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

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/51089.html

If you have an interest in e-learning or blended learning then the chances are that you have come across my friend Curt Bonk at some point in your career. If you haven't been to one of his remarkable presentations, you should find the time to do so. It's not hard as he is in great demand as a keynote and invited speaker and he has been known to average one every couple of days for years on end. You might not immediately recognise him from his picture as, chances are, he'll be dressed as a wizard, a Jedi knight, Darth Vader, one of the Borg or any one of a number of ingenious (if conspicuous) disguises. He'll probably be throwing things (nice things) at you while displaying a multimedia extravaganza of densely packed information in a slide show behind him while talking with remarkable coherence and speed about stuff you really ought to care about. You'll probably be called upon to participate, if only as part of a crowd. I have called this Curt Bonk's Wall of Sound in the past because of its massively parallel layers of rapidly presented information with barely a pause that you feel more than absorb. I've also called him a human hypertext because there is so much information there that you tend to pick out snippets and link them with others that come seconds or minutes later rather than following the linear narrative that runs too fast to completely absorb. It's not that he flits from here to there: it's just that Curt bombards you with so much stuff that you tend to construct your own path through his talks. They don't quite capture the atmosphere, but there are videos of some of Curt's talks  on his site.

If you're interested in e-learning and you've missed the presentations then there's still a very good chance you've read some of his work – Curt's output in a year is roughly equivalent to what most people in this area produce in a whole career. It's mostly high quality academic stuff, generally flawless, always interesting, generally fitting the mould that all of us academics tend to follow. But now Curt has produced something different, something that is the textual equivalent of his presentations, a set of stories and ideas that burst from the page with all of Curt's customary zeal that drives his presentations.

The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education is (explicitly) in the same kind of territory as Friedman's The World is Flat, but applied in an educational (in the loosest sense) context. Like Curt's talks, it is dense with fantastic stuff, stories, research findings, hey-wow statistics, examples and ideas. Like Curt's talks, it travels at a furious pace, packing a mass of knowledge into a small space and, given that the book is pretty long and Curt is remarkably well-informed, that's a hell of a lot of knowledge.

This is not a view from the edge: Curt is right in the thick of the revolution and makes an extremely persuasive point that the changes wrought by technologies that emerged just a few years ago are not something to think about tomorrow, but that affect and profoundly influence what's happening today. For the mass of educators stuck in a model of teaching and learning that has barely changed since the nineteenth century, this should be a wake-up call. The world of learning has radically changed and, as Curt rightly says, it is open and accessible to all (well… at least, most people in developed nations and a massively growing number elsewhere).This is a very detailed snapshot of the world of learning and education on the cusp of change and a guidemap for those who have either not realised that things are different now or who see the changes but are confused about what to do.

It took me a while to get into the swing of the book, partly because I was reading it like an academic (it's not an academic book and doesn't pretend to be) and partly because Curt is talking about things that I'm pretty familiar with. I agree with pretty much everything he has to say on the subject. He's preaching to the converted here but, after a while, I was swept along with it anyway and, as is the nature of such things, there's plenty in it that was unfamiliar to me. However, the real joy of the book is that it reminds me at every turn of the page of why I love this job of teaching, how the things we do can really make a difference, how big change is possible, how amazing it all is. It's refreshing and revitalising. This is a cornucopia of ideas, examples, inspirations and explanations about how to help everyone learn more, learn better, learn more enjoyably. Curt is a fantastic teacher and researcher himself and is about as much of an expert in the field as anyone can be so none of this is wild speculation or fantasy. Just because he foregoes the academic niceties on this occasion doesn't mean that it is not backed up by a firm foundation of sound pedagogy and very solid research.

