Said to be a landmark in computer entertainment, the creation ofPeter Molyneux, Milo, is a young boy who enjoys football, drawing and playing around his fish pond.Molyneux's ingenuity uses Microsoft's new full-body controller forXbox 360, in Project Natal.Check out the video: Video

Eliademy is one of the most diverse startups in Finland. Our team has 8 nationalities and great age/gender balance. 22 volunteers helped us to make localization to various languages. Our users are coming from 160 different countries. We support diversity … Continue reading →

Have you checked out interactive YouTube videos and wondered how they were created? How it works: while the video plays, it offers options through links embedded in the video, which take you to a different place on the timeline or to a different video, which offers new options, and so on. The combined effect is a seemingly infinite number of choices, but for interactive YouTube videos it is in fact very finite: a separate video has to be created for each choice. The interactivity is created by overlaying annotations on top of the video. Annotations were previously used solely as captions or speech balloons leading viewer to another site for more information related to the video. Now they are transforming YouTube from a static video player to a tool for engaging the audience.The YouTube Annotations Editor is a creator tool that lets you layer text, hotspots and links over your video, thus enriching experience with information, interactivity and engagement. Examples: Hunter shoots a bear - http://www.youtube.com/user/tippexperience Blend Your Own Adventure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcJFwy7KPBA The Time Machine - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8rJ1WML60Y How to make an interactive video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMrMEydnFFA Annotation Man:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqzlqPK0VVY#t=19

Fellow blogging companion and friend, Paul C of quoteflections,gave us the challenge:For the month of June could anyone so inclined go on an interesting personal journey for good quotations and include some reflections?Here’s my June contribution.Suppose you were asked to pick 50 street numbers at random from your local telephone directory. You might have some fun working out a method of selecting them so that, as near as possible, your list showed a chance selection of numbers.What if you were then asked to sort them by first digit, called the leading digit. You might put all numbers beginning with 1 at top of the list, such as 14, 105, 138, etc. The next set might then be 27, 223, 2901 and so on. Since these were selected in truly random fashion, and given that there are nine possible categories (1 to 9) you might be forgiven for thinking that the pattern of numbers in your list may look something like this:11, 14, 19, 103, 198, 161321, 23, 24, 27, 213, 259,3, 30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 3594, 40, 43, 49, 4905, 50, 54, 57, 57, 5026, 61, 61, 62, 65, 667, 7, 70, 71, 70482, 85, 836, 84090, 91, 93, 913, 962As you can see, the number of numerals in each line is roughly what you might expect, of about 6 in each, give or take to odd one or two allowing for some unevenness due to the smallness of the sample.It’s the sort of distribution you'd get from a random number generator.Trial by experimentYou can conduct your own similar experiment. Take today’s newspaper for instance. Scan through the newspaper gathering all the numbers in the text on each page - the financial pages are good for this.Starting from the left of each number, ignoring the sign, decimal point and any zeros, the first digit you come across is the leading digit. There are 9 possible leading digits. It seems reasonable to expect that 1/9 (or 11.11%) of all numbers would have 1 as the leading digit. However, this is not what’s found in practice.Here’s what I got when I made a random selection of 50 street numbers from the Wellington White Pages telephone directory:10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 15, 18, 19, 103, 113, 119, 126, 128, 133, 136, 137, 198, 161321, 21, 23, 24, 27, 213, 259,3, 30, 33, 36, 37, 3594, 43, 49, 4905, 50, 54, 5026, 61, 667, 7, 7082, 85, 84091, 93Not exactly what you might predict using the assumption that there would be an equal number of numerals in each category. It’s a fascinating observation that this distribution is common to an infinite number of possible random selections, measurements and totals from collectable data.A universal lawIt is the same sort of distribution that’s found when lengths, in millimetres, of fish are recorded from random samplings, the same scattering that occurs when pebbles are picked haphazardly from a beach and weighed in grams, and the same pattern that's obtained when the brightness of stars is measured from a random selection in the night sky. Contrary to what you might expect, the leading digits are not evenly distributed in any samples like these.True random number generators, however, do not produce distributions like this. Herein lies the usefulness of what’s known as Benford’s Law in checking the authenticity of data, such as collected numerical research findings, data measurements where true random sampling is the expected feed, accumulated travel expenses or income tax returns.Benford’s Law has become a universal tool for fraud detection when checking the genuineness of financial or related data.How does it work?Why are the distributions not even as you might expect? One, much simplified way of gaining an understanding of this is in recognising how number distributions occur in the first place. Here’s my simple model for correlating the leading digits of created numbers with their frequency of occurrence.Let’s suppose that I invested a dollar in a company that returned me a monthly 10% on my investment. I decide to reinvest this return with the company when the total of investment returns and the sum invested reaches whole dollar amounts. So the expected value of my investment would increase by an integral dollar amount each time it’s reinvested: $1.00, $2.00, $3.00 etc.I keep monthly notes on the total value of my investment. It takes ten months for my original dollar to earn sufficient for the total amount to have reached a reinvestment value of $2. During this time, however, my notebook shows the following monthly value totals:$1.00, $1.10, $1.20, $1.30, $1.40, $1.50, $1.60, $1.70, $1.80, $1.90When my notebook shows a value of $2.00, the total amount is reinvested. My notebook then shows these monthly value totals:$2.00, $2.20, $2.40, $2.60, $2.80The next set of monthly records in my notebook looks like this:$3.00, $3.30, $3.60, $3.90And the next monthly set like this:$4.00, $4.40, $4.80At $5.00 my monthly records are:$5.00, $5.50And so on. You can see that the pattern of numbers recorded in my notebook is not unlike what’s expected by Benford’s Law. The probabilities of the occurrence of the leading digits are shown in the chart:Benford’s Law has a mathematical side to it, based on sound probability principles outlined in Wikipedia. If you are mathematically inclined and have the time, you may like to check it out.But the message to anyone who may think they know how to fiddle the books using bogus data from a random number generator or the like is summarised in the quotation:A little learning is a dangerous thing- Essay on Criticism, Alexander PopeA Green Pen Society Contribution( 3 ) ( 2 ) << - related posts

