MIT seeks through the development of MITx to improve education both on the MIT campus and around the world.

On campus, MITx will be coupled with an Institute-wide research initiative on online teaching and learning. The online learning tools that MITx develops will benefit the educational experience of residential students by supplementing and reinforcing the classroom and laboratory experiences.

Beyond the MIT campus, MITx will endeavor to break down barriers to education in two ways. First, it will offer the online teaching of MIT courses to people around the world and the opportunity for able learners to gain certification of mastery of MIT material. Second, it will make freely available to educational institutions everywhere the open-source software infrastructure on which MITx is based.

Since it launched OpenCourseWare (OCW) 10 years ago, MIT has been committed to using technology to improve and greatly widen access to education. The launch of MITxrepresents a next step forward in that effort.

UDACITY:

UDACITY is a recently established portal offering university-level online courses for free. Two courses are currently available CS101 Building a Search Engine andCS373 Programming a Robotic Car.

Both courses begin on February 20, 2012 and each is broken into 6 week-long units with a seventh wrap-up week that also includes a final exam.

Coursera:

Stanford professor also launched a Massive Online Learning course.The 14 new free online courses from Stanford University are started at a website called Coursera. These are non-credit courses, which let you watch short videos and take embedded quizzes. If you sign up, do the homework and take exams, you will also a letter of completion signed by the course’s instructors.

What they believe  ”We are committed to making the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it. We envision people throughout the world, in both developed and developing countries, using our platform to get access to world-leading education that has so far been available only to a tiny few. We see them using this education to improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.”

You can get a taste of what will be on offer at Coursera by looking at these preview videosfrom the course on Model Thinking, taught by political scientists Scott Page of the University of Michigan. The course is an introduction to the kinds of models used by social scientists to help manage and analyze data. The first lesson gives an overview of the course, and the second lesson looks a few models that help make sense of segregation in cities and how social revolutions can seem to come out of nowhere.

Each lesson is made up of 5 or 6 short videos, 6 to 12 minutes in length, which makes it easy to get a chunk of learning done on your coffee break, or between other activities. I find Page to be an engaging instructor, and the illustrations in the videos are helpful in understanding his explanations. I’m looking forward to seeing what the rest of the course will bring.

So today there are billions of content all over the web and users are moving from “creating” content to “filtering and aggregating” it. Content curation is the organizing, filtering and “making sense of” information on the web and sharing the very best pieces of content that you’ve cherry picked and shared with your network. Digital content curation gives your audience what they want to see by distilling and presenting the best information available, while adding your own unique perspective and context.

Five basic steps of Curation

1. Aggregation is the act of curating the most relevant information about a particular topic into a single location.
2. Distillation is the act of curating information into a more simplistic format where only the most important or relevant ideas are shared.
3. Elevation refers to curation with a mission of identifying a larger trend or insight from smaller daily musings posted online.
4. Mashups are unique curated justapositions where merging existing content is used to create a new point of view.
5. Chronology is a form of curation that brings together historical information organized based on time to show an evolving understanding of a particular topic.

Content Curation Tools for Professional & Personnel USE:

Curation Tool	About
	curated.by  (beta) — Collects and organizes tweets into topic-based “bundles” (collections of tweets) that can be shared or embedded anywhere, and subscribed to by other users. Bundles are created using a simple Chrome browser extension that displays a “Curate” button below every tweet you see on Twitter.com.
	Storyfy  — Storify is a way to tell stories using social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. You search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into your story. You can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers.
	Scoop.it  (beta, invite-only) — “Be the curator of your favorite topic!” Scoop.it is an AWESOME tool for discovering those super nichey, hidden gems relevant to specific topic. Use the dashboard to manage an unlimited amount of sources (websites, RSS feeds, specific social media accounts, etc.) and plug in relevant keywords and date parameters. Scoop.it does the rest and delivers you a constant feed of exactly the type of content you’re looking for.
	Redux  — Powerful content curation specifically for videos. Redux helps you discover all the coolest videos to watch, which are organized into very tightly-focused topics by other Redux users. Create your own channel to start curating video content.  You can also go on a Stumble-like tangent by hitting the “Discover” button which serves up fresh videos relevant to your interests.
	Evri  (beta) — “Discover, follow, curate & share.”  Primarily a news-focused curation tool, Evri brings you the latest stories, helps you track the ones that matter most and enables you to curate your own channels.
	Blekko  — “Slash the Web!”  blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. slashtags search only the sites you want and cut out the spam sites. use friends, experts, community or your own slashtags to slash in what you want and slash out what you don’t. Extremely useful search tool for when Google’s bloated, spammy results just aren’t cutting it.
	BagTheWeb  — BagTheWeb helps users curate Web content. For any topic, you can create a “bag” to collect, publish, and share any content from the Web.  Beyond most curation tools’ capability, BagTheWeb enables users to build networks of bags. This way bags can be linked together to provide rich and complete information about any topic.
	BlogBridge  — A tool for true info-junkies who want a better way to wrangle all their RSS feeds from blogs and news into one pretty cool organizer.  An easy to use/easy to manage way of trawling through hundreds of blogs and pulling out the best nuggets.
	KeepStream  — “Organize your tweets.” We all know how hard it is to keep up with our Twitter streams and many have also felt the frustration of losing tweets into the void, thanks to Twitter’s unreliability. KeepStream lets you save your tweets, organize them into useful collections (e.g. curate your tweets) and embed collections of tweets into blog posts.
	Paper.li  — Lets you turn Twitter, Faceook and RSS feeds into easy-to-digest online “newspapers” in just a few clicks. Requires a Twitter or Facebook account to sign up and start publishing your own newspapers.  Treat your readers & followers to a handpicked selection of fresh news and links daily.
	Pearltrees  — An extremely powerful tool that aids discovery of new, relevant content by presenting it in a very visual way. The interface builds a hub-and-spoke style tree diagram of content that you search for, discover and collect. Hover over new “pearls” to see at-a-glance previews of the content which you can then “pick”, comment upon, and share.
	Bundlr  — A tool for online curation: clipping, aggregation and sharing of web content. What if there was an easy way to package up all those cool links you found—videos, tweets, photos, and other stuff that was all related—and then share your bundle easily with others?  That’s what Bundlr does.
	Amplify  — “The easiest way to clip, share and discuss things that interest you.”  Add the Amplify web clipper to your browser to start clipping & sharing things you find around the web, such as article excerpts, photos, videos and more.
	mySyndicaat  — A no-frills news curation tool for serious newshounds.  A personalized aggregator that lets you gather news, filter it to your needs, and deliver it via dynamic feeds and publication tools.
	Curation Station  — A paid service catering to businesses, CurationStation provides companies and agencies with a tool for gathering, monitoring, selecting and sharing specific content with their audiences to achieve business goals, and lets them customize how the curated content is displayed (e.g. to match their branded website).
	trunk.ly  — A handy and very valuable little tool that collects and stores content and shared links from your social streams.  More importantly, it indexes the web pages these links point to and builds a personal search engine, so you never have to tag or describe a link again, you just search and Trunk.ly will find it again for you.
	YourVersion  — “The best way to discover new content that’s relevant to you.” Plug in your keyword-based interests and let YourVersion scour the web for you and wrangle all that content into one easy-to-manage dashboard organized into tabs such as News, Blogs, Web, Twitter, Quora, Friends, and more. Use the Relevant vs. Recent dial to get the right blend of content.
	Summify  — Creates a beautiful daily summary of the most relevant news from your social networks and delivers it to you by email, web or mobile.
	Diigo  (beta) — “Collect and highlight, then remember.” Diigo is a true bookmarking tool (versus Evernote) that looks and feels a lot like Delicious, but with extra features that make it more useful for content curation. Collect and organize anything (bookmarks, highlights, notes, screenshots, pictures…) then access your stuff from anywhere and easily share it.