The bulk of the book's organisation largely follows Curt's WE-ALL-LEARN model for understanding the mass of stuff that's out there. After the introduction, the main part of the book consists of what Curt calls 'Openers' – a nice play on words that captures both the fact that these are things that are making the learning world open and that he fills the chapters with things that might start us thinking about doing things differently – rather like conversation openers, if you like. The full expansion of WE-ALL-LEARN is:

1. Web Searching in the World of e-Books
2. E-Learning and Blended Learning
3. Availability of Open Source and Free Software
4. Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare
5. Learning Object Repositories and Portals
6. Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
7. Electronic Collaboration and Interaction
8. Alternative Reality Learning
9. Real-Time Mobility and Portability
10. Networks of Personalized Learning

I find the acronym a little forced: WE-ALL-LEARN may be memorable but, though I've heard Curt talk about it, read the book, visited the site and more, I still can't for the life of me remember what more than one or two letters stand for and had to copy and paste the definitions into this review. It is interesting that, though they cover each aspect in turn, the chapter titles are different (and more entertaining!) than the acronym's expansion. That is perhaps reasonable as the book  is not an encyclopaedia and needs to tell a story. The framework does give a bit of structure to a very complex and evolving web of change and it keeps the book organised, so I'm fine with it.

Any review should highlight the things that the reviewer wishes were different: the book is great and all I can offer is nit-picking here:

• Curt finds it really hard to look on the negative side of all this wonderful stuff. He pays lip-service every now and then to the possibility that this is not for everyone, that there are digital divides, that most of these technologies can be used really effectively by bad people, that the economics of Free are a bit shaky, that the crowd is not always that wise, that it is hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, that we need to rethink our attitudes to plagiarism and so on. He does spend some of the final visionary chapter, Treasures and Traps, talking about risks as well as how to overcome them but, even then, the grimy shadowy stuff is dealt with in far less detail than the good things and his heart is just not in it. While it goes against the grain for Curt to consider the Dark Side, this is in keeping with the revolutionary fervour of the book: he is on a mission to change the world, to motivate and mobilise. The bad stuff has been copiously written about elsewhere anyway.
• I have a technical quibble with the word 'Web' in the title which, given that real-time mobility and portability is the R in WE-ALL-LEARN and the second A is for alternate reality, and many other technologies are discussed that are not even similar to the Web, is misleading for a techie like me. This is about many forms of networked technology and how they are changing things, a web (in a generic sense), not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee invented, nor its offspring. 
• My final quibble is that there are more exclamation marks per page than my Brit sensibilities are adjusted to accommodate for. However, the exclamation marks and superlatives get a lot easier to accept after the first couple of chapters and it is hard not to get carried away with the massive energetic flow of it after a while.

This book is not aimed at me: I know where Curt is coming from, I have the t-shirt, I'm already not just a convert but an apostle like Curt (albeit of a lowlier kind). Even so, the book left me energised and enthused, excited afresh by the many extraordinary possibilities latent in technological affordances, inspired to try anew to make things different, make things better. If you are an educator who has been wondering about how to make sense of all this gushing surge of new and scary technologies that we might use in education, someone who is interested, perhaps a little sceptical but open to exploring new directions, this book is a must-read. It is packed from head to toe with inspiring ideas and very practical guidelines about how to get real and lasting value from social, open, ubiquitous, mobile, immersive and many other modern technologies, not just in the future but now. A particularly appealing aspect is that it is firmly focussed on human connections and enhancing, not replacing, interactions with real people in real places. 

If you're a lifelong learner (who isn't?) this is also a great place to start finding out about the massive range of help that is available to you. The opportunities beyond Google and Wikipedia are many and varied, and this book is full of ideas and examples of ways to learn outside the institution.

Given the stance of the book (including two pages extolling the virtues of my friend Terry Anderson's approach in creating the freely downloadable and highly rated book, The Theory and Practice of Online Learning) it is a touch ironic that this is a book that is very much in the traditional mould – not expensive, but printed on paper and certainly not free. It's a double-whammy because a few specific technologies he talks about have been superceded, changed, merged, or gone the way of all things and this is sure to get worse. The irony is not lost on Curt and he has a solution. He is, as I mentioned before, a prolific writer. In writing this book he discarded about as much as he kept, not because of quality issues but because there was just too much to print. As a consequence and in keeping with the spirit of what he is writing about, he will be releasing a similarly copious e-book for free that keeps the same structure but that has completely different content. Curt mentions this in the paper book, but it won't be available for a little while. He has promised to put it on the WE-ALL-LEARN site for anyone to download. I'm looking forward to that. If it's half as inspiring as the paper version, this will be a great bargain and maybe even more current. The WE-ALL-LEARN site is also an excellent source of up-to-date links, current information, ideas, and suggestions. It's well worth visiting even if you are not getting the book.