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Emotions play tricks on our memories, making our recollections of events much happier or heart-wrenching than they actually were. Smartphone app Expereal seeks to cut through those cognitive traps by allowing you to rate your day on a 10-point scale and organizing that data into easy-to-read charts.
The iOS app (Android and Web-based versions are planned) is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based digital strategist Jonathan Cohen, who was inspired by psychologist Daniel Kahneham’s 2010 TED talk “The riddle of experience vs. memory.” Kahneham argues that our memories are often distorted by cognitive biases. For example, one bad day can completely spoil someone’s memory of an otherwise pleasurable two-week vacation.
When designing Expereal, Cohen decided to stick to a 10-point scale to help users keep their ratings objective. “I could have potentially asked people to pick a word to describe their mood, but what I like about numbers is that in order to get the full breadth and benefit you also have to enter tags and give meaning to it,” says Cohen.
Expereal’s first screen allows you to rate your day (or part of the day, depending on how often you use the app). Then you can note your location and the people you are with, add tags and snap a photo. A drop-down menu takes you to a set of charts that visualize your ratings by day, week or month, and compares your numbers to all of Expereal’s users or your Facebook friends who also use the app (data is aggregated anonymously). The “Expereotype” option is an album of your in-app photos with embedded ratings, tags and locations.
Cohen says Expereal fills the gap left by journaling apps and life-tracking wearable tech products like Jawbone UP and Nike Fuelband.
“None of these services in my mind really address the fundamental question–’how is my life going and how is it trending over time?’ I thought that by having a better understanding of this over time, it would be an interesting way to look back in order to move forward,” says Cohen.
The evolution of the web from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and now to Web 3.0 can be used a metaphor of how education should also be evolving, as a movement based on the evolution from Education 1.0 to Educa...
In this special edition of CNET Update, I (Bridget Carey - host of CNET Update) put Google Glass to the test as a coaching tool. Since I need to learn archery to become a proper heroine (e.g. Katniss, Merida, Lara), I wanted to try an archery coaching session through a Google+ Hangout. I reached out to CoachUp.com to find a coach that was willing to go on this tech adventure with me. CoachUp connected me with M.J. Rogers, an archery coach in South Dakota who has worked with Olympic and Paralympic athletes. I traveled to Pro Line Archery Lanes in Queens to do the video chat with Rogers. Once we were connected, I could see Rogers talking from his webcam in my Glass display. But I discovered it was hard to hear him with other people talking in the room. Rogers and I did several Glass Hangout tests before, and it was easy to hear him from my quiet office. At the indoor archery range, Rogers could hear me just fine, but the Glass speaker wasn't loud enough to overpower the few people talking in the room. That's because the Glass speaker rests against your head behind the ear -- not in your ear. Without a way to turn up volume, it would be nice to have the option to attach earbuds. While at Pro Line Archery, the archers around me were kind enough to stop talking so I could hear the Hangout better.The Google Glass team is working on this audio issue, according to Steve Lee, a project director for Google Glass. In the meantime, there is another way to talk in a Hangout. If someone at their computer types a message while in a Hangout chat, the text shows up on the Glass display. Although the Glass camera doesn't show my true point of view, Rogers said the camera did provide a helpful perspective for him to judge how I'm holding the bow. He could tell I needed to work on my pose when I release the arrow. Pro Line co-owner Neil Kucich was able to see some problems with my stance that Rogers couldn't see from the Glass camera. I would need to have a mirror near me for Rogers to get the whole picture. Nevertheless, Rogers said he could give coaching tips just from what he saw through Glass -- especially for judging perspective in relationship to the bow.
CNN's Maggie Lake gets a chance to take Google Glass for a test drive around New York City.
Google Tech Talk April 30, 2013 - Abstract: Not all information is created equal. Accurate, innovative scientific knowledge generally has an enormous impact on humanity. It is the source of our ability to make predictions about our environment. It is the source of new technology (with all its attendent consequences, both positive and negative). It is also a continuous source of wonder and fascination.
In general, the value and power of scientific knowledge is not reflected in the scale and structure of the information infrastructure used to house, store and share this knowledge. Many scientists use spreadsheets as the most sophisticated data management tool and only publish their data as PDF files in the literature. In this high-level talk, we describe a powerful, new knowledge engineering framework for describing scientific observations within a broader strategic model of the scientific process.
