Below are our top 10 links from last week:

1. 10 Reasons To Use Color

Color is a potent element of visual language. It helps convey information and message to your readers even before they are consciously aware of it. This article from Understanding Graphics lists and explains 10 reasons you should use color in your visual messages and displays.
Read it here

2. New Research Puts Fortune 500 Social Media Usage On Display

This article from Grow Blog highlights some of the facts and figures in a new study of the Fortune 500’s adoption of blogging and Twitter as observed by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts.

3. Storytelling 2.0: Open Your Books To Augmented Reality

In today’s world, suffused with technology’s blue glow, a mere collection of bound pages may no longer suffice for entertainment in the information age. This article on News Scientist talks how books have metamorphosed into actual story telling experiences with animations, audio, computer visualizations through Augmented Reality.

4. ilearn By iPad, Say Students

Technology has permeated all spheres of life, including education. This article on Leader Messenger talks about some tech-savvy schools where students as young as five are using iPads to learn to count, read and spell.
Read it here

5. The Future Will Be Personalized

This article on Tech Crunch talks how the web is evolving from one where user-generated content overwhelmed the existing filters to one where social data begins to overwhelm social filters to one where new solutions would target information based on personal relevance.
Read it here

6. Some Key Findings From This Year’s Sloan Survey Of Online Education In The USA

This article on Tony Bates’ e-learning & distance education resources lists some key findings from this year’s survey on Class Differences: Online Education in the United States by Allen, I. and Seaman, J. (2010).
Read it here

7. Pupils Without Internet ‘Disadvantaged’ In Education

This article on BBC News talks about a survey, conducted by Times Educational Supplement and charity E-Learning Foundation, which suggests pupils without internet access at home are disadvantaged in their education.
Read it here

8. Web 2.0 Productivity Tools

This article on Social Brite gives a roundup of apps & resources that would make your day go easier and increase your productivity.
Read it here

9. Facebook Messaging, Teens And School Work:  Can Facebook Be A Social Learning Network?

This article on Read Write Web discusses if Facebook’s new messaging system would lead to the death of the blackboard and contemplates if it would emerge as the social learning platform of the future.

10. The MOST Crucial Learning Activities And Media

This article on Learning Solution Magazine describes a simple process that will ensure that your courses have the most crucial learning activities – learning activities that assure that the learners get adequate practice doing (during instruction) what they need to be able to do on the job, after instruction.

Hope you like these and if you come across anything interesting do share with us.

The post Top Learning, Technology & Media Links: Weekly Digest – 1 first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

2. 3-D Tabletop Display – We’ve often visualized glass-free 3D device after watching the 3D movie – Avatar. The interaction concept is great.

3. Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web – An interesting read on semantic web.

4. How To Convert The Toughest SME – Cathy Moore talks about building rapport with SMEs. A very crucial step in developing quality learning content is getting the SME on board. Great tips in this post on how.

5. Why America Needs To Start Educating Its Workforce Again – A nice TechCrunch post that gives some insights in to workforce-development practices of 24 leading companies in India. It also links up to the report on which the post was based which is detailed and gives some serious food for thought. Download the report here.

The post eLearning: Interesting Weekly Finds #18 first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

2. A Collection of Social Media Infographics – Helpful to use infographics in presentations, reports, articles, etc. A cool resource, these graphics also give great ideas on how data can be represented visually.

3. Tashkeel – This tool adds missing diacritics to Arabic text. Diacritics describe how arabic text is pronounced and are usually omitted in writing. Adding diacritics is an important pre-step to several text processing applications.

4. Sport Technology – This is about teaching sports! Interesting to see universities get involved in creating technology that goes beyond conventional learning tools.
“Students gain experience in designing realistic and practical embedded and mobile systems, as well as other applications that can enhance the training, coaching, playing, broadcasting, safety and viewing of various sports.”

5. Text 2.0 – An application featuring eye tracking, follows your progress and also indicates where you were when you return. Translates and explains words on the fly, reads words if you don’t know how to pronounce and much more.

The post eLearning: Interesting Weekly Finds #17 first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

2. Real Time Language Translation Over Phone – A cool demo of technology that might eventually truly end the language barrier. The aim is to achieve reasonable cross-language communication in the absence of any means of communication. Tremendous applications in learning and development, it’ll be interesting to keep an eye on developments in this space.

3.  Ribbon Hero – Ribbon Hero is a game for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel 2007 and 2010, designed to help you boost your Office skills and knowledge. Play games (aka “challenges”), score points, and compete with your friends while improving your productivity with Office. As a concept test, this add-in is not supported, but is an opportunity for you to try out an idea we are working on and let us know what you think. A nice way to encourage learning.

4. Socialcast – Socialcast is offering a collaboration tool plug-in for MS-Outlook. Unlike Basecamp and other tools, it works right inside Outlook and works on top of Socialcast EASE – Enterprise Activity Stream Engine offered by Socialcast.

5. Bloomfire – A cool service that’ll launch middle of the month. Let’s anyone create a course, let’s anyone take it. It allows for a large number of informal, social-learning opportunities can be dedicated to any subject. Check out the videos on the site explaining their service idea, should be interesting to use when it launches.

The post eLearning: Interesting Weekly Finds #14 first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

• Video gaming improves visual perception, processing and attention.
• Internet use engages more neural circuitry than book reading in the digital generation.
• Sizes of three structures in the brain can predict a video gamer’s success.
• Learning environments of video games can educate children effectively.
• Building computer games promotes critical thinking and creative thinking skills.