	Qrait  (beta, invite only) — (From the makers of Twitterfall) “Qrait is a real-time curation platform designed to fulfill the needs of content curators and reduce information overload for the rest of us.” Users create “molecules” which are like little hubs of information that you add “atoms” (more information) to. Atoms are added in the form of copy & pasted URLs that will automatically pull in any embeded content such as video, photos, etc.
	Story Crawler  (private beta) — A researcher’s dream, Story Crawler is an intelligent news and information gathering software product that data mines the information overload to fetch results that hone in on your specific needs and connect the dots for you.
	Feedly  — “A fast and stylish ways to follow, read and share the content of your favorite sources, anytime, anywhere!”  Like an RSS reader on steroids, Feedly lets you arrange your sources and customize your views to get the most out of it, bringing the best content to the surface. Requires login with a Google account.
	my6sense  — Delivers you content that is ranked according to your personal preferences from your various social streams. You can view what’s most important to you, sorted by relevance, from all of your streams, within individual streams, and even within specific categories determined by you.  What’s unique is that there’s no need for you to set preferences or give any explicit feedback. ‘Digital Intuition’ learns what’s valuable to you by translating your consumption behaviour into a personalized ranking function.
	Instapaper  — “Save interesting web pages for reading later.” One of those deceptively simple tools that, after using for a while, you’ll find you can’t function without. When you stumble upon interesting content on the web but don’t have time to read it, simply press “Read Later” to send it to InstaPaper, then access it later from anywhere/any device (including Kindle) in a stylish newspaper-like format.
	Shareist  (beta, invite only) — Create your own custom curation site quickly and easily. Publish content that matters to you and your audience and provide your unique perspective.
	Storyful  — “Storyful was founded by journalists who wanted to separate the news from the noise of the real-time web.” Use Storyful to easily build a visual “story” told through tweets, videos and images.
	LOUD3R  — A paid (read: expensive) but professional content curation platform that delivers the best real-time content about any topic and pipes it into your site, blog, branded channel, etc. Bills itself as the first and only enterprise-level content solution that is feature-rich and intuitive.
	OneSpot  — “Deliver the content your audience wants from your site, network, or around the web.”  Another professional grade content delivery platform with patented community ranking algorithms that bring the best content for your audience to the surface.
	Daylife  — A  professional publishing suite that “intelligently ingests any media into the cloud and enables real-time publishing of beautifully-rendered features.”
	Eqentia  — “From your context, let us find you content. From that content, let us find you people. You take action.”  Aims to empower companies to become professional publishers with a host of content curation tools, dedicated topic portals, and analytical insights. Even if you don’t use a paid Eqentia product, you can take advantage of the system’s curation by exploring and personalizing the channels or by creating your own portal.
	Curata  — “Curata is content marketing in a box. Curata helps marketers maximize their content curation efforts with web-based tools to easily find, organize and share online content – helping them build thought leadership and grow their qualified leads.”
	Lynk.ly  (beta) — Lynk.ly helps you discover the most talked-about stories in the world BEFORE they become too popular. In essence, Lynk.ly predicts the popularity of stories that are being shared on the world’s social networks. Browse the front page to see what’s hot, what’s new, and what’s up-and-coming.
	PostPost  — “PostPost search results are filled with super-relevant information from the people you follow on Twitter—the links, photos, news, reviews and insights totally missing from real-time search.” Sign up to let PostPo.st automatically gather what you and the people you follow have shared so you can always have it on demand.
	MyTweetMag  — “Turns your Twitter links into your personal blog stream.  Curate your topic and show what you’re passionate about!” Instead of merely embedding a Twitter stream into your blog, use MyTweetMag to turn all those links you share on Twitter into a beautifully-styled “magazine” of your curated content that blends in with your blog.
	Kurate  — Follow the news topics that are most important to you, then publish curated news streams for your team or customers.  Start with one topic, then fine-tune your stream by adding more keywords, excluding keywords (great feature!), and adding sources like RSS feeds.
	Thoora  — “An engine to help discover, rate and deliver the highest quality, most trusted, and relevant content on any given topic.” Create a topic, add some sources, and let Thoora trawl the web for relevant links. Share your topic on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
	Netvibes  – “Everything that matters to you, all in one dashboard.” Completely personalize your web experience by pulling anything/everything (news, blogs, weather, email, search queries, videos, photos, podcasts, and much more) into one constantly updated easy-to-browse dashboard that will help you curate content.

