A key part of the Seek > Sense > Share framework for PKM is to find new ways to explain things, or add value to existing information. Metaphors help us understand new concepts, as do visuals. When the folks at Venngage asked if they could create an infographic on PKM I saw it as another... Read more »

A look into the world of solar energy shows that small solar panels are becoming very popular in the market. They can be seen everywhere, research on these panels are increasing day by day, and more people are making inquiries about them. So why they are becoming highly sought? The following are the explanations for ...

Brett Spencer, assistant professor and a reference librarian at the Thun Library at Penn State Berks writes, "Many faculty seek to make creative use of films in their teaching, whether in traditional class screenings or through flipped classrooms."Photo: Faculty FocusHowever, there are many obstacles to teaching with videos: the costs and constraints of DVD as a technology; limited DVD collections at some libraries; time involved in creating videos for one’s own classes; the popularized, questionable nature of many videos found on YouTube; the lack of institutional subscriptions to mainstream streaming services; and copyright concerns. Fortunately, in recent years, most campus libraries have subscribed to copyright-licensed and academically oriented streaming video collections such as Kanopy, NBC Learn, Films on Demand, PBS Video Collection, and Swank’s Digital Campus. These "Netflix" of academia offer fantastic functionalities and curated content designed with pedagogy in mind. Here are seven specific ways that library streaming services can enliven traditional teaching with videos, support film projects that you might already be assigning, and make new types of learning experiences possible for your students.1. Link to customized segments while teaching.We have all had the frustrating experience of trying to show specific film segments to a class by fast-forwarding and rewinding back and forth through a whole DVD to find the segments. Today, most library streaming databases offer "create a clip" or "custom segment" features that allow us to select our own segments from a video, embed links to those segments on presentation slides, and jump directly to those segments while teaching. You can even mix and match clips from several different videos about the same controversial topic, like the death penalty, in order to expose students to multiple perspectives and spark debates.Read more... Additional resources  The Teaching ProfessorThe Teaching Professor is the lively, highly informative newsletter with a singular purpose: to provide ideas and insight to educators who are passionate about teaching. A source of cutting-edge information and inspiration for more than 10,000 educators at universities and colleges worldwide.Source: Faculty Focus

Photo: Rob Spahr"There are students who spend their summers on the Jersey Shore doing things that would make Snooki and The Situation proud. But there are also others who spend their free time doing work that could make everyone else proud." reports Rob Spahr, supervising reporter for NJ Advance Media.A baseball statistic simulator was one of the research projects worked on during Monmouth University's School of Science Summer Research Program in 2015. (Rob Spahr | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)Monmouth University culminated its School of Science Summer Research Program on Thursday, with a symposium that showcased the research projects of 96 students from throughout New Jersey, and beyond.The students were chosen from more than 250 applicants from across the country for the 12-week program, during which students work on collaborative research projects under the supervision of Monmouth University faculty. The projects were formulated by faculty members and spanned various disciplines, including biology, chemistry, computer science and software engineering, mathematics, and marine science.Photo: John Tiedemann"What you see here in the diversity of the projects reflects the area of research interests of the faculty in the Monmouth University School of Science," faculty mentor and interim School of Science Dean John Tiedemann said. "These are research projects that they formulated for the summer specifically or as a continuation of their faculty research that is conducted throughout the year."The students, however, are the ones who take it upon themselves to apply for the program every year, Tiedemann said...One of the research projects that you didn't have to be a science enthusiast to find interesting was a computer program that tried to predict the outcome of baseball games.The statistical simulator - which was worked on by the group of Reid Cooper, Philip DiMarco, Mary Menges, Nicholas-Jason Roache, Chengi Zhu, Swethana Gopisetti - used actual batting, pitching and fielding Major League Baseball statistics from the 2014 season to simulate the outcome of games"In order to make everything work you need to use randomness. However, that randomness also has to be weighted based on each player's statistics. Since no two games are going to be alike, we allow the user view previously run simulations so they can go back and see what the are results were," said Cooper, of Medford. "I wouldn't want to see anyone use this right now for gambling, but you could use this for gambling once more mathematics were involved."Read more... Source: NJ.com

