One unique aspect separates Plus from other Google services. Unlike Facebook or Twitter where one accesses the ‘firehose’ of data that one subscribes to and is dependent on the Friends/Following, and where users mostly use features like groups/lists etc to sort out noise from the stream, Plus uses a different approach and lets users create ‘circles’ that allow them to separate streams. This is a more manageable approach for dealing with the humongous amount of incoming data that social networks generate.

When Google Plus started out, it was already ‘seeded’ with a large number of individuals who were already working on the concurrent development of the service. Since invitations were sent out from these accounts, the adoption of Plus propagated much faster through the web application/service development community. For now, it remains a geeky sort of place. As an early user, none of my ‘real’ social network peers were on it yet and it made me follow a large number of Google product engineering folks, developers from other companies, and technology journalists and yes, I also follow Mark Zuckerberg, who it seems is the most ‘followed’ person on Plus right now. Ironic that. The early user group was so technology driven and because of that, they were able to offer large amounts of bug reporting and constructive feedback to Google about the evolving feature set. It was great to see how Google’s engineers solicited feedback, which they got almost instantaneously and were able to act on it quickly. This interaction made it quite clear that Google was responsive to the limited user groups suggestions.

With individuals like Vic Gundotra and other senior engineering staff starting ‘hangouts’ (essentially video conference forums open to anyone who happens to be around at the time) users got a unique opportunity to interact with some superb engineering talent. I’m quite sure the engineers also benefit tremendously from such interaction with end-users, which would otherwise not have been possible. It led me to wonder about the evolving nature of such web services and applications. For perhaps the first time in the history of design, a large groups of users can influence the shape/form of a service they use. While designers always consider the user of a product/service, the scope/scale of interaction with users possible now was unheard of just a decade ago. Back then, as is now, designers depend a lot on ‘research’ to make design decisions. But I’m digressing, so without ever intending to learn from using Plus, I ended up learning several things mostly around:

1. Insights into how Google’s engineering folk think about web service/application development.
2. Observing the evolution of a web application’s feature set and the implications of the change for the user community.
3. Seeing Google’s responses to opinions within the user community and how they prioritized requests was interesting to watch too.

It’s quite clear to me now how social networks could influence learning by:

1. Providing a digital space for free expression about the work and workplace
2. Creating a forum for interaction around the knowledge expressed
3. Providing a sense of community and common purpose
4. Providing the ability to observe and participate in tasks with other more experienced individuals
5. Creating an environment where feedback is quick, almost in real-time, and could come from disparate parts of the networks, this offers users unique perspectives
6. Providing a system that encourages and rewards discovery and contribution, and where emergence clearly marks important/linchpin users or important content
7. Encouraging moments of serendipitous learning, or rather, providing a digital space for such learning serendipity to grow and thrive

Now if only organizations understood that such networks could be critical to learning and in turn survival.

The post Learning And Social Networks first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

1. The hangout feature is the clear differentiator – multi user video conferencing, ability to share media, and VERY COOL is the ability to watch media clips together as a group! It also switches ‘attention’ depending on what’s happening in the conversation, that’s awesome too.
2. Circles is a great way of organizing and separating feeds; unlike Facebook’s fire-hose in your face approach. Also the group management user interface and experience is far better than anything Facebook offers.
3. A new profile feature that will probably replace Google’s current profile (I am not sure about this though)
4. The +1 I figure will eventually end up deep inside Google’s ecosystem and will be included in the page-rank algorithm; it ties very well to their core business of search, a million individuals working with the +1 button might give Google the edge in providing human context to search.
5. Sparks – the content search mechanism is unlike anything I’ve seen; enter an interest into the box and Google fetches web elements that might be related to the interest. You can create an interest list in this way, adding stuff you like as you go along.
6. Huddle – this was something I was looking for; finally a group messaging system that works across Android, iPhone, and SMS.
7. User interface and user experience are unlike any other Google service I’ve used so far – quite simple and intuitive; it is evident Google has spent significant time and money working this out for Plus.

Some questions that came to my mind were:

1. What about integration with twitter, google reader and other web services?
2. What about the data, will there be an API in the near future?
3. How will this evolve, considering Google’s products seem to be in a continuous beta?

Does it compare to Facebook? I’d say yes, will the masses leave Facebook and embrace +(Plus)? That’s hard question to answer at this point, time will tell. Have you tried it? Will this make a better tool for learning than Facebook is? Leave comments please.

The post Google Plus: Initial Impressions first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

The App Inventor comes loaded with many blocks for creating UI elements, programming blocks, storage blocks, social blocks, media blocks etc, these blocks can be arranged in to logical sequence by drag and drop to develop an application.

Some organizations/universities have had the opportunity to use it as a part of the private beta program and here’s a video of a professor and student from The University of San Francisco sharing their experience of using App–

The App Inventor has some basic and advanced tutorials that will help users start creating Android apps. The tutorials list have “Quiz Me”,“MakeQuiz, and TakeQuiz” tutorials which show how to develop the quiz apps. App Inventor can be used for developing mLearning, quiz apps, mini learning games etc. It also has social media blocks for connecting to services like Twitter .

I think allowing just about anyone to built Android app without programming knowledge will boost the number of apps available for Android.. This would help the domain as now SMEs would be able to develop the Android apps themselves without the help of a developer/programmer. With the cost of experimenting with new designs and timelines to develop an app being reduced we should see some significant progress on mlearning apps development.

To begin with the App Inventor is available only for the Android platform (understandable). It would be interesting to see if it supports other mobile platforms to in future – that potentially can be a big help to development of cross platform apps.And it would be interesting to see if Apple releases a similar tool to ease out the development for iOS devices.

The post Google App Inventor – Can It Boost mLearning? first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.