In the first two posts in this series, we discussed the value of data and the process for using the theory of change model for learning design. This week, we’ll walk through creating a measurement model for a fictional company, Acme Donuts.As you work through the learning initiative design process, the key challenge is to balance strategy with tactics: Connecting specific actions that accomplish high level goals. The Theory of Change model, which starts with broad goals and asks you to work backwards to specific actions, forces you to make the connections between each step clear. The narrative step also challenges you to explain the connections: An excellent exercise for testing assumptions and discovering gaps.I created this sample narrative to outline the many factors relevant to designing a learning program that includes a measurement model from the beginning.Developing a Program Narrative: Acme Donuts ExampleWhat are your initiative’s goals? To develop functional goals, you need stakeholder buy-in, alignment with organizational goals and specific descriptors. Make sure you’re not developing goals in a vacuum.Acme, Inc. is a manufacturer of donuts. Our goal is to increase profits 15% this fiscal year. To do that, we must meet two key preconditions: 1) Increase the recurring revenue generated from long-term sales agreements; 2) The sales team must develop strong communication, sales and negotiation skills to negotiate and close sales agreements.Whether conscious or unconscious, everyone makes assumptions. A key step in developing a functional initiative is ensuring that you understand what variables you will hold neutral as you target changes in your organization.We are making two key assumptions: 1) The product is appropriately priced for its quality. 2) There is sufficient demand in the marketplace to enable us to increase sales.Work backwards from your goals to the preconditions that must be met. Limit the scope of your discussion to the changes that can be affected through training and development activities. If, for example, Acme’s Donuts just aren’t very good, training sales people more effectively may not do any good at all.Both sales team members and managers have described needing opportunities both to study and practice the techniques of sales and communication and to work together as a team to identify best practices and improve performance over time.Outline specific initiatives you will undertake. Ensure that you outline how those initiatives connect with your preconditions and goals.To reach the targeted competencies of communication, sales and negotiation skills, we will embark on a multi-phase initiative: Participation in online learning courses to expose sales team members to the techniques of diagnosing and creating a sales strategy. Group workshops with their peers to enable them to practice their communication and negotiation skills. Connecting each participant to a mentor who will meet regularly with them to enable them to seek feedback and advice. Creating a social network to enable team members to share successes and resources.Develop specific metrics based on your goals. Ensure that you have a variety of metrics at each level and step of your initiative. Make sure you can assess specific factors so that you can, in turn, make specific improvements to your learning initiatives.We will measure the success of our initiative on a monthly basis with these metrics: - Sales team’s self-assessment of communication, sales and negotiation skills on a detailed scale- Sales manager and VP of Sales assessment of individual and team performance- Monthly recurring sales per salesperson and as a group; the rate of change in monthly recurring sales- Profit growthSet expectations. Ensure that you and your colleagues understand and agree on goals and reasonable expectations for results.We expect to see some change in the metrics in the first two-three months of the initiative, but we believe that we will see significant improvement within six months as sales team members have an opportunity to implement and improve their new skills in cooperation with their peers. We will use data from assessment and from performance to continually create online courses and group workshops targeting areas of weakness. To the extent possible, we will use internal experts to lead workshops both in person and virtually. In closing, this example is just the beginning. Check out the Theory of Change website, which provides an excellent case studies from a variety of social and job training programs.Further Reading"Getting Serious About Measurement: Metrics for Social Learning""21 Questions to Ask Before Designing a Training Program", The Training DoctorImage credit: dasroofless on Flickr

