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at Learning 2009

someone from the audience asked which learning trends or technologies we felt were overrated: Mobile Computing and Learning, Social Networking, Gaming, User Content, and Performer Support. And the two clear "winners" were...Gaming and Social Networking with both receiving over 30% of the vote. The "loser", which in our case was a GOOD thing :), was Performer Support with 9% of the vote. Not only is our industry finally seeing PS as a powerful learning approach, but we are also seeing it as something achievable.

The dream is to create a one stop launching pad of vibrant and supportive communities that will act as a learning portal for informal learning. If you've been around the learning industry long enough you'll remember that this approach was also what killed many efforts around corporate learning portals in the 90's. They were overrated as a one stop landing page for every learning asset imaginable. Although the premise was good, the execution left much to be desired. Most learners visited once or twice, were immediately overwhelmed, and never returned again.

The Online Learning Environment Survey (OLES) is an online survey instrument for evaluating e-learning environments. The data collected and the resultant statistics depict the actual and preferred learning environment of individuals and groups of learners giving valuable feedback to educators working in these environments. Using the OLES educators can gather valuable pre-course and post-course data to evaluate the effectiveness of the e-learning environment. Adjustments can then be made accordingly to improve or adjust the learning environment.

Do you wonder why people don’t understand the idea you’re trying to get across in a meeting? Are you mentoring another developer and struggling to understand why the still don’t get it? Do you run training courses and wonder why the attendees only learn 10% of the material? We are all teachers whether as informal mentors, coaches, trainers or parents. Yet only professional educators receive training in this area. Nearly two years ago I started reading neuroscience (Norman Doidge’s “The Brain that Changes Itself”), for fun. Along the way I acquired an interest in neuroscience and wondered how its lessons could be applied to Agile Software Development and beyond.

Varying the types of skills you work on in practice sessions engages a different part of the brain than the one you use when focusing on a single task, researchers say. The finding explains why variable practice improves the brain's memory of most skills better than working on just one type of task, according to the research team from the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.In their study, published online recently in Nature Neuroscience, the investigators divided 59 volunteers into different groups. Some were asked to practice a challenging arm movement, while others did the arm movement and related tasks in a variable practice structure.The participants in the variable practice group learned the arm movement better than those who practiced only the arm movement, the study authors found.Among those in the variable practice group, the process of consolidating memory of the skill engaged a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with higher level planning. Among those who practiced only the arm movement, the engaged part of the brain was the primary motor cortex, which is associated with simple motor learning, the authors explained."In the variable practice structure condition, you're basically solving the motor problem anew each time. If I'm just repeating the same thing over and over again as in the constant practice condition, I don't have to process it very deeply," study senior author Carolee Winstein, a professor of biokinesiology and physical therapy at the University of Southern California, said in a university news release.

This course advances the concept that humans and their organizations are an integral part of the engineering paradigm and that it is up to engineering to learn how to better integrate considerations of people into engineering systems of all types. This course focuses this concept on the assessment and management of the risks associated with engineered systems during their life-cycle (concept development through decommissioning). Risks (likelihoods and consequences) are addressed in the contexts of the desired quality from an engineered system including serviceability (fitness for purpose), safety (freedom from undue exposure to harm), compatibility (on time, on budget, with happy customers including the environment), and durability (freedom from unexpected degradations in the other quality characteristics). Reliability is introduced to enable assessment of the wide variety of hazards, uncertainties, and variabilities that are present during the life-cycle of an engineered system. Proactive (get ahead of the challenges), Reactive (learn the lessons from successes and failures), and Interactive (realtime assessment and management of unknown knowables and unknown unknowables) strategies are advanced and illustrated to assist engineers in the assessment and management of risks.

The conceptual framework and value chain analysis methodology developed for this study are being refined in light of the lessons learned by the research team, and applied to further studies in other sectors, not all of which are as buoyant as bagged salad! Co-innovation is a concept in which we firmly believe and in which Houston's Farm is now firmly engaged. However, there remains much to learn about how to do it and how to research it. The value chain innovation research initiative at the University of Tasmania will, we hope, provide more valuable insights for academics and practitioners in the future.

Alexander S. Szalay is a well-regarded astronomer, but he hasn't peered through a telescope in nearly a decade. Instead, the professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University learned how to write software code, build computer servers, and stitch millions of digital telescope images into a sweeping panorama of the universe.

Today, data sharing in astronomy isn't just among professors. Amateurs are invited into the data sets through friendly Web interfaces, and a schoolteacher in Holland recently made a major discovery, of an unusual gas cloud that might help explain the life cycle of quasars—bright centers of distant galaxies—after spending part of her summer vacation gazing at the objects on her computer screen. Crowd Science, as it might be called, is taking hold in several other disciplines, such as biology, and is rising rapidly in oceanography and a range of environmental sciences. "Crowdsourcing is a natural solution to many of the problems that scientists are dealing with that involve massive amounts of data," says Haym Hirsh, director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation.

