FeedBurner – Yummy features. Great for the Blogger users to generate RSS2/1 feed.

SmartFeed is an intelligent, subscriber-aware feed service that enables you to reach the widest possible audience while publishing a single feed on your blog or site. Today, SmartFeed converts Atom feeds to RSS on-the-fly for readers that do not support Atom. In the coming weeks, SmartFeed will be getting even smarter!

Via : Seb’s Open Research

Experience-Enabling Design: An approach to elearning design from elearningpost by L. Ravi Krishnan & Venkatesh Rajamanickam. A great article articulating the importance of experience design in eLearning and process of resolving conflicts between experience and layout. Every word of the article is quotable, no point in giving an excerpt here.

My little postscripts –
We evaluate everything in this world (performing arts to gossips) with two souls – one is a critic soul, and another involved soul. Critic soul always wants us to be detached and involved soul want us to be engaged, be part of the story, evaluate from the heart. That’s why experience matters. Experience talk to our gut and encourages our involved soul.
Knowledge osmosis is facilitated in an unconscious mode while we are engaged in an experience. That’s why we can recall movie dialogues but not the phone number of our boss.

[A footnote here - I've seen (many times) my wife watching a highly melodramatic scene of a soap opera with moist eyes. This is, I believe exposure effect, nothing to do with engagement or experience.]

I very much liked the case of using of minimalistic graphics. Think about the form drawings of cavemen. Minimalist schematic diagrams are the first form of pictures drawn by human being. I think that’s why it effective in communicating experience clearly.

Designing Collaborative E-Learning For Results by Glen Mohr and Julia M. Nault

Collaboration tools in action to humanize online learning, a good case study.

Because we can communicate by email and over the Web, we no longer need to meet face to face. The more connected we are, the more isolated we are. The connectivity/isolation paradox is manifesting itself in many aspects of our professional and personal lives and is a fundamental reason why e-learning programs can be unsatisfying to instructors and learners. How can we design e-learning programs to overcome the connectivity/isolation paradox?

Checklist for Critical Success Factors in collaborative organizational learning
1. Manage expectations.
2. Create a common base of knowledge before the course starts. This may consist of new readings/exercises or refreshers of previous ones.
3. Make it extremely clear how and when participants will communicate.
4. Demonstrate the technology at the outset and reinforce throughout the course. Do not let anyone slip through the cracks.
5. Make synchronous sessions highly interactive.
6 Let students generate the data and examples used in the course.
7. Include a collaborative project.
8. Bring closure to the material and provide a plan for next steps.

Teach to learn by Van Weigel of Eastern University
A practical learning strategy specially when now days everyone is riding the simulation bandwagon.

Via OLDaily

One of the more interesting things I learned from John Stuart Mill’s biography: homeschooled by his father, James Mill, John was required in turn to teach his younger siblings. While he gained a great deal from the experience, he reports in the Autobiography, his younger siblings fared less well. This is reflected in an item from Van B. Weigel that Tze thought (correctly) would interest me. Weigel writes, “For those taking notes, lectures may be poorly suited to the task of learning, but not for the person giving the lecture. A tremendous amount of learning takes place in preparing for and giving a lecture.” The same, I might add, is true of writing a daily newsletter. Weigel has a lot to say about deep learning, communities of practice and simulations, drawing on people like Wegner and Aldrich.

Online Storytelling: By Katarina Björk, ACTeN [PDF]

In this report Katarina Björk of the The Story Lab in Sweden focuses on online storytelling, i.e. storytelling as a method on the Internet for the distribution of content for various purposes. The report discusses internet-based storytelling as opposed to traditional storytelling and provides many examples of applications of this new way of getting story across, including for commercial, personal, cultural and political purposes.

Via OLDaily

Delivered in the context of the EU-funded project ACTeN, this report provides an overview and analysis of the educational use of storytelling. I like the wide variety of examples used to illustrate the core themes, including corporate storytelling in the consumer oriented industry, public services and pedagogic institutions, such as museums, and political movements and organizations. The paper also provides a useful workflow of online storytelling and looks at technological developments impacting the outlook for storytelling.