Tom Khulmann is an International Speaker and the author of the Rapid E-Learning Blog, which has over 85,000 subscribers each week.He shares practical tips and tricks to help people learn more about elearning. He also manages the Articulate user community. He holds a Master’s in Education Technology from Pepperdine and is very passionate about learning and technology.

Here is a chance to learn about e-Learning and related technology from an International Expert.

Webinar Detail

Title : How to Become a Rapid E-Learning Pro
Date : 8th February, 2012 
Venue : Online (WizIQ) 
Time : 10.00 AM (Time zones) 
Venue : Online (WizIQ)

Registration: CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Webinar Theme: Many teachers, educators and academicians are developing their online course with limited budget and resources. Tom Kuhlmann as he shares some practical tips on getting the most out of the resources you have to build engaging and interactive elearning content.

Thanks to IMU, Malaysia for arranging such webinar.

Note: The online Webinar URL will be sent to you by E-mail 30 minutes before the Webinar begins.

By clicking on each of the following link, you will be able to:

• Keep yourself up-to- date with the new software, technologies, and trends relative to corporate e-learning and e-learning in general.
• Find answers to difficulties you may have regarding the implementation of corporate e-learning.
• Learn from the experts!
• Get new ideas and tips!

So subscribe to these blogs and strengthen your PLE

 Multimedia Learning by David Anderson
The blog focuses on e-Learning design and development. You should definitely visit the Multimedia Learning blog.

aLearning Blog by Ellen Behrens
The alearning Blog is the brainchild of Ellen Behrens, who has been working in online education for seven years, association learning for more than a couple, and adult learning for more than twenty years. After working for a Web company that developed learning management systems and created custom elearning for corporate clients, Ellen escaped to the non-profit world where she led her trade association into online learning. Under her guidance, the association was able to offer its first asynchronous Web-delivered course, and its first synchronous Webinar.

Tagoras Blog (Tagoblog) by Jeff Cobb & Celisa Steele
The blog focuses on an ongoing stream of resources related to learning strategy, marketing, and technology.

Pinched Head Blog by Rick Maranta & Nancy Woinoski
In this blog, you will find short articles and tutorials that will help you understand a little more about the world of eLearning.

Rapid e-Learning Blog by Tom Kuhlmann
The Rapid E-Learning Blog shares practical tips and tricks to help you become a rapid e-learning pro.

eLearning Pulse is an independent online community focused on serving learning and technology professionals, from instructional designers to software developers to project managers. This site provides free resources to the eLearning development community, including news, job postings, and more.

Jane’s Pick of the Day by Jane Hart
In this blog Jane features items of her interest such as learning and/or working.

The eLearning Coach by Connie Malamed
The eLearning Coach covers actionable strategies, practical content, personal reviews and resources to help instructional designers and e-Learning professionals to design, develop and understand online learning. Also, Connie is member of the Instructional Designers & E-Learning professionals’ group on LinkedIn.

Learning Ecosystems by Daniel S. Christian
The Learning Ecosystem covers e-learning as well as other topics from the K-12, higher education, and corporate training and development spaces.

Breakthrough eLearning by Rick Nigol
Rick focuses on how to break through some of the barriers that prevent the achievement of excellence in e-Learning.

