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LEGOs and Lincoln Logs are for Luddites. Sifteo cubes are the new building blocks. Each cube has a 128-pixel color LCD screen, wireless connectivity, a 32-bit ARM microprocessor, and an accelerometer that responds to tilting and stacking. You can arrange them to create everything from vocabulary puzzles to building challenges, all of which can be enjoyed by as many people as you can crowd around the coffee table.

Sifteo founders Jeevan Kalanithi and David Merrill previewed the cubes at TED 2009 when they were grad students at MIT. The cubes debuted at CES this year. The design marries classic tactility with new hardware and software. “Sifteo cubes are the first gaming solution to deliver truly hands-on play,” Merrill said. “[The cubes combine] the latest in embedded computing and sensing technology with a timeless play style.”

With the continued penetration of smartphones into the mainstream market, QR codes are becoming more of an option for designers to prompt interaction. The two-dimensional barcode can easily be generated from text, including a website link, and printed on materials in magazines and conferences. An artist in Paris found an unusual use for the black-and-white squares: to animate a tattoo.

Informalizing formal learning content brings it closer to the learner and provides for more learning that is “accidental,” or unplanned.

ELearning animated assets, for example quick product demonstrations, are ideal for posting to a site such as YouTube or Vimeo. Not only do these sorts of demonstrations provide concise, targeted training but they can also be teasers to draw people to more formal learning, such as a full training course, of which the demonstration is just a part.

Another easy way to informalize formal learning content is to reposition it closer to a product rather than have it stand alone. It is possible to convert portions of a Web-based eLearning course to “digital cheat sheets” and to incorporate these in product documentation, or embed them into the product itself. These can also serve as teasers to draw people back for additional or advanced formal training.

"CK-12 basically looked at STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] and broke it down into the 5,000 fundamental concepts, and they mapped them all together," Chakrapani says. "It's not about creating a textbook and every three years putting out a new edition so you can capture more revenue. It's about thinking how a student learns."

"And then you go back at the end of year with teachers, see what students struggle on, And revise And improve the book. Each year, the text gets better."

Free educational resources -- like a university course on Coursera, for example -- may be available for students to use at no cost, but students cannot reuse, remix, or repurpose that course content however they'd like. By contrast open-source materials like CK-12's materials are not only free, but can also be freely repurposed in any way a student or teacher sees fit.

iOS 7 hits iPhones this fall, but only the iPhone 5 and iPod touch will get all the features announced at WWDC. The iPhone 4 and 4S will get the new look and a splattering of features. and forget about the iPhone 3GS and older iPhones. They will be stuck in the skeuomorphic world of iOS 6 forever.

Wired: You’re interested in massive open online courses and have championed Salman Khan’s videos. If these had been around when you were young, would it have affected your schooling? Gates: No. For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good. Now, if you’re the kind of person who gets stuck on Chapter 5 and will give up if you don’t have someone to answer questions, don’t try and pick up the Feynman lectures on physics. That’s true whether it’s online or offline. A MOOC is an attempt to gather a group and encourage students, almost like a typical classroom, forcing you to interact during the lecture so that it kind of wakes you up and keeps you engaged. A hyperlearner doesn’t have to have those things.

Not only is the creative services software shop closing down the Creative Suite version numbers and branding; it’s getting rid of the entire paradigm of old-school, cereal-box* software.

No more waiting for your design software’s features to catch up with what the web guys have been doing for six months

new purchasing paradigm for the entire creative industry. Every ad agency, every magazine, every indie design firm and print shop — they will all be transitioning from bought-and-owned software at $200 or $700 or $2,000 a pop to the Creative Cloud subscription model, which can cost as little as $20 per mont

ZoomIt is screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image. I wrote ZoomIt to fit my specific needs and use it in all my presentations.ZoomIt works on all versions of Windows and you can use pen input for ZoomIt drawing on tablet PCs

While edX shares the common theme of scaling the online experience to very large groups, it adds an important component lacking from the various Stanford spin-offs, namely research.

EdX partners will be doing more than putting content online, they will be studying how people learn in these environments in an effort to improve both classroom and online learning.

“When we were doing research for our messaging product, we actually looked at what subject lines people used. And like 80 percent of subject lines are “hey,” “hi,” or left blank. The subject line is outdated. The truth is, e-mail is outdated.” Though he’s IBM’s poster boy for dropping out of e-mail, even Suarez admits that the inbox And carbon-copy will probably never completely go away. But four years into his experiment, he feels more productive, And almost all of his work is done in the open. For Suarez, it’s not just more efficient. It’s a nicer way to communicate. There’s a “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” kind of passive-aggressiveness to the way many people use corporate e-mail, with the strategic bcc And the cover-your-ass e-mail message. “If you have been using e-mail in a corporate environment, you know that plenty of people use e-mail as a weapon against their own colleagues,” he says. “This was also creating a new way of working where you wouldn’t need to justify the work you did. You earned trust from your colleagues by being a lot more public, a lot more open And a lot more transparent in what you do.”

Portals, mashups, mobile, and social will combine

6: Video

Why Develop for Android?Android is an open-source platform based on the Linux kernel, And is installed on thousAnds of devices from a wide range of manufacturers. Android exposes your application to all sorts of hardware that you’ll find in modern mobile devices — digital compasses, video cameras, GPS, orientation sensors, And more.

Android is an open-source platform based on the Linux kernel, And is installed on thousAnds of devices from a wide range of manufacturers.

Android’s free development tools make it possible for you to start writing software at little or no cost.

"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

as a learning tool, the iPad’s single-screen interface reduces elements of interruption and potentially enhances user orientation to a specific task. An abundance of features can be a disturbance to the cognitive process, and educators often prefer mobile devices without distractive features like messaging and phone calls.

Modern educators are voicing the need for learning to be more contextual and engaging. Mobile phones and digital whiteboards add a level of interactivity, but not a lot of computing power, and a laptop is not always convenient.

The iPad fills this gap by enabling a host of activities such as referencing, collaborating, and creating content. In an August 2010 Wired.com article, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet,” the transformation from open Web browsing to specialized apps was a change driven by the Apple model of mobile computing. The iPad leverages this trend by providing personalized choice of content, a big plus for student users.

Information on hangouts can also be pushed to Facebook and Twitter.

The startup was initially funded by Spring Singapore for $50,000 and it recently raised US$500,000 in seed funding in September. It has received backing from big names in the global technology scene. Joichi Ito from venture fund Neoteny Labs, who's also chief executive of Creative Commons and an early investor and board member of Twitter, and Batara Eto, who is co-founder and former chief technology officer of Mixi, Japan's largest social network, have joined foound's board of directors and advisory board respectively.