(This is the 17th article of the series on learning design tips from dominKnow KnowledgeBase) mLearning is different from learning through reading manuals, watching videos, researching on the web, or participating in instructor-led training. That means it should be designed differently to help ensure it is a successful part of your training program. General tips for designing your... Read More ›

The Spanish training institute (Selected as the 8th best animation school in the world on 2014 by Animation Career Review) has partnered with CBTec OY (Eliademy) to create a set of around 400 courses to expand their market into another … Continue reading →

This month’s Big Question on The Learning Circuits Blog is"where is your time spent?" It paraphrases this in a series of more specific questions that saved me time in thinking up sub-headings for the sections in this post.Where do I spend my time?I think a more important question here is ‘when and how do I spend my time?' However, here’s the 'where', per day, based on normal weekday activities averaged over a 7 day period, not including holidays:As you can see, I have a 28+ hour day. Short of pitching the world off its orbital path to accommodate all this, obviously there has to be some overlap. Indeed, to be realistic, this is what I find - not multi-tasking - but the ‘where’ tends to dictate this more than the ‘when and how’. When and how I spend my time is another matter.How do I find time for all the relatively newer thingslike reading blogs, twitter, social networks, etc?In 2001, I discovered some useful things about myself. I learned more about when the best time is for me to think and reflect. I discovered that the early hours of the day was a good time to reflect on the day yet to come, and do some planning for that. The best and most convenient time for this is when travelling to work by bus.For me this - together with its more relaxed counterpart, that of travelling home on the bus - provides an efficient use of otherwise wasted time. So it does two things. It gets me to and from work. It also helps me with the efficient use of my time at work and at home.I might plan a strategy for tackling a ticklish problem at work to do with my learning group, for instance. Or I might have a bright idea for a blog post and have the time to think through different ways that it could be done. In fact, most of my initial thinking is done on the bus or at times like that where I've no option but to be there.Good planning, of course, has to be flexible. When things don’t go to plan, a new plan must be drafted or the old one reshaped. Here’s when contingencies can also be mulled over while still in the planning stages - another efficiency trick. That way, not so much time has to be spent rethinking the one-and-only, platinum-plated, carbon-nano-tube-reinforced plan.What am I doing less of todaythan I was 3-5 years ago?I don’t write so many letters. I spend more time writing equivalent emails and social networking to cover the same reasons for writing letters. With my older daughter, Hannah, at university and living in another city, I now spend time communicating with her through txting and Facebook and on the telephone.This weekend, for instance, I took some photographs of my youngest daughter, Catriona, with my Sony digital. She was all set to be off to a Saturday night fancy dress party. I just had to catch a few pix of her.Today (Sunday) I spent some time trimming the photographs and uploading them to Flickr and Facebook while chatting with Hannah online. This is one of the overlaps, in this case an overlap of family time spent with social networking and using digital technology.Do I have less of a life withall of these new things?Most certainly and categorically not. In 2007 and at the age of 60, I had a hip joint replaced. That was in August. In October, my family whisked me off to Auckland to spend a weekend with them. I’d got rid of my sticks by that time and was able to hold a digital camera steadily enough to nearly fill 2 Gb of upload.When I got home on the Sunday night I uploaded the digital pix to Facebook and used these in communication with family overseas.Similarly in December that same year, when I was still inebriated with my new mobility, I took Catriona across the harbour on a ferry to explore Matiu-Somes Island. Once again, the digitals provided an incentive to blend relaxation with family and a bit of web2.0 technology.The joy of the immediacy in using today’s technologies - my chat with Hannah while uploading pictures taken the night before - the rapid return to communicate pix taken on holiday immediately with family overseas - the fun of previewing pix that were taken on Matiu-Somes Island while returning on the ferry - do not detract from life.At the NetSafe Conference July 2008 I stepped out to the shore of Lake Wakatipu at morning tea. I had my camera in my pocket and I captured a scene that has brought back memories of the short time spent at the lakeside. The playback is on Facebook and has been appreciated by family and friends alike.But there are many moments of tranquillity that I have spent with others or in solitude without the accompaniment of technology - I am guilty of this. In those times I either leave the technology (digital cam - mobile phone) at home or in my pocket, switched off. I make the choice.

SCORE, a nonprofitassociation dedicated to helping small business start, grow and succeed, todayannounced the launch of e-Business Now, a new website providing small businessleaders with "how to" knowledge to successfully usetechnology-enabled applications. The website provides free on-demand workshops"how-to" guides, connections to technology mentors and more—a full rangeof tools for learning how to leverage technology to fuel the future success ofsmall businesses.  Register to access the free training and information.  Workshops are developed using Articulate Presenter.Check it out:  http://ebusinessnow.org/

Continuing with this section where we get to know a bit more about our beloved instructors, we came across a very particular and original person who has found true passion on technology. Sören Forsdal saw an opportunity while facing a problem … Continue reading →