Exploring Curation as a core competency in digital and media literacy education
YouTube is experimenting with a new feature designed to help users better discover videos and channels on its site. Called “YouTube Mix”, it’s an auto-generated playlist that will display suggested videos based on what you’re reading. While the video service already has suggested videos displayed in the right-hand sidebar of each page, YouTube Mix offers users the ability to watch 50 videos continuously that it thinks they’ll be interested in. No additional work needed to click through each video one by one to watch it. Each playlist features up to 50 videos, but YouTube says that once all of those videos have been watched, an additional 50 will be shown, showing users more content that they are interested in. Just like a music playlist, users can shuffle videos, place it on repeat, or skip around to specific videos they wish to see.
Smartphones and Tablet sales will soon take over laptop and desktop computer sales: Don’t stick just to books – why not let students use the technology they’ll need in the future? The 21st Century workforce will be filled with people who have grown up with devices, and are used to having easy access to search engines, sharing and collaboration are the norm, and creative freedom is king. Shouldn’t our classrooms represent a version of this too? BYOD is not just for classrooms: 62% of workers use their own smartphones for work – and this number is slated to rise. A BYOD classroom mimics the rising number of BYOD workplaces.
Informal learning is happening for learners of all ages: with tools like MOOCs, e-learning tools, blogs and wikis, and social media, supporting students’ informal learning (as well as formal learning) can be a key to helping them become lifelong learners.
- Cartoon by John Atkinson
Salesforce.com is updating its enterprise social network called Chatter in a way that enables companies to tap into the interest graph. Chatter now features “Topics and Expertise”, integrating useful information they find from their social channels into the product to help them better discover insights, identify experts, and even find related resources. Adding Topics and Expertise to Chatter Joining existing features such as Recommendations, Similar Files, and Search, on Chatter is Topics and Expertise. Through this, users can analyze and categorize information within the Salesforce platform. The company says that the new Chatter will “seamlessly connect related experts, files, groups, and other information, all on a single topic page.” How it works is that a user will log into Chatter and add a post to to the News Feed and can then apply tags to have it assigned to a specific topic. Salesforce has created an algorithm that will look at all posts to suggest specific topics that the user could assign to it. Users do not need to stick with the suggested tags and can create their own to apply to the post. Once a topic tag has been added, that specific post will be linked to a Topic page, similar to what you might find on Wikipedia or perhaps even on Facebook Pages. Think about a Topic page as the catch all about that specific issue — so if someone posts something noteworthy in Chatter about, say, The Next Web, the system’s algorithm would automatically generate a related page. Users can go to the page and view all the relevant posts with the appropriate topic tag aggregated in one spot. In addition, Topic pages include a list of top influencers so that users will know who has been sharing the most about the specific topic within the company. By clicking on a specific person, users can learn more about them on their Chatter profile page, along with topics that they are influential about, where they work, their interests, and more.
Social technologies are increasing the ability of companies to tap into Collective Intelligence – the distributed knowledge and expertise of individuals located inside and outside the formal boundaries of the enterprise. Applying this knowledge can deliver tangible benefits in developing new products and services, sharing best practices,distributing work in new, innovative ways and predicting future events.
DESIGN OF EFFECTIVE LEARNING FOR THE BRAIN / MIND:
Thoughts and Research on Neuroeducation Science
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Google released a major new education program today that organizes and manages the way teachers push apps, books, and other learning content to student tablets. “When I go visit my kids’ classrooms, it looks pretty much exactly like it did when I went to school,” said Chris Yerga, Google’s engineering director at Google I/O. “Teachers told us that in education, there’s a huge gap between what’s possible with technology and what’s practical, especially with mobile technology. And then they told us it was Google’s job to fix this.” He explained that teachers said Google should make an affordable Android tablet, content management tools, and app discovery tools. So Google is starting with the last two. Google Play for Education is like an app store designed especially for teachers with some powerful management tools built-in. Teachers will be able to visit this app store and search by categories such as age-range and subject matter. If you are trying to teach math to a bunch of first graders, you can plug in those refinements and get back a list of apps made specifically for that group. Teachers will also be able to see reviews from other teachers. After instructors select an app, Google Play for Education will push it out automatically to all the tablets associated with a defined Google Group of students. That’s the catch — you’ll need to set up your entire classroom on Google Apps, buy Android tablets for all the students, and create a Google Group with the tablets hooked up. The only real issue here might be cost, as Google Apps are fairly easy to set up and many education institutions are already using them. Schools are able to load accounts with funds for the app store, so a teacher can automatically deduct from that balance if they wish to license a classroom-amount of paid apps. Teachers will also be able to push out YouTube videos and books in the same way they do apps.
