Jane's Pick of the Day

New structure and design for my website: C4LPT

Due to the large amount of material I now host on my main website, Centre for Learning & Peformance Technologies (C4LPT),  I've re-structured it, and applied a new design.

if you're looking for something, and can't locate it, try the new Site map.

Some bookmarks this week

Here are some of my delicious bookmarks (that automatically get sent to my Twitter account @c4lpt) - in case you missed them!!

• What is Web 3.0? Semantic Web & other Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English - by Anol Agar at Digital Inspiration
• iPod Learning Made Mobile, iLearn No 2 from Apple
• Google Wave: A Complete Guide - from Mashable
• What's Your Government 2.0 Personality Type? - from Steve Radick - this could easily be modified to identify AnyOrg 2.0 Personality Type
• 65 tips for getting the most out of your elearning budget - a free ebook from the eLearning Guild
• Modern Corporate Training: The enterprise Learning Framework from Josh Bersin, which has provoked a number of comments from others including Jay Cross in his posting Picky Picky

WordWrap macro

Josh emailed me about WordWrap macro as follows:

Announcing a humble little tool that can save a lot of time, not to mention tedium and frustration.

Problem: when copying multiple lines of text from PDF into Word documents, there’s no easy way to merge multiple lines of text into a single paragraph in Word. The busy author must hand-edit, line by line, removing line breaks and adding spaces.

Solution: With this simple macro for Microsoft Word 2007, press CTRL-SHIFT-V and the clipboard’s text is pasted without CR/LF “wrap” characters, so you get a single, merged line of text.

WordWrap Macro

V1 works with Word 2007 on Vista in English, but it’s open-source; feel free to improve it

ShareNotes

Ed wrote to tell me about ShareNotes as follows:

"Basically it's a site where students upload their class notes to build an online resource where students can search for notes from their own classes or look at other peoples notes. It provides an incentive for uploading notes, students get paid $50 for each 100 notes they upload."

ShareNotes.com is 100% free to use, simply create a login and start sharing / downloading lecture notes. Additionally, ShareNotes.com does not take any part of your commissions.

ShareNotes

[70 further note taking and sharing tools here]

Poll Everywhere : Use Twitter in PowerPoint

 

Your audience - or even your students - are tweeting : How do you draw them into your presentation?

By asking for their opinion, and displaying their tweets directly in your PowerPoint slides.

With Poll Everywhere, you can invite people to tweet a short comment directly to your slide in real-time, while still blocking inappropriate or off-topic tweets. You can also ask multiple choice questions and watch a graph evolve as people vote. 

Download slides that show live results. Nothing to install!

Free and paid price plans

Poll Everywhere

[Over 150 Twitter apps here]

What would Andrew do?

Jay Cross has a new un-book out, What would Andrew do?  Here's the description:

Chief Learning Officers and training directors are struggling to convince executives they are making a difference. To be successful, they must think and act like business people. This takes more than jargon and metrics. This un-book explains what a training director must do to get budget, keep her job, and make solid contributions to the bottom line. What Would Andrew Do? will challenge you to convince a hard-nosed, self-made Scot that your proposed learning project is a worthwhile use of his money. If you can do that, convincing your organization shouldn’t be a problem. This is version 4.5 of What Would Andrew Do? It is a work in progress. It’s incomplete. Don’t buy this book unless you’re willing to put up with messiness in order to get its message.

You can access What woudd Andrew do on the Lulu Marketplace, where you can purchase a downloadable or print copy.

Here's Jay's own blog posting about it

FunnelBrain

Joe emailed me about FunnelBrain:

FunnelBrain is an academic question-and-answer site that provides an environment for team based learning and multi-media flashcards.

Create FunnelBrain Flashcards with videos photos, audio, text and math equations!

FunnelBrain

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 - May Update

Nearly 100 learning professionals from around the world have now shared their Top 10 Tools for Learning, which I am using to  build the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009.

Here is a a screenshot of the the top 20 tools on the list - at the time of writing this posting - which shows information about their place on the list over the last 2 years.

KEY
F = Free, £ = Commercial, D = Download, H = Hosted. 
Cells shaded blue are new on the list this year

You can view the complete, emerging list here.

If you are a learning professional then please do share your Top 10 Tools:  There are a number of ways to do this:

1. By far the easiest is to send me a tweet @c4lpt with the names of your 10 fav tools
2. Write a blog posting and tweet me or email me - jane.hart@c4lpt.co.uk - the link 
3. Email me the full details of your choices together with the reasons why - and I will set up a webpage for you. (More info here)

Cobocards

Ali emailed me with details of Cobocards as follows:

"With Cobocards (Collaboration Cards) students can create flashcards in collaboration, i.e. someone founds a team and everyone creates flashcards. If you have 5 team members and each of them creates 20 flashcards the next day each of them has a set of 100 cards."

You can print them and study offline, edit them again and again, compare with older versions, check the status of your knowledge, upload pictures and graphs, include formula with LaTeX, share your flashcards with friends, set a deadline for exams,...

Cobocards

[Over 40 More Interactivity tools here in the Directory of Learning Tools]

Wolfram Alpha

A number of people have emailed suggesting I blog about Wolfram Alpha.  I haven't done so up to now because it has had so much coverage that I didn't think I could add any more to what had already been said.  So in this posting I am going to link to three articles about how it compares with Google.

First of all, WolframAlpha calls itself "a computational knowledge engine"  rather than a search engine.  It's long-term goal is "to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone".

1. Compare WolframAlpha Searches with Google - here Anol Agarwal of Digital Inspiration shows Firefox users how they can use Wolfram alongside Google.
2. Five things Wolfram Alpha does better and (vastly differently) from Google, is a piece by Stan Schroeder, at Mashable, who provides "some guidelines which will help you shake off that “search engine” frame of mind and perhaps help you start using Wolfram Alpha to its full potential".
3. WolframAlpha and Google Face-off - by David Talbot at Technology Review, shows how the two Web engines compare when given the same queries.

Anybody got any interesting experiences of using WolframAlpha to share?