Books aren't data The EPUB format is strictly XML-based. From the metadata to the table of contents to the book content, an EPUB file must be almost entirely composed of text marked up in well-defined XML schemas. Those schemas allow the EPUB book to be validated by a computer program that follows the schema and other well-defined business rules, ensuring consistent production. At the other end of the workflow, those same schemas would assure reading systems of the predictability of the books added to them.

PDF is a terrible format to convert from. For a list of the various issues you will encounter when converting PDF, see: Convert PDF documents.

"The way we design computers today," Microsoft researcher Hong Tan says, "it would seem that people only use their eyes."

Worlds most prolific podcaster talks about modern podcasting.

"This changes the default from a situation where institutions procure and provide learning technologies to one where learners bring their own technologies and institutions support them. It shifts the locus of control from institution to learner. 

The findings in this report were developed using a representative sample of students from 184 U.S.-based institutions.

The popularity of mobile technologies among college students is increasing dramatically. Results from the ECAR research study on students suggest that many undergraduate students bring their own digital devices to college, favoring small and portable ones such as smartphones and tablets. 2 Although students still rate laptops (85 percent) as the most important devices to their academic success, the importance of mobile devices such as tablets (45 percent), smartphones (37 percent), and e-book readers (31 percent) is noticeably on the rise. Increasingly, students say they want the ability to access academic resources on their mobile devices.3 In fact, 67 percent of students' smartphones and tablets are reportedly being used for academic purposes, a rate that has nearly doubled in just one year.4

In this video Downes shares his utopian anti-institutional view of education. He pleads for "learning beyond institutions", towards personal learning in a networked world.  Move towards anarchic learning, based on no models, no systems, no traditional ideals. Move beyond institutions and towards self-organised networks of learners. "Content is the McGuffin it's the thing that gets us talking with each other" "its the connections between people and neurones that is the actual learning"

Using ICT to Support Disabled Adult Learners An Introduction. A Xerte presentation.

se the web site resources to develop high quality learning experiences for students by  * exploring a range of proven learning designs, with exemplar aspects and full instructions on how to implement the designs (exemplars) * examining a set of generic learning designs to apply in your knowledge domain (guides) * making use of a set of tools for supporting learners (tools) * reviewing the principles for design of high quality learning experiences (the project)

Great talk. (Thanks for the link Pat) I've picked out the quotes related to PLEs

I thought this was an interesting commentary on the teaching techniques used in the current wave of MOOCs.

A Model of Accessible m-Learning

Despite the pedagogical advantages of collaborative learning, online learners can perceive collaborative learning activities as frustrating experiences

How to decide whether to engage in training or in education?  And how to know which is needed, if maybe not both? There are several attributes of education and training that can help answer each question. The table (Based on Arthur Chickering's work in Education and Identity, Jossie-Bass, 1993) summarizes the attributes of education and training and poses the critical questions the learner must answer when choosing between them.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state." - Herbert Simo

In 2006, the Nokia 1600 was the top-selling phone in the world, and the BlackBerry Pearl the best-selling smartphone.2 Both were only a year away from their doom, but that doom was not a cheaper, less-capable product, but in fact the exact opposite: a far more powerful, and fantastically more expensive product called the iPhone.

There are many ways to slice and dice the types of mobile learning content. One way is by starting with the simplest kind of messaging and move to the most complex:

Allowing content to be read on any mobile device.