Marking the end of Amplify- a social media child

I received an email today…

Dear XYZ,

After much consideration, we’ve decided that it is time to shutdown Amplify. On behalf of the team, I want to thank you for being part of our journey. It is important to us that we shut down the service in the most responsible and considerate manner possible. Towards that end there are two things that you should consider:

• First, we’ve arranged with Clipboard (a new service under entirely different ownership and management) to give you an account on their service, which is currently accessible by invitation-only. You can accept this invitation and register your account now.
• Second, from the registration page, Clipboard will allow you to easily request that your old clips be preserved in Clipboard. If you don’t want them converted, then do nothing. We can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to convert all of your older clips, but if the demand is sufficient, we will do our best.

They say, “We’ve had a wonderful run and we are grateful to everyone for taking the journey with us…….Clipboard will hold Amplify’s databases in trust and if there is sufficient interest they will provide a migration tool to import Amplify clips into Clipboard.”

Wonderful run? And no thought of the audience? Is this the birth of the death of social media?

Seriously, I do not want to join another Social Platform that predates to grow. Goodluck Clipboard!!!

Concept Mapping in Healthcare elearning

Concept mapping can be perceived of  representing visual knowledge in the form of a hierarchical graphic network composed of nodes and links. In the complex healthcare environment, it is very important for educators to cultivate critical thinking and judgement abilities in healthcare students. Concept mapping is an instructional strategy that requires learners to identify, graphically display, and link key concepts by organizing and analyzing information.

Concept maps can be successfully used to teach conceptual thinking, thus increasing students’ competence in critical thinking. Plotnick defines a concept map as a “graphical representation where nodes (points or vertices) represent concepts, and links (arcs or lines) represent the relationship between concepts”.

Edmondson & Smith describe a concept map as “a tool for representing the interrelations between concepts in an integrated, hierarchical manner”. The map provides a way to connect concepts, allowing the student to visualize during the learning process.  Many times, new meanings are constructed about events or objects based on the students’ prior knowledge.

Infusing critical thinking skills into didactic activities requires the construction and reconstruction of meanings by students through actively seeking to integrate new knowledge with knowledge already existing in their cognitive structure. Cognitive structure is a term used by Ausubel (in Mellish, Brink & Paton 1998:28) to describe a person’s existing knowledge of a particular subject and how well organised and clear that knowledge is. Concept-mapping has been identified as a stimulating learning method to facilitate critical thinking by encouraging students to connect new knowledge to their prior learning, and to give students an opportunity to gain further, wide and varied knowledge of a number of concepts in a short period (Akinsanya & Williams 2004:41).

Courtesy: Dr. jack Yensen

A study was conducted to examine the effects of concept mapping and synthesizers as instructional strategies for nursing students encoding and recalling pharmacology concepts in an undergraduate pharmacology course.  Although results cannot be generalized, this study showed that using concept maps and synthesizers in the teaching environment is effective in increasing the students’ learning experience.

If students can link new information to their existing conceptual framework, they can construct new, meaningful interconnections so that their existing conceptions are transformed, enriched or revised and conceptual change occurs.

Google+: Sharing online more like sharing in real life

Body Physics is where disparate systems share with each other under one single platform.

Collaboration Life

Perhaps Google took  a lesson to converge all sharing systems into one giant platform. Google is creating an unified army for battle. Google’s services are soon going to inter-collaborate into one giant social platform, and in the process steal some teeth from Facebook.

“We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project”, says  Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President, Engineering at Google.

 

 

+Circles: share what matters, with the people who matter most

 

Circle around life

What’s in it: You share different things with different people. So sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself – just like real life.

Google Speaks:  “What do people actually do?” And we didn’t have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time—with their circles.
From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So we did the only thing that made sense: we brought Circles to software. Just make a circle, add your people, and share what’s new—just like any other day.

+Sparks: strike up a conversation, about pretty much anything

 

Sparking Life

What’s in it: Tell Sparks what you’re into and it will send you stuff it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something cool to watch, read, or share.

Google Speaks: The web, of course, is filled with great content—from timely articles to vibrant photos to funny videos. And great content can lead to great conversations. We noticed, however, that it’s still too hard to find and share the things we care about—not without lots of work, and lots of noise. So, we built an online sharing engine called Sparks.

 

 

+Hangouts: stop by and say hello, face-to-face-to-face

 

Hangout with life

What’s in it: With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let specific buddies (or entire circles) know you’re hanging out and then see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat. Until teleportation arrives, it’s the next best thing.

Google Speaks: Just think, when you walk into the pub or step onto your front porch, you’re in fact signaling to everyone around, “Hey, I’ve got some time, so feel free to stop by.” Further, it’s this unspoken understanding that puts people at ease, and encourages conversation. But today’s online communication tools (like instant messaging and video-calling) don’t understand this subtlety. With Google+ we wanted to make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous, so we created Hangouts.

