Nice tips for remote employee training

Working from home has become an almost defacto reality for a large portion of technology workers in  the West and now in other countries like India as well...


I was reading an interesting article with tips on how workers who work from home can be trained. A very interesting perspective...


Here's the link:
http://goo.gl/QV3IL

USA, China, and Finland... Symptoms from three systems...

China has recently announced that they are going to increase spending on education to 4% of their GDP. This is significant in context of the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's saying "the way boost education development is to have schools run by educationalists. He also "defined "educationalists" to be those who love to teach and know how to teach, and those who have been teachers for their entire lives."


Now compare this with the US education system. With the administration 'making' school compete for survival, the school system is responding with rather dubious methods of making the grade (just to prevent losing their jobs when their school is shutdown). Ironically this is in the backdrop of the "No Child Left Behind" policy of the US administration.


Reading the article 'When test scores seem too good to believe' in USAtoday, how this pressure is making teachers (!)... Not students... adopt unfair means to spike up performance. This also makes me wonder about the system itself. How, what, and how much does an average student learn in a typical school lifetime?

The Atlanta Journal Constitution wrote a very thought provoking blog post on how China is edging ahead the race education in comparison to the US. In fact, the comparison to the former USSR's success in producing stellar education outcomes.

In contrast, Ira David Socol has an interesting perspective where Finland seems to have a better model and track record that both USA and China. The interesting factoid is also how Ireland has been suggested to follow Finland model for financial recovery. What would be even more interesting is to compare how Ireland's education system fares in comparison.

New Features in Moodle 2.0

A shiny new Moodle 2.0 was launched a few days ago. Here a few links that describe all the new features:

• A YouTube playlist of Moodle 2.0 features 
• A brief tour of Moodle 2.0
• A very interesting compilation about the impact from the new features
• The official release notes

Virtual Classrooms with Facebook enabled Skype 5

I was reading a mashable.com post about Skype 5 that integrates your Facebook timeline.

This means that now you have all the elements that you normally get from a commercial solution for an online classroom session:

• A chat stream for the participants to converse while a session is in progress
• Video based (conference)/interaction (Skype 5 allows 10 people video conferencing)
• Ability to white-board 
• Ability to "dial-in" using VoIP and normal telephones
• Ability to SMS and interact
• Social media interaction (Facebook integration in this case) 

It will be a good thing to use this and setup teaching interfaces. Since Skype can now deal with dropped calls
(auto reconnection is a new feature), low bandwidth users how the option of joining with the Facebook timeline,  SMS, chat, or audio.

Here's how the new interface looks in Skype 5.0 looks

Here are some links that describe the new Skype features:

• The mashable.com article
• Skype's own blog

ItzaBitza—Microsoft's new learning game for kids

Microsoft (and Sabi games) has made an interesting game that teaches kids reading comprehension as they play the game. This game utilizes multi-touch interfaces like tablet PCs.

The story in the game evolves as the kids use their fingers or a stylus to draw things like houses and other things to crack puzzles and win challenges. The interesting part is the "Living Ink" technology used in the game that recognizes the shapes and that objects that the kids draw and makes them into a part of the game.

This way the young players are constantly playing and creating a unique game experience for themselves.

Here are some links where you can see a little more of how this game works:

• "ItzaBitza" Game Demo
• The ItzaBitza Game Trailer
• Download a demo version here
• Sabi's website where you can learn about the variants of this game
• Download videos for your media player here
• A mom blogging about testing the game with here kids
  
  

Interesting Ways to Learn and Teach Languages

I stumbled across http://www.howtolearnlanguagesfast.com/

The URL sounded quite gimmicky, so I was a tad bit apprehensive.

However, there are quite a few interesting ideas like using images and associated mnemonics to remember clusters of words, using mind maps and even singing to learn languages.

Very interesting...

Open eLMS

Discovered Open eLMS.

http://www.openelms.org/

Seems quite cool since it looks simpler and better than Moodle. I’m intrigued by the Employee Management System which claims to integrate systems to measure the competencies with the LMS.

Will explore…