An intriguingly designed (and stupidly named, bearing in mind the popularity of SmartFM for listening to music) adaptive learning tool that attempts to improve the effectiveness of self-paced learning by reminding you about stuff relating to your learning goals at the right point on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. In essence it’s a sequencer for memory-based learning. Purportedly based on brain science and using a very strongly cognitivist approach, this actually looks like quite a useful way to remember stuff if you use it in a disciplined way, although the effort and hassle of actually using the application may limit its utility for many people.  

Address of the bookmark: http://smart.fm/tour

A fascinating search system that uses semi-structured searching of Wikipedia (in this demo – the method is generalisable) to graphically show links between two different concepts. It’s quite beautiful to watch the concept map grow. A potentially very valuable tool that can provide a rich overview of a subject area using crowd-sourced knowledge to abstract a collective view of connections between topics. 

It has some notable interface issues (it appears to use Silverlight 🙁 ) but it’s an extremely promising approach to mining for and visualising something akin to collective wisdom, with a clear focus on generating something of value to learners.

Like the vast majority of systems that look at knowledge structure as a means to organise information for learners, it is worth observing that knowledge structure is far from equivalent to the best pedagogical structure so this is not a means to establish a learning path. However, to provide a useful top-down overview of an area of interest and its connections to other things, as well as to draw attention to the crowd-perceived importance of particular aspects of an area, this is pretty cool.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.conceptlinkage.org/clink/

Call me a geek, but I want one of these! It’s not quite Avatar yet but it’s a pretty good start. A robot that can be controlled by thoughts transmitted over the Internet. Who wouldn’t want one?

The Rovio itself is a mighty cool device at a very reasonable price (its main competitor is the Spykee, which is natively controllable by SKype, and both are obtainable for well under $300) which lets you do online video conferencing while your robot avatar wanders around the remote location, controlled by you. Both are clever enough to find their own charging stations when they run out of juice. Sadly, neither Rovio nor Skypee yet includes a front-facing video screen – just camera and microphone – so the people at the other end have to stick a picture of you on the device with a bit of blu-tack if they want that Avatar-like realism,

Address of the bookmark: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/27/rovio-robot-controlled-via-skype-with-emotiv-brain-reading-heads/

A delightfully recursive peer-reviewed symposium on peer review. On the bright side, it does use at least three different forms of peer review in reviewing the papers on peer review so I guess you might expect some very high quality papers as a result. And if that didn’t happen, then the symposium will have at least proved the need for a symposium on the subject.

It would be very interesting were the participative peer review process to lead to changes in the participative peer review process. If one of the rules of change is that the rules of change may change then things can get very interesting. See http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/04/the_evolution_o.php for Kevin Kelly’s latest musings on such things.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.iiis2010.org/wmsci/website/default.asp?vc=27

Robert X. Cringely is one of the finest, smartest commentators on technology with the inside track on almost everything of note in the world of technology and an unbelievably deep understanding of all things geek, from the most arcane algorithmic processes or hardware designs to the most fuzzy social ties and political manoeuvrings. I have loved his blog for many years because he sees things that others don’t notice and, even if they do, his powers of prediction verge on the uncanny so he is nearly always worth listening to.

In this post he comments on the unlikely discovery of the next generation of iPhone in a bar at a time when Apple might benefit considerably from such a leak. No big surprises, just Apple doing the usual thing of giving us what they (deliberately) left out last time and should have provided in the first place if they weren’t such a nasty but brilliant money-grabbing organisation – a front-facing camera, in particular.

However, perhaps the most interesting observation for those of us in academia is that Apple’s higher education sales and support division is going to close down after 25 years, with the funds going into Apple Stores and telemarketing. I guess it was inevitable and it’s not a huge loss. Apple don’t need it any more – they are sufficiently entrenched in HE and every other market, and their special-purpose computers like the iPod, iPhone and iPad don’t need that special educational slant or pricing to get well used. Plus, lest we think they have forgotten us, iTunes U is way more high profile, successful and glamorous than sales and support ever were.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/so-a-guy-walks-into-a-bar/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ICringely+%28I%2C+Cringely%29

A great little paper that examines Facebook users’ interactions over time. Perhaps the most intriguing finding is that there is very little consistency of interaction between pairs of Facebook friends from one month to the next – the general pattern is one of occasional spikes and flurries of interaction, with a limited amount of continual dialogue between closer friends. The really interesting thing is that the by far the most common catalyst for the spikes in activity is the sending of birthday greetings. This mirrors real life for me in some ways – I stay in contact with many distant friends largely because of the exchange of christmas or birthday cards but, unlike in real life, a social network makes it much easier to maintain a dialogue.

Address of the bookmark: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1592665.1592675

An interesting brain-based explanation of why we can only multitask two things at a time, with some fascinating connections to motivation, goals and rewards. The medial prefrontal cortext in each hemisphere deals with calculating rewards, with each lobe pursuing its own goal. If there are more goals, there’s no space left so, if we want to multi-task further, we have to time-slice. This carries a big cognitive hit, of course. Some interesting parallels with multi-tasking in computers, in which dual-core systems do much the same thing.

It also gives some insight into how we choose between many options. As it turns out, we don’t: we simply reduce them to two. I suspect there are some potential applications of this principle in the design of online learning.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.livescience.com/health/brain-multitasking-limit-100415.html

Interesting article that re-treads a lot of old ground in slightly different shoes. However, as a conceptual framework for thinking about approaches to learning design it’s quite thought-provoking and might be useful.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.educationfutures.com/2010/04/07/three-alternatives-to-temponormative-pedagogy/

It’s not big news that learning-by-doing is good in the sciences but, as interestingly, opportunities to find out what it means to be a scientist/technologist/engineer/mathematician are even more important to young learners…

“Teens listed activities such as field trips to places where they can learn about STEM (66 percent) and access to places outside the classroom where they can build things and conduct experiments (53 percent) as the best ways to get them interested in these subjects. Highlighting the need for non-traditional learning regardless of setting, two-thirds of teens chose hands-on individual projects and hands-on group projects as the types of classroom-based educational methods they enjoy most.”

Address of the bookmark: http://web.mit.edu/invent/n-pressreleases/n-press-10index.html