Mr. Szalay's unusual career began with a stint as a rock star. While in graduate school in Hungary, he played lead guitar in the band Panta Rhei, which released two albums and several singles in the 1970s.

The Pentagon is looking to better train its troops — by scanning their minds as they play video games. Adaptive, mind-reading computer systems have been a work-in-progress among military agencies for at least a decade. In 2000, far-out research agency Darpa launched “Augmented Cognition,” a program that sought to develop computers that used EEG scans to adjust how they displayed information — visually, orally, or otherwise — to avoid overtaxing one realm of a troop’s cognition. The Air Force also took up the idea, by trying to use EEGs to “assess the operator’s actual cognitive state”  and “avoid cognitive bottlenecks before they occur.”

Now, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) is soliciting small business proposals for an even more immersive trainer, one that includes voice-recognition technology, and picks up on vocal tone and facial gestures. The game would then react and adapt to a war-fighter’s every action. For example, if a player’s gesture “insults the local tribal leader,” the trainee would “find that future interactions with the population are more difficult and more hostile.” And, most importantly, the new programs would react to the warrior’s own physiological and neurological cues. They’d be monitored using an EEG, eye tracking, heart and respiration rate, and other physiological markers. Based on the metrics, the game would adapt in difficulty and “keep trainees in an optimal state of learning.”

The OSD isn’t ready to use neuro-based systems in the war zone, but the agency does want to capitalize on advances in neuroscience that have assigned meaningful value to intuitive decision-making. As the OSD solicitation points out, troops often need to make fast-paced decisions in high-stress environments, with limited information and context. Well-reasoned, analytic decisions are rarely possible

We provide web-based tools and consulting services to support organizations and consultants. Our purpose is to help teams make decisions based on shared data, resulting in increased alignment and faster implementation.. Here are several standard organization needs, and how we can add value to your work   Your need Our value-add Surveys Shared results lead to group learning. Identify your areas of strength and weakness. Meetings Interactive meetings provide opportunities for buy-in and for gathering the group's intelligence. Hear from everyone.   Brainstorm or Delphi process Create better solutions and build improvement by using fast-cycle brainstorming to increase group understanding.

eStrategy Solutions, Inc., a Texas-based online e-learning provider, delivers "pain-free" solutions for online training and testing for state licensing agencies, boards and affiliates.

The Prediction API enables access to Google's machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes. Upload your data to Google Storage for Developers, then use the Prediction API to make real-time decisions in your applications

Technology has given us access to endless amounts of information from every corner of the world. But the real challenge is to make sense of all this seemingly disconnected data. To cut through the clutter, make relevant associations, and transform raw information into true knowledge. Atigeo™ is solving this complex challenge with xPatterns,™ a new breed of compassionate technology that allows users to derive insight and wisdom from data. Based upon an advanced platform of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it effectively interprets unstructured data to arrive at new and unexpected connections. Connections that can personalize individual interactions, enhance consumer privacy, improve business intelligence, advance research development, and foster a greater understanding of the world around us.

Over the past 25 years we have built an unparalleled set of skills in bringing the right stakeholders together to collaborate, set priorities, and move forward with confidence. Organizations are increasingly complex and geographically distributed, yet the need for close collaboration and priority-setting is more critical than ever before. The world’s most successful organizations spanning government, industry, and academia rely on Expert Choice for rapid convergence of experience, intuition, and specific data. We’ve designed our software to be quick-to-learn, easy-to-use, and rooted in how we all make decisions. Take a look at how we work with our customers to improve outcomes, reduce costs, save time, and build alignment, buy-in, and confidence.

A survey of 600 developers by Mashery reported that 69% of respondents said Amazon, Google, and Twitter were the most popular API’s they were using.

Amazon and Netflix jointly published a great case study and announced Netflix would move more infrastructure into Amazon’s Cloud.

A wonderful post on CNet talks about Goldman Sachs’ findings for the Cloud.  There were a ton of them including:           – A ranked list of apps moving into the Cloud.  Web Conferencing and Salesforce Automation were #1 and #2. 

To remain fresh and relevant, online courses need to be continually revised and improved. Considerations of relevant laws and institutional policies should be a core focus of every curriculum redesign. Redesigning an online curriculum presents rich opportunities to integrate the latest thinking in given disciplines and to incorporate new methodologies for teaching and learning. New, emerging, and evolving technologies can greatly enhance work to update the curriculum of an online course.