Google's search engine is powerful, but not all-knowing. Every month Google processes 100 billion queries, and typically returns results with microsecond speed. However, on a fairly regular basis, Google's search engine has to think a bit harder to render a result. On a daily basis, 15 percent of queries submitted -- 500 million -- have never been seen before by Google's search engine, and that has continued for the nearly 15 years the company has existed, according to John Wiley, the lead designer for Google Search. "We have to solve that problem," an understated Wiley said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. In the process of trying to know more and reduce the 15 percent of new, previously unread or unheard queries, Google crawls 20 billion Web sites per day in search of new data that it can turn into results.
A key part of Google's quest to reduce the percentage of unseen queries, and provide answers rather than lists of links, is the Knowledge Graph. It's a vast database that understand entities -- such as topics, people, and events -- and the connections among them, somewhat like the human brain. Knowledge Graph has more than 570 million entities and 18 billion facts about connections between them, by Google's count.
To do this, Desire2Learn wants to bring predictive analytics into play in education. But why? Well, first and foremost because, today, if students want to figure out whether a course is right for them — or how well they might perform in that course — they’re hard pressed to find a good answer. They can ask fellow students, check websites that rank faculty based on nebulous criteria or try to find surveys, but none of these options are ideal. With its new analytics engine, Desire2Learn aims to change that by giving students the ability to predict their success in a particular course based on what they’ve studied in the past and how they performed in those classes. The new, so-called “Student Success System,” was built (in part) from the technology it acquired from Degree Compass; however, while Degree Compass used predictive analytics to help students optimize their course selection, the new product aims to help both sides of the learning equation: Students and teachers. On the teacher side, Desire2Learn’s new analytics engine allows them to view predictive data visualizations that compare student performance against their peers so that they can identify at-risk students, for example, and monitor a student’s progress over time.
The idea is to give teachers access to important insight on stuff like class dynamics and learning trends, which they can then combine with assessment data, to improve their instruction or adapt to the way individual students learn. In theory, this leads not only to higher engagement, but also better outcomes
EVOLVING MODELS OF LEARNING - COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE Instructivism, Constructivism, And Connectivism Instructivism is definitely more teacher and institutionally centered, where policy-makers and “power-holders” create processes, resource-pools, and conditions for success. Constructivism sees the teacher step aside to a new role as facilitator, pairing students with peers, learning processes, and another another at key moments based on data and observation while the students create their own knowledge and even early learning pathways. Connectivism is similar to constructivism–in fact, a learner participating in connectivism would likely do so at times with an constructivist approach. The difference here lies in the central role of relationships and networks (Collective Intelligence) in connectivism. Rather than supplemental, they are primary sources.
Online learning startup Coursera on Wednesday announced a partnership with Chegg, a student hub for various educational tools and materials, as well as five publishers to offer students free textbooks during their courses. Professors teaching courses on Coursera have previously only been able to assign content freely available on the Web, but as of today they will also be able to provide an even wider variety of curated teaching and learning materials at no cost to the student. The high-quality educational content, as the company puts it, consists of eTextbooks and supplementary materials will be delivered via Chegg’s DRM-protected eReader. The DRM limitation will allow for the content to be offered gratis only during the duration of the course. The list of participating publishers includes Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, Sage, and Wiley. This is the first time these publishers have made a commitment to online education of Coursera’s caliber. How did Coursera manage to convince them come on board? The massive open online course (MOOC) provider is offering them at least two deals: the insight into worldwide usage data, as well as the option to sell full versions of their eTextbooks to students for continued personal learning.
People are now watching more than 6 billion hours of video a month on YouTube, the Google-owned video service announced on its blog Wednesday afternoon. That’s twice as much as just a year ago: In May 2012, YouTube announced that its viewers were watching three billion hours of videos a month. In August, that number had grown to four billion hours. From the announcement blog post:
“We recently announced that YouTube hit an incredible milestone of 1 billion unique monthly visitors, connecting 15 percent of the planet to the videos they love. And those global fan communities are watching more than 6 billion hours of video each month on YouTube; almost an hour a month for every person on Earth and 50 percent more this year than last.” Less than two months ago, YouTube announced that its site now gets frequented by more than one billion unique visitors a month. YouTube announced the new milestone in conjunction with the Newfronts in New York, where various online video services are showing new shows to advertisers.
If you’ve ever wondered where all those images come from when perusing Wikipedia, the answer likely lies in Wikimedia Commons, a project set up by the Wikimedia Foundation to create an online repository of license-free images and other media files. Now, the Wikimedia Commons project has officially unveiled its native mobile apps for iOS and Android, after an extended beta period. Thus far, most Wikipedia users – by far the largest of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects – could upload their images via a Web browser (including mobile Web). With native mobile apps now in tow, it’s easier for users to take a snap with their pocket rocket and upload on the spot.
