OPLS blog

I promised a review of Imagine Teacher for the Nintendo DS, in the vain hope that it would help teachers in some way with their own professional development. Well, the short answer is, it won’t!

I looked for insights into classroom strategies, help with identifying student learning styles, curriculum planning and perhaps learning space design. I think I was being a little optimistic.

The game is as taxing on the brain as watching Celebrity Big Brother, and, to be honest, I shouldn’t have devoted the amount of time I did in getting to know it, hoping against hope that I’d uncover a few nuggets of wisdom somewhere.

You’re better off using the pictochat feature on the DS and collaborating with peers across the staffroom.

Best avoided.

Since 2007, Techcrunch have hosted a conference for online start-ups in a bid to attract further investment. Called Techcrunch Top 50 in 2008, there are some interesting ideas in development.

To help you navigate your way through, I thought I’d pare the list down a little, in so far as the ones listed below have some resonance for teaching and learning. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.

Youth and Culture:

• Blah Girls - Backed by Ashton Kutcher, Blah Girls is a gossip site that features a group of animated teenage girls who provide opinions on what’s going on in the world of entertainment
• Tweegee A hub for tweens, Tweegee offers the youth market a suite of online tools for social interaction and organization
• Shryk Web-based financial software for children aimed at promoting financial literacy and good saving habits
• Hangout Industries Blends social networking with virtual worlds by creating a 3D, online environment where 16-24 year olds can chat and share media.

Memes & News:

• DotSpots Tracks the memes spreading across the web, aggregates the content associated with them, and gives everyone Wikipedia-like control over that content
• Angstro Lets you set up a feed of news about your friends, instead of news by your friends
• LiveHit Tracks the music, videos, and entertainment sites people are clicking on right now
• Quant the News Creator of StockMood.com, a service that tracks the sentiments of online news stories about stocks and then measures their potential impact on the direction of those stocks’ prices.

Advertising & Commerce Monetisation:

• Burt Collects user data to tailor individual advertising campaigns and target users more effectively
• Adgregate Markets Brings online stores to consumers through a display ad that is a fully transactional widget
• Adrocket Contextual text-based advertising for email; assigns keywords to each address depending on known demographic and contextual data.

Collaboration:

• Tingz Offers a unified platform for delivering internet content across multiple devices including mobile phones and PCs
• MIXTT A group based social network/dating site that encourages real world interaction that’s more comfortable than the 1-on-1 format of most similar sites
• Imindi Based on neuroscientific principles, Imindi’s Thought Engine tries to exceed human thought and help its users find new ideas, concepts, and questions on the Web
• Popego Surfaces the most meaningful information from within your social graph based on your interests and other factors.

Finance & Statistics:

• PersonalRIA Allows users to shadow a professional investment advisor’s portfolio, automatically executing trades (which most brokerage sites cannot do)
• Emerginvest Offers commentary and analysis on Emerging Markets and tools that provide you with information on how to diversify globally
• ExchangeP Dubbed a ‘fantasy stock market’, ExchangeP’s service allows users to sign up for free and start investing in private companies
• Me-trics Lets you see how mood, weight, and goals correlate with other metrics, including web services like Facebook or RescueTime
• iCharts YouTube for embeddable, interactive charts (link not working at time of post).

Mobile:

• Mytopia A gaming platform that lets players compete across mobile devices and social networks
• Tonchidot Makes the Sekai Camera, a camera system that aims to merge the virtual and real worlds by using a digital device as a viewfinder
• FitBit Developing a small wireless sensor called the Fitbit Tracker, which automatically records data about a person’s activities, calories burned, sleep quality, steps, and distance throughout the day.

Language & Communication Tools:

• Alfabetic Translates any blog or Website into another language and places ads alongside it in the new tongue
• Postbox Based on Mozilla technology, Postbox saves users’ time when looking for particular information within their email
• Swype A new method of text input on touch screens; does away with traditional “hunt and peck” in favour of a more fluid motion
• DropBox Provides an easy way to backup your files, share them with co-workers and friends, and synchronise them between computer.

Rich Media:

• VideoSurf A visual video search engine that allow users to search across millions of videos for a given actor and to view summaries of videos through a series of detected keyframes
• GazoPa An image search engine developed by Hitachi that uses visual similarities between photos to suggest matches (rather than simply relying on keywords)
• Fotonauts A photo sharing application that turns every album instantly into a Web page
• Bojam Although there are a slew of online music services already on the Web, Bojam is trying to do something a bit different: it wants to connect musicians and allow them to collaborate over the Web.

Games:

• Grockit A “Massively Multi-Player Online Learning Game”
• Akoha A web-based social game played with trading cards aimed at spreading good deeds around the world
• Atmosphir A platform for creating 3D interactive games by selecting blocks (such as a sand castle tower, fireball-breathing bird, or trap door) and snapping them onto a grid
• PlaYce Provides a 3D virtual world inside the browser for games and social interaction that is based on the real world
• Shattered Reality Interactive A new massively multiplayer online game (think World of Warcraft) that lets the crowd guide the direction of future expansions.

Research & Recommendations:

• GoodGuide Provides information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of products and companies
• GoPlanit A one-click travel planner that assembles a customized trip itinerary with the click of a button; also supports mobile microblogging
• Goodrec A mobile and online recommendation service that provides brief, to-the-point recommendations from friends and trusted sources.

The next generation of the one laptop per child (OLPC) initiative (XO-2) was announced recently amid continuing controversy over its purpose and vision. Some images, though, of what it will look like below.

I think the move towards e-book functionality is interesting and I look forward to its interim (XO-1.5) release in 2009.

Apparently, Negroponte said at the launch, “Some people have asked me why not just give kids cell phones? And in fact there will be 1.2 billion cell phones manufactured this year, and cell phones are of huge consequence in the developing world - but the cell phone is not a learning device. The next generation laptop should be a book.”

“… the cell phone is not a learning device[!]” Come on, Nick. I admire what you’re trying to do here, but please don’t ignore the significant role mobile phones can play in teaching and learning. So, if you’re reading this, you might want to have a look at this post (and the ensuing comments) from Ewan McIntosh.

Someone from the OLPC stable who does seem to have a good understanding of education is Walter Bender, the man behind the Sugar user interface on all OLPC machines. He’s got some interesting things to say regarding how software for the OLPC is designed around constructionist theories of interactive learning and believes strongly in the need to open up development in this area to the open-source community. I encourage you to have a look at an interview Xconomy did with him here.