2. Recognizr: Facial Recognition Coming to Android Phones – More great technology hitting smart phone platforms. Originally built as a software concept, the Android app called “Recongnizr” is a mobile prototype that allows you to use your phone in order to “see” who a person is and what web services and social networks they’re connected to. App users can also associate traditional address book details with their profile like their full name, address, phone number and email.

3. Relevance in Twitter – Feedtrace picks content that is relevant to you from Twitter. It takes the noise out and gives you the stuff you really care or enjoy. Feedtrace studies the links you have shared before, does some complex math, and selects a list of real-time stories (news, articles, videos, etc) that you should like. This process (algorithm) is in constant improvement, so you should see better results every week.

This sort of system has obvious implications in eLearning. I’d imagine an intelligent agent of this sort constantly dealing with the fire-hoses of information, picking out content that is interesting and aids in learning or adds value to performance in some way.

4. An HTML5 framework – SproutCore is an open-source platform for building fast rich cloud applications on the web. Specifically, the tools we develop are suitable for building large-scale applications that scale to many millions of users across many different devices. The first of many HTML5 frameworks to come. Great to try building some HTML5 applications.

5. AS3 Lib for Yammer – An AS3 Yammer API library that communicates with the Yammer service. The as3yammerlib is hosted on GitHub and the source code is publicly available. To use the library you will need your own consumer key and secret for the Yammer API available from Yammer’s developer site. The library is also dependent on the as3corelib for doing JSON parsing and as3-signals for broadcasting events. A cool way to integrate Yammer into your learning applications.

The post eLearning: Interesting Weekly Finds #13 first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

2. Google Buzz
Google has announced Buzz a new social media service that would be integrated within Gmail. Using Buzz you can connect to the other social media services like Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google reader. More information on how we might use it in elearning can be found in this post on our blog.

3. SIRI
A personal assistant for mobile phone. Siri understands what you say, accomplishes tasks for you and adapts to your preferences over time. Siri can help you find and plan things to do. You can ask Siri to find a place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie. Imagine what an agent like this might do for learning, quite impressive.

4. Sketchpad
A Web-based drawing tool, which outputs the drawing as PNG file. Interesting that it’s fully developed in HTML5 and features tools like patterns, gradient, spirographs – generally found in big editors like Photoshop etc. It seems a promising step towards a Flash-less web.

5. IBM Academic Initiative
A cool initiative by IBM to promote open source software in academia. Institutions that are eligible and signup get no-charge access to hardware, full-version software, professionally developed courseware, tools, training, books, and discounts.

The post eLearning: Interesting Weekly Finds #11 first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Facebook, news, and Twitter to both Windows Mobile and Symbian devices with plans to offer an Android version of their software sometime in the future.

2.    Color Picker
Color Picker by Korean designer Jin-sun Park is a concept pen that can scan colors from anything around and instantly use the color for drawing. After placing the pen against an object, the user just presses the scan button. The color is being detected by the color sensor and the RGB cartridge of the pen mixes the required inks to create the target color.

3.    When You Have Just One Computer for the Whole Classroom
To help schools get the most out of their limited computing budgets, Microsoft has developed a new software platform called MultiPoint that allows multiple students in a classroom to interact with a single computer simultaneously using their own mouse. As part of the MultiPoint platform, Microsoft recently released a free software add-in for PowerPoint – Mouse Mischief – that would let teachers create interactive presentations with True/False or Multiple Choice questions. When you play these slides on a computer screen (or a projector), the entire classroom can answer the questions using just their own mice.

4.    Nokia’s Design and User Experience Library
In recognition of the importance that good design and user experience plays in creating successful products and services, Forum Nokia has renewed and extended it support available for those looking to improve the quality of their mobile applications. Central to this effort has been the launch of a new User Experience program and resources for designers.

Most useful of all is the launch of the Design and User Experience Library. It contains essential basic principles and key information needed when creating services for mobile devices.

5.    Firefox for Mobile – Fennec
Mozilla has been steadily creeping towards it goal of releasing the first Firefox browser for mobile phones. On Friday, Firefox 1.0 for Nokia’s Maemo–previously code-named Fennec–arrived.
Firefox for the Maemo 5 platform has a few interesting conceits that set it apart from other mobile browsers, like Opera Mobile and Opera Mini.

The post eLearning: Interesting Weekly Finds #9 first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

2. Apple’s Tablet Interface

The design of interaction is often restricted by the user interface paradigms in current use. There is speculation that the Apple Tablet (if there is one) will push the envelope of UI design. This links to a post in Gizmodo – worth a read. Haptics and touch technology are already transforming the user experience, couple that with a sophisticated UI and it offers learning interaction designers new avenues to explore.

3. Disney Ptex library goes Open Source
Disney Ptex library has been released as open source under the BSD license. The Ptex library is the same production-proven code used at Disney and included with Pixar’s PRMan, and includes full support for reading, writing, caching, and filtering Ptex texture files

4. Chamilo – this is a new open source LMS that may become an alternative to Moodle in the future. Though there is still a long way to go and the documentation is still under progress we have it on our radar to see how it shapes up.

5.  Youtube and Vimeo adds the HTML5 support – two of the popular video portals add the HTML5 support, though this is still in beta testing and compatible with Safari and Chrome browsers only. The HTML5 videos for Youtube can be tested from the TestTube. In Vimeo to try out the HTML5 player, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.

The post eLearning: Interesting Weekly Finds #8 first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.