Follow on Twitter as @niveknosdunk"How mathematics can lead to better medical imaging." according to Kevin Knudson, professor of mathematics at the University of Florida and writes about mathematics and its applications. Photo: ForbesCT Scans are so common these days that practically everyone has heard of them and has either had one or knows someone who has.  The high resolution images the machine produces are truly remarkable and allow physicians to spot tumors, hemorrhages, and bone trauma, among other maladies.  But I suspect most people don’t know what "CT" stands for (computed tomography), or, if they do, they don’t know what it means.Old-fashioned X-ray images provide useful, but coarse, information about our insides.  The problem is that the rays pass through the body onto the film in such a way that each point on the image is the aggregate of the points in the body lying above it.  Thus, more dense areas of the body appear lighter on the output image.  Sometimes this is good enough-a large light area might correspond to a growth of some kind (a tumor, perhaps).  X-ray images are also great for spotting broken bones.But if your physician wants more detailed information, a CT scan might be warranted.  Tomography is the imaging of an object by cross-sections.  The basic procedure for medical tomography is to shoot X-rays through a thin cross-section of the body.  The machine then computes the amount of energy that comes out the other side along each straight line.  Mathematically, this means that if f(x,y) is the density of the body at the point (x,y) in the cross-section, and if L is the line the X-ray moves along, then the machine is gathering the various line integrals (here, z is the arc length parameter)This is what an X-ray does, too, but instead of a computer gathering the integral data it is a piece of film catching the intensity of the X-ray that reaches it.  What’s more, the lines L make some angle with the horizontal; by varying the angle, we get a collection of such data for each one.  The end result is a function Rf, called the Radon transform of the density function f.  It is a function of two variables, the distance s of L from the origin and the angle α that L makes with the horizontal.Radon_transform.png ‎So what?  Well, the remarkable thing is that the Radon transform can be inverted; that is, if we know the function Rf, we can recover the function f !  This falls into the general area of inverse problems.  The computer attached to the CT machine does this inversion, and the resulting images are then assembled together to give a remarkably accurate representation of the interior of the body.Wow!  Math can save lives.Read more...Source: Forbes

Recently our Sales Director, Richard Cassidy, had the pleasure of presenting at Learning Technologies Summer Forum, which was held at the Olympia, London. This free event is an extension of the very popular Learning Technologies exhibition and conference, which was held in January this year, and gives attendees the chance... Read More

Regardless of our age, playing with simulators (e.g. stock market investment, driving or flight simulators) and games (Starcraft, Hearts of Iron, World of Warcraft) always puts us on the path to learning and experiencing new things. That is because if our objective is to "win" the game, then we need to explore and learn the "system" in order to beat it. That is exactly what Game-Based Learning (GBL) is all about. In this article I will cover the types of game-based learning as well as the benefits of simulations and games. In addition, I will mention some of the tools that can be used to build eLearning games and simulations. Lastly, I will discuss how you can incorporate "gamification" into your eLearning content. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Follow on Twitter as @eyderpEyder Peralta summarizes, "For decades, we have known of only 14 convex pentagons that can do something called "tiling the plane." Now there is a 15th shape, but mathematicians are still far from knowing exactly how many exist."There are now 15 known convex pentagons, or nonregular pentagons with the angles pointing outward, that can "tile the plane." EdPeggJr/Wikimedia Commons   Jennifer McLoud-Mann had almost come to believe that her last two years of work had been for naught."It had gotten to the point, where we hadn't found anything," she said. "And I was starting to believe I just don't know if we're going to find anything."Armed with an algorithm, McLoud-Mann, along with her husband, Casey Mann, and David Von Derau — all of the University of Washington, Bothell — had been trying to help unravel one of math's long-standing unanswered questions.Photo: University of Washington Bothell How many shapes are able to "tile the plane" — meaning the shapes can fit together perfectly to cover any flat surface without overlapping or leaving any gaps. Mathematicians have proved that all triangles and quadrilaterals, or shapes with four sides, can tile the plane, and they have documented all of the convex hexagons that can do it.But it gets a lot more complicated when dealing with pentagons — specifically convex, or nonregular pentagons with the angles pointing outward. The number of convex pentagons is infinite — and so is the number that could potentially tile the plane. It's a problem that's almost unsolvable because, as McLoud-Mann put it, it has "infinitely many possibilities."...But last month, a cluster of computers that Von Derau was using to run though different shapes spit out an intriguing possibility. He sent it to McLoud-Mann, who said she was excited but suspicious. She had been sifting through the data coming out of the cluster, and most of the time when she checked the computers' work, the shapes turned out to be one of two things: an impossible pentagon — meaning one that didn't fit the mathematical definition of a convex pentagon — or one that already fit into the 14 types that had been found.This time it was different. She ran the data over to her husband's office. She told him that they needed to make a picture of it immediately. And this is what he came up with:The 15th convex pentagon found to be able to tile a plane.Casey Mann The three mathematicians had discovered the first new convex pentagon able to tile the plane in some 30 years. The scientists had become a part of a legendary history that dates to 1918, when the German mathematician Karl Reinhardt described the first five types of pentagons to be able to tile the plane. Until last month, only four others had added to that canon: R.B. Kershner found three more types in 1968; Richard James added one type in 1975; after reading about James' find in Scientific American, Marjorie Rice, a housewife and amateur mathematician, added four types that same year. Rolf Stein found a 14th type in 1985.Read more... Source: NPR