Services like HealthTap have proliferated over the last year as a way to let anyone with questions about their health connect with real, licensed physicians online and avoid the pain of waiting in line at the doctor’s office. While HealthTap and others are building up their health information databases to let people quickly find answers to a variety of health questions, the demand for personalized health information continues to grow. While we use services like Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter every day, these social networks are far from being the best places to ask health questions and connect with others experiencing similar symptoms, conditions, taking the same medications or receiving similar treatments — for privacy reasons, among others. That’s why Lyle Dennis, a practicing physician and neurologist, createdHealthKeep — a social network designed to connect people with similar symptoms and conditions and help them better track, manage and understand their health. HealthKeep provides a forum in which everyday people can post about their health and medical issues and search for potential treatments. Unlike most social networks, i.e. Facebook, the service allows users to register anonymously and does not collect names, which means that its HIPAA-compliant. Once members register on the platform, they can create “Health Timelines,” where they can share any new symptom, medication, diagnosis, doctor visit, procedure or test result. A la Facebook, the timeline is updated in realtime, stream-style, allowing users to view updates and graph their health at any point. Once a user adds an element to their timeline, they are automatically linked to every other member in HealthKeep’s community that has shared that element. An announcement is made each time a new member is added to that group, whereupon the community can then discuss their symptoms and treatments and share information, all of which takes place within feeds dedicated to those specific items.
Appolicious, the app search and discovery portal which helps users find new mobile applications for iPhone, iPad, and Android, is today launching a new service today aimed at parents, teachers and others in search of the best educational apps for children: appoLearning. This new resource is Appolicious’ attempt solving the inherent problems with app search today, starting with a focus on apps for learning
As new models of digital learning sweep across higher education, colleges and universities across the globe are scrambling to get on board and make their course catalogs available to a wider audience via the Web. Of these new models, few have seen more attention than massive open online courses (a.k.a. “MOOCs”), which, starting with Khan Academy, promise to offer access to quality, affordable education at scale — online. Founded by eight engineers in Stanford’s CS Department, the non-profit platform committed itself to building (arguably the first) open-source MOOC platform — designed to be both free and interoperable with other platforms to encourage collaboration from teachers and other institutions.
Active, successful participants in this 21st century global society must be able to:
> Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;
> Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought; > Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes; > Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information; > Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts; > Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments.
Collective intelligence
Organizations have the ability to leverage the experience and wisdom of an entire workforce to solve a problem or identify an opportunity instead of just relying on a specific team. After speaking at a conference recently someone from a large oil and gas company told me how they couldn't solve a problem of a drill melting at extremely hot temperatures. They posed the problem on their collaborative platform for the thousands of other employees to try to solve and received a solution which was worth over a billion dollars. Serendipity
Being able to come across a person or piece of information that can be used to improve a situation is a valuable thing. Organizations who deploy collaborative solutions greatly improve the chances of this happening. Employees have the ability to discover information which they can contribute to in a positive way. Lowe's Home Improvement saw this first hand when an employee asked for more of a product to be delivered to a store which other stores were not selling much of. Eventually this employee shared a demo she was doing at one of her stores to sell out of the product and other locations quickly followed. This employee who was asking for additional product happened to share her demo which resulted in over a million dollars in additional revenue. Easy to find people and information
Email and static intranets are the default forms of communication and collaboration within many organizations. This leads to around 25-30 percent of an employees work week spent in front of email and a large amount of duplicated content. Enterprise collaboration platforms have enabled a much more effective way to find people and information. A way which is self-sufficient (meaning you don't need to ask anyone for anything) and empowering to the employees. Anyone can be a leader and employees have a voice
When most employees think of a leader at their company they typically think of an executive. Social media has changed what it means to be a leader. Employees now have a voice where they can share their ideas for anyone within the company to see and read. These employees have the ability to become leaders in their own right on any topic that they care about. One of the world's largest consulting firms in the world (hundreds of thousands of employees around the world) has seen this happen first hand where junior and mid-level employees have the most widely followed internal blogs in the company. These employees are not executives but they are leaders with a voice that everyone listens to. Transparency and flatness
Most organizations in the world are hierarchical and not transparent. It's analogous to climbing a ladder where only the first few rungs are visible and the rest are hidden. This is changing and many organizations are no longer using this as the way to work. Employees (including managers and executives) are now sharing what they are working on, how they are feeling, who they are meeting with, and what is happening with their department or the company as a whole in a discoverable and public way. There is greater insight for employees to understand not just what is happening in their organization but how their individual contributions are impacting something greater.
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