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The signs leverage what’s called a feedback loop, a profoundly effective tool for changing behavior. The basic premise is simple. Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Action, information, reaction. It’s the operating principle behind a home thermostat, which fires the furnace to maintain a specific temperature, or the consumption display in a Toyota Prius, which tends to turn drivers into so-called hypermilers trying to wring every last mile from the gas tank. But the simplicity of feedback loops is deceptive. They are in fact powerful tools that can help people change bad behavior patterns, even those that seem intractable. Just as important, they can be used to encourage good habits, turning progress itself into a reward. In other words, feedback loops change human behavior. And thanks to an explosion of new technology, the opportunity to put them into action in nearly every part of our lives is quickly becoming a reality.

So can computers actually help improve our concentration and contemplation, instead of leading us into distraction? The problem, as Pang puts it, is that "Technologies that were supposed to help us think better, work more efficiently, and connect more meaningfully with others now interrupt us, divide our attention, and stretch us thin."

In the paper he outlines give principles of contemplative computing; Build awareness through DIY and self-experimentation Recognize that we are cyborgs, and humans Create rewarding challenges Support mind-wandering Treat flow as a means, not an end

Pang suggests that we don't have to choose between information technology and contemplation, and suggests contemplative computing as a new way forward. He describes contemplative computing as something you do, not a product. But the principles of contemplative computing could be extending to application design. "The problem is that today's information technologies are often poorly-designed and thoughtlessly used: they're like unreliable prosthetics that we have to depend on, but can't quite control or trust," Pang says.

Recent efforts by organizations like Coursera, edX, Udacity and Khan Academy have produced thousands of educational videos logging hundreds of millions of views in their attempt to make learning freely available to the masses. While the presentation style of the videos varies depending on the author, they all share a common drawback: videos are time-consuming to produce and cannot be easily modified after release. With that in mind, we present VidWiki, an online platform to leverage the massive numbers of online students viewing videos to iteratively improve video presentation quality and content, similar to other crowdsourced information projects like Wikipedia. Through the platform, users annotate videos by overlaying content on top of the video, lifting the burden on the instructor to update and refine content.

People consider the marketing power of geo-location apps and tracking software as they become more popular, but how often do we consider the implications of such a technology on our personal (and business) info that we don’t want to reveal.

Even Twitter has jumped into the mix by adding your geolocation information (you can opt out of it) that allows people to find you as you tweet away.

The purpose of the iPortfolio is for you to reflect on, and demonstrate evidence of your learning achievements, by drawing on experiences both within and beyond the formal classroom.This application enables you to upload evidence of your learning - photos, videos or audio clips - straight to your iPortfolio!iPortfolio is available to all Curtin Students and Staff. More information available at http://iportfolio.curtin.edu.au

High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?

A pair of MIT Media Lab alums have come up with a do-it-yourself kit for making smart environments. David Carr and John Kestner, partners in the industrial design firm Supermechanical, have developed a small, durable, inexpensive remote sensor node, and an easy-to-use web app that turns data from the sensor node into timely information. The system, dubbed Twine, lets you tie everyday objects into your digital life.

Twine is a palm-size block of rubber that contains a WiFi node, temperature sensor and accelerometer. It’s powered by two AAA batteries or a mini USB connection. And it has a port where external sensors can connect. The initial external sensors are a magnetic switch, moisture sensor and a breakout board for building your own sensor. Supermechanical is also considering an RFID reader, pressure sensor and current sensor.

Using slideshows or sliders within a web design is an effective method of highlighting your portfolio, projects, ecommerce products or even key site related messages and information. As the current slider trend dictates, they are typically found above the fold on the homepage.

Welcome to M-learning.org! Here you will find wealth of information about mobile-learning, best practices, research and free resources brought to you by Tribal's Digital Learning Studio!

Tribal is a global thought leader in m-learning. We have been active in mobile empowerment and learning since 2001, working to widen opportunities for learning through the use of mobile technologies.

To be effective at improving productivity and content retention, mobile learning content must take a different form from what has gone before. And it is content — content fit for the mobile learning purpose — that will drive market growth.

there are two types of user for mobile learning — the “considered” user and the “trigger” user.

The considered user downloads and views learning material

Digital Cosmetic Mirror by industry giant Shiseido can be used to test make-up and recommendations without even having to pick up a mascara brush

Using augmented reality to do sampling is a novel way to involve consumers, and can be a useful technology for saving on waste

The terminal then gives you tailored recommendations. Pressing a few buttons on the touch-screen paints make-up onto your image in realtime, allowing you to see the results instantly. You also try out make-up that is currently making waves, along with printing out before and after photos with product information for you to go make the purchase of whichever colors caught your eye the most.

Schoology is a startup that seeks to address many of the pain points of the LMS: Schoology is easy to use. It's free. It offers data portability. It encourages communication and collaboration with look and feel of contemporary social networking sites rather than the bulletin boards of circa 1996. But it isn't simply a social networking tool. Schoology provides the functionality of its big name competitors - Blackboard, Moodle.

Most LMSes isolate students in their particular courses. And once that class is over and once a student has graduated, the information contained there - notes, lessons, assignments, discussions - are lost. Schoology blends a social networking interface with learning management tools, so that teachers and students (and parents and administrators) can communicate and collaborate on academic issues.

real-time web 2.0 tool that allows users to send up to 140 character messages (tweets) to their followers

Twitter hashtags, a topic with the # symbol such as "#edtech", are tools for spreading, organizing, and searching for information on Twitter

use hashtags to create a twitter backchannel.

"Interoperability is important to Web designers," the W3C said in releasing the results. "Good test suites drive interoperability. They're a key part of making sure Web standards are implemented correctly and consistently

Internet Explorer 9 has topped all other browsers in conforming with the HTML5 specification, including Google Chrome and Firefox,

W3C pitted the just-released version of IE9's developer platform preview against Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, evaluating the five browsers in dozens of tests across seven categories of features

Typical instructional design and pedagogy focus on breaking down a subject into component parts, gaining mastery of those parts, whether they are steps in a process or techniques or parts of the anatomy, and then reassembling them in the learner's mind and in practice so that the result is overall mastery of the broader subject. That may be oversimplified, but this basic approach goes back to Aristotle, at least. It's not debated in education, it's assumed that this is the best approach for learning anything, including complex processes or highly nuanced behaviors in shifting contexts.

Centola's conclusions. He studied positive changes in people's behaviors regarding health care, changes that resulted directly from placing subjects in carefully designed social networks with the goal of improving their health decisions. What he concluded was that smaller, tighter social groups had more success improving health behaviors than larger, looser social groups (ie, the typical Facebook connections). Maybe you already see what it took me a while to notice. Both of them had success. Social networks designed for a specific purpose can do something pretty amazing: They can change people's behaviors. Any educator or trainer whose goal is actually to impact both thinking and behaviors (to change lives!) rather than just getting people to pass a test or check a box, should be paying close attention. And maybe getting a little excited.Researchers in education have long known the power of social groups to alter behavior. Brown, Collins, and Duguid made this case a while back

these three went on to say that highly complex behaviors are picked up, absorbed, through relatively informal social exchange more quickly than they could be if they were "taught" in the usual break-it-down sense. We're talking about complex behaviors. Processes. Highly nuanced interpersonal interactions. Centola's study suggests to me that we now have an online tool, the social network, that is fully capable of carrying the power of culture to shape behaviors and establish norms. And it can be done on purpose.