"The energy grew in the community space at Barnes & Noble at Bucknell as children and their parents arrived for a biweekly read-aloud."  Fourteen three- to six-year-olds took their places on pillows and in small chairs in anticipation. Then, Professor Lori Smolleck, chair, Department of Education, and Helen Vu '16 joined them.Photo: Bucknell University"Today, we're going to talk about shapes," Smolleck said. "What are some shapes that you know?"  "A heart!" said a girl, who was then invited to come up and draw it."A square!""A triangle!""A circle!"  When the children exhausted the shapes they could remember, Smolleck added some others — an octagon and a hexagon — while she held up examples and carefully led the group in counting each side, comparing similarities and differences among all of the shapes.At first glance, this may seem to be a simple exercise, but there's extensive planning behind it. Smolleck and Vu are working on an education research project to better understand how read-alouds contribute to learning. Each lesson builds on what the children already know and prepares them for what's next, be it pre-school or kindergarten. The lessons are recorded to collect data for analysis. Color Zoo by Lois EhlertThis lesson was based on the book Color Zoo by Lois Ehlert, which was a tool for Smolleck and Vu to help the kids learn mathematical concepts and early literacy comprehension strategies. "By the end of this lesson, our goal is to have the children recognize shapes, differentiate between shapes and create their own animal or scene out of them so they can see how shapes come together to make something larger," said Smolleck. "It allows them to practice understanding mathematical concepts and also to use fine motor skills and exercise creative thought."...This type of research informs the field of education as well, helping teachers reflect on their work to better reach learning outcomes and expand their awareness of what they do and say in the classroom, which can affect students' knowledge and attitudes."Conducting research of this nature is an invaluable experience, which will greatly impact Helen's future as a graduate student and educator," said Smolleck. "She's gaining familiarity with current educational reform and research in early childhood and literacy education, as well as other content areas such as science, social studies and mathematics education. This may impact her choice to employ more reform-oriented methods of teaching that are balanced in relation to the integration of content areas. I also think it will help Helen reflect on her own teaching philosophies and make her implicit beliefs about teaching and instruction explicit as she continues to examine her teaching strategies and develop as an educator."Read more... Source: Bucknell University

Photos Thursday morning we arrived at Ocean Avenue in Carmel just in time to catch the arrival of the cars in the Tour d’Elegance. These cars, that would participate in the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on Sunday, had driven from Monterey to Big Sur and back through Carmel where they park for a couple of … Continue reading Monterey Car Week →

In this video interview example, learners can simulate a real-world conversation using interactive video and text-based questions. This video interview was created for a recent […] The post Video Interview appeared first on Elearning Examples.

As noted in an earlier post, an easy way to build interactive elearning modules is by choosing a single image and adding interactive elements to it. This is a great solution for those who don’t have graphic design skills or access to a graphic designer. The key is finding a single image that has a few […]

A recent posting for a six-week knowledge management contract was posted by the UNDP. When it comes to requests for proposals, if you ask for something, you will definitely get offers to produce it. But is this what they need? "Conduct initial research on industry standards for KM measurement to inform the design of UNDP’s... Read more »

Portable solar panels are very convenient as they are both light and thin. These were designed to be flexible for comfort in the creation and storage. They are mainly used outdoors, but can also feed a whole family while using little space. The use of portable solar panels is popular among travelers and campers since ...

Teachers will be the next millionaires! I've been making this statement for the last decade. But it's only been in the last few years that I've actually seen it becoming a reality. Training-preneurs are all over the internet. They are the people who have seen what technology has done to other industries, as well as what […] The post The Rise of the Training-preneur appeared first on Litmos.

