look at the various dimensions that constitute mainstream adoption, you want to look at the fit to the educational need, the capability of the audience to consume it, the access and availability of both platform and content, supporting infrastructure required and of...

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs)

I had not heard of  games of this genre before, but they are pretty exciting and I must thank Ulises Mejias for my first introduction to  this medium. There are many definitions including the one here where ARGs are contrasted with serious games. Apparently, the first such "game" dates back to 1996! Wikipedia defines it as "is...

eyeOS

For those interested in operating systems for education, such as the OLPC Sugar project, you must check eyeOS out. The OS is completely browser-based and built on open source technologies. Apart from being painless to administer, it has amazing possibilities for the classroom. From their website: eyeos can provide schools and universities with a full web platform where students,...

Picolearning

Check out Microvision's SHOWWX. The SHOWWX Laser Pico Projector is a pocket-sized projection device that can connect to iPods, PCs and other TV-Out devices expected to be made commercially available in March 2010 in the US. Microvision also offers an evaluation kit for other companies who want to embed this technology in their digital products e.g. mobile phones. While there are...

Alternate Education

I have started research on alternative education systems. Right off the bat I found a website that summarizes some of these initiatives in the Indian context - Alternative Education in India. Two really interesting categories were Alternative Schools and Learning Cooperatives. I like the fact that the latter prefer not to be called "schools" at all. Among...

Centenary Post

For my hundredth post, I would like to focus on a few key questions that attack various aspects of what I have experienced and learnt in the past two years. These questions are extremely important for me to attempt to answer and I hopefully will, atleast in part, as I go on. The questions may...

3 Idiots: Educational Pedagogy or Fantasy

In case you didn't know, 3 Idiots is now a record-breaking Hindi movie, that explores and exposes the educational system. As of the time of this post, it has been released worldwide and is the highest grosser in Indian cinema history (about US$68mn in 19 days and also made 43 million pounds worldwide to date). The movie...

Online Certificate Depository

Finally! Indian minister for HRD, Kapil Sibal, has announced the start of an initiative, to be completed in 2011, of pushing all academic qualifications from school to Post Graduation, to a secure, authenticated online depository. The ostensible aims are to provide electronic access, reduce the forgery of certificates and link schools and academic institutions directly to the depository. This is...

Is content king?

I have really been wanting to write about this news article ever since I saw it some time back. The company, Demand Media moved to #24 in the comScore top 50 web properties in the US, owns eHow.com, Pluck and eNom, and has succeeded in attracting 31 million unique page views in July, 2009. Since then,...

2010 Predictions

It's again the new year and time to review some of the predictions I had made for 2008 and 2009. From my 2008 predictions: PLEs will be sharable - tools shall arrive on the web that shall allow entire learning experiences to be sliced and shared between users. This shall be followed by ratings on which PLE slices are...

Reverse Search

I have a special interest in reverse searches. It has been used in many forms such as reverse looking up IP from domain name , looking up a phone number using an address etc. But I have seen a couple of examples lately that go a step further. Straight or forward search involves entering key...

The god in Education

Am reading Neil Postman's The End of Education. Was particularly struck by his separation of the engineering of learning from the metaphysics of learning. While the engineering of learning involves the how (the methods, techniques), the metaphysics of learning involves becoming a "different person because of something you have learned" (p. 3). The metaphysics of...

Social Networking – the last innovation wave

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in  Facebook makes a provocative statement in a report by New Scientist. He says: I believe that the computer age culminated in the internet, the internet culminated in social networks, and that we'll have to look extremely far afield for what is next...My view is that...

Brandon-Hall 2009 Award!

Winning a Silver at the recently concluded Brandon-Hall 2009 Awards is something special! We were nominated along with our fantastic partners at ICICI Bank in the Best Use of Games for Learning category. Our "work of art" was a game that allows sales people to sell banking products to a set of customers. What was...

Medium – the Massage

Reading Marshall mcLuhan's the medium is the MASSAGE. Deep. The impact of media - the wheel as an extension of the leg, clothes as an extension of the body, electronic circuitry as an extension of the brain - has powerful impacts on the way we are. He makes the point about "electric technology" presenting a unifying force,...

NBT – Networked Based Training Solutions

NBTs, the natural evolution (in my opinion) from WBTs, are a solution worth evaluating. Let us look at NBTs from two aspects - one within a learning context and the other from outside that context. Typical online training involves the use of self paced digital media or virtual classrooms. The major aspects are: The very...

Nokia Life Tools

Nokia has recently launched this service in India. Nokia Life Tools are rich iconic applications that use SMS as the backend on inexpensive (sub $50) models such as the Nokia 2323 and 2320 classic. As Mr. D Shivakumar, Managing Director, Nokia India says, We believe this is the beginning of a historical journey that will take...

The temporal internet – Zoetrope

The vision of the web as a site of history may not be old or far-fetched. Check out the Wayback machine at http://www.archive.org. They even have a K-12 Web Archiving Program! We all know that content on the web changes constantly. How do we maintain a track of that content change? How do we play...

Google Chrome OS

It's nice to hear of a new operating system coming up. The central idea here is to use a lightweight Linux based kernel and the Google Chrome browser (that is built over the WebKit engine) to offer "speed, simplicity and security" to the end user. The OS is targeted at initially at netbooks and eventually will power...

Seriously Unreal: Microsoft’s Project Natal

You have got to see this! MS is working on a new technology that promises to revolutionize the human computer interface. Project Natal is a hands-free motion sensitive controller integrated with the Xbox system. You definitely want to check out the videos - here and here. The ability for a person to use physical movements and...

Google Wave

Check out Google Wave. The concept is striking and ambitious. Also very relevant to what we have been talking about in terms of PLEs. At the core, there are a few important architectural dimensions. Firstly, content structure. A few years back I had designed an architecture for a content management system that structured out content...