+Mobile: share what’s around, right now, without any hassle

 

Mobility in life

What’s in it: Taking photos is fun. Sharing photos is fun. Getting photos off your phone is pretty much the opposite of fun. With Instant Upload, your photos and videos upload themselves automatically, to a private album on Google+.  All you have to do is decide who to share them with.

Google Speaks: Getting photos off your phone is a huge pain, so most of us don’t even bother. Of course pictures are meant to be shared, not stranded, so we created Instant Upload to help you never leave a photo behind. While you’re snapping pictures, and with your permission, Google+ adds your photos to a private album in the cloud. This way they’re always available across your devices—ready to share as you see fit.

+Mobile-
+Huddle: Huddling your groups in

 

Huddle in Life

What’s in it: Texting is great, but not when you’re trying to get six different people to decide on a movie. Huddle turns all those different conversations into one simple group chat, so everyone gets on the same page all at once. Your thumbs will thank you.

Google Speaks: Phone calls and text messages can work in a pinch, but they’re not quite right for getting the gang together. So Google+ includes Huddle, a group messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what’s going on, right this second.

Google Hopes you join in, but its entirely +You.

Cognitive Mishaps- inattentional blindness in elearning

Kenny Conley, a Boston police officer, was chasing a shooting suspect. During the chase, he ran past a brutal assault. Other cops were attacking an undercover cop because they mistakenly believed he was involved in the crime. Conley was eventually asked to testify about what he saw of the assault. He claimed he saw nothing. Jurors didn’t believe Conley’s claim that he didn’t see the fight. Instead they assumed he was part of a cover up of police misconduct. They convicted Conley of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Thankfully for Kenny’s legal battle, he is back at the police academy.

DO YOU WISH TO OFFER THAT DECADE FOR YOUR LEARNERS TO FALL BACK TO LEARNING?

Psychology professors Christopher Chabris (Union College) and Daniel Simons (University of Illinois) did an experiment that involved a video of a “gorilla” walking through a group of people passing basketballs. The unexpected gorilla stopped in the middle of the scene, faced the camera, thumped its chest and then walked off screen. When study subjects were asked to count the number of passes by players wearing white and ignore those of players in black, half of them did not notice the gorilla.

They asked people to run around a ¼ mile route on campus while chasing one of the researchers. The experimenters asked the participants to stay about 30 feet behind the researcher and to count the number of times he patted his head. Part-way through the route, they ran right past a staged fight about 25 feet off the route. They put the participants in either a low attention load condition (simply chase the guy) or a more difficult attention load condition (count the number of times he touches his head with both his left and his right hand). In daylight with the low attention load, 72% noticed the fight. But with high attention load, only 42% noticed the fight. Even in broad daylight, people can fail to notice a fight that occurs right beside their path if their attention is occupied.

That experiment is an example of what researchers call “inattentional blindness,” the failure to see something unexpected if one is focused on something else.

While you build your elearning course, you create your objectives and establish the objectives with learner in the beginning of the course. You then integrate instructional approaches that help your learners stay focused on the objectives and finally achieve them.

How many times have you thought what happens if learners get into “inattentional blindness”? Elearning programs are generally built to be intuitive. Intuition, however may have a side-effect, “inattentional blindness”. To prevent learners fall into inattentional blindness, mainstream instruction has to be delivered in a way that allows learners prevail the alertness of surrounding learning objects.

In an attempt and focus to achieve a result at the end of Lesson 2, try to hint back the learner of subtle take-aways of Lesson 1, failing which an elearning program will fall prey of inattentional blindness- a serious cognitive mishap.

The Promise of HTML 5

HTML 5 holds enormous promise for the browser experience without a plug-in requirement. Capabilities include drag-and-drop file copy, animation, video playback with synchronization, all sorts of transitions, interactive canvas and font manipulation, advanced typography, Web SQL data storage and rollback, online/offline testing and a myriad of others available now or under way.

If you are still unsure about HTML5, just take a look at some of Apple’s past bets. The company’s flagship technologies such as FireWire and SCSI, foresaw that CDs would replace floppies and that all computers would need Ethernet, and was using SIMM modules when others were still inserting memory chips one at a time.

Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers now support HTML5. Microsoft is planning to support it, and maintains an excellent HTML5 Web site where it displays news, capabilities and emerging features about HTML5 and other technologies that have not yet been standardized.

And when combined with CSS3 and JavaScript, as in Apple’s HTML5 demo web site, its potential to create amazing Web experiences simply knows no bounds. Indeed, there appear to be no limits on the type and scope of applications built with HTML5. For example, there’s an effort to build HTML5 WebSockets, which permit bi-directional communication between the browser and the Web server, giving it the ability to update browser content without the need to reload the page. And as with all HTML versions, apps made with HTML5 would be cross-platform and would not reply on proprietary operating system-specific runtimes.
Read More at http://goo.gl/7vhnO