From the Inter-American Dialogue and the Inter-American Development Bank: A new foresight resource freely available to the public entitled, A Database of Reports on Global Trends and Future Scenarios. This database includes nearly 800 foresight publications and reports from around the world, and it provides governments, banks, corporations, universities, think tanks, and other institutions continuous […]

"One line in the presidential candidate’s ambitious plan draws criticism from online educator." according to Kevin Walker, U.S. News University Directory Managing Editor.Photo: U.S. News UniversityDemocratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s $350 billion plan to make higher education more affordable has drawn fire from some critics, particularly the plan’s comment on online education."We must bring integrity to online learning and will not tolerate programs that fall short," the plan, published on the Clinton campaign website and distributed to media, said. Clinton's plan aims to lessen the debt burden of a college education. While it may be no more than a tempest in the campaign teapot, the comment irked those in the distance education field. The line made it seem not just that online education had lost its way, but that it "never had" any integrity, according to Inside Higher Education. Experts pointed out that many "traditional" universities now offer degree programs online."I did not realize I worked in a field devoid of integrity," Russell Poulin, director of policy and analysis for WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), told Inside Higher Education.  "If they are not equating online learning with for-profit colleges, then I'm at a loss as to why they would want to throw a whole industry under the bus."The line was picked up on by other media outlets, including a commentary in Forbes by Excelsior College president John Ebersole. He wrote that " online learning is embedded into the American higher education experience because it works."Read more...Source: U.S. News University

"A Metro Vancouver university has announced it’s offering a course on growing medical marijuana this fall." continues CTV Vancouver News.CTV Vancouver: University offers pot classesKwantlen Polytechnic University said it will have two new online courses this September focused on the ins and outs of the budding pot industry.Kwantlen Polytechnic University is offering two classes focused on the budding medical marijuana industry this fall. Aug. 17, 2015. (CTV)One course will cover plant production and facility management, while the other will deal with marketing, sales and drug development.Instructor Tegan Adams said she’s spent years doing consulting for eight different medical marijuana companies in B.C., and there’s a clear need for formal training."There was a pretty big gap in knowledge between the people who were growing marijuana and the people who were investing in it," Adams said."There’s a need for middle management."But some are already giving the plan a failing grade. Surrey Fire Chief Len Garis said he worries a course like Adams’s could have unintended consequences."My concern would be that the information and what they learn there is going to be diverted to an illicit market," Garis said."They could grow marijuana whether it’s medical or not."Adams said her course will cover Canada’s Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations, and is intended for students who want to grow pot legally.If people want to learn how to grow pot illegally, they have plenty of options, she added."They can learn a lot of different other places [without] paying a bunch of money to go to university," Adams said."This course in particular though is for people who actually want to work through the MMPR and do it legally and be part of the evolving pharmaceutical and medical world that marijuana’s going to be entering."Universities aren’t responsible for what their students do with their education, Adams added, and even accountants can use their skill set to commit crimes.The online courses are seven weeks long and are open to people across the world.Source: CTV News

Liz Sheffield is a freelance writer with a background i […]The post Social Media for eLearning Professional Development (Part 1) appeared first on eLearning Brothers.

By Queenie Wong, Mercury News In a move aimed at narrowing a skills gap faced by many workers, the business-oriented social network LinkedIn purchased Lynda for $1.5 billion earlier this year. By using LinkedIn’s information about working professionals and businesses to link employees to the right online courses, the companies are bidding to help solve problems [...]

by Tim Dodd, AFR The University of Tasmania’s very popular massive open online course (MOOC) explaining dementia this week begins its run for the fourth time. So far the course, Understanding Dementia, has enrolled 50,000 students and has an extraordinarily high completion rate of 36 per cent since it was first offered in 2013. A 10 [...]

By Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed Traditional colleges have been mostly on the sidelines for the early development of online microcredentials or badges — the kind that aren’t linked to conventional courses and the credit hour. Educational technology companies and other alternative providers have taken the lead in working with employers on these skills-based credentials. A [...]

Ah, time. If there's one thing we're good at, it's listing all the reasons we don't have the time to do the things we say we want to do. So many people I know have a great idea for a...

When I started working with Inmarsat back in 2011, they didn't have any elearning. With a team of trainers travelling all corners of the globe, there was an understandable push to reduce travel costs. My remit was to introduce an elearning strategy that would not only provide a cost-saving against classroom training, but that would allow […] The post How I Saved $50,000 Moving from Classroom Training to eLearning appeared first on Litmos.