Learning Circuits Blog
The LC Blog is a community feature that Learning Circuits launched in 2002. The main feature of the LC Blog is its Question of the Month, which hones in on a priority topic facing learning professionals. Anyone–and everyone–can contribute to the LC Blog.

e-Learning Post by Maish R Nichani
The goal of this blog is to explore news, views and stories around corporate learning, community building, instructional design, knowledge management and more.

I Came, I Saw, I Learned by Kevin Siegel
The content focuses on eLearning, mLearning, social media, and how-to articles for Captivate, Camtasia, FrameMaker, Acrobat, RoboHelp and PowerPoint.

E-Learning Queen by Susan Smith Nash
E-Learning Queen focuses on distance training and education, from instructional design to e-learning and mobile solutions, and pays attention to psychological, social, and cultural factors. The edublog emphasizes real-world e-learning issues and appropriate uses of emerging technologies.

Stephen’s Web  by Stephen Downes
Founded in 1995, Stephen’s Web is best described as a digital research laboratory for innovation in the use of online media in education. More than just a site about online learning, it is intended to demonstrate new directions in the field for practitioners and enthusiasts.

Mobilemind by Tom King
Mobilemind focuses on mobile computing and e-Learning.

Online Learning Update by Ray Schroeder
The Online Learning Update blog has been published daily since early in 2001.  It is intended to provide a scholarly chronicle of the development of the technology, pedagogy and practice of online learning at all levels of education.

e-Learning Curve by Michael Hanley
Michael Hanley’s blog covers topics such as e-learning, web-based e-learning, technology in education, e-learning tools, learning 2.0 (blogs and podcasts), & continuous professional development.

MinuteBio by Jeffery Goldman
This blog is to share opinions, tips, and resources on e-learning, m-learning, and the tools used to design and develop high quality courses.

e-Learning Acupuncture by Eric A. Tremblay
The blog focus on experiences and random thoughts about e-Learning, distance education and Educational Technology.

By

Mazhar K. Laliwala

Assistant Professor in Physics

Gujarat Arts & Science College, Ahmedabad.

Title of the Book: The FOURTH PARADIGM-DATA INTENSIVE SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

                                 EditEd by Tony Hey,   STewarT TanSl ey,  and KriSTin Tol l e

Publisher: Microsoft Research

                    http://research.microsoft.com

The Fourth Paradigm is a continued conversation around data-intensive science, building upon an initial set of essays published in 2009, freely available for download at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/4th_paradigm_book_complete_lr.pdf. The book ‘The FOURTH PARADIGM’ build on the vision of Jim Gray(Jim Gray was a researcher and manager of Microsoft Research’s eScience Group), a Turing Award-winning computer scientist lost at sea in 2007, for data-driven scientific discovery and how it can be realized. The original compilation featured over 70 contributors, with 26 invited essays grouped under four topics: Earth and Environment, Health and Wellbeing, Scientific Infrastructure, and Scholarly Communication. ‘The  Fourth Paradigm’, a  remarkable publication from Microsoft Research, is about discovery based on data-intensive science  – a new kind of scientific exploration.

                      ‘Hundreds of projects in fields ranging from genomics to computational linguistics to astron­omy demonstrate a major shift in the scale at which scientific data are taken, and in how they are processed, shared and commu­nicated to the world. Most significantly, there is a shift in how researchers find meaning in data, with sophisticated algorithms and statistical techniques becom­ing part of the standard scientific toolkit. The Fourth Paradigm is about this shift, how scientists are dealing with it, and some of the consequences. Its 30 chap­ters, written by some 70 authors, cover a wide range of aspects of data-intensive science.

                      ”The book is in four parts. The first two parts are a panorama of the new ways in which data are obtained, through new instru­ments and large-scale sensor net­works. The fields covered range from cosmology to the environ­ment and from healthcare to biology. Most of the chapters in these sections follow a common pattern. Each introduces a complex system of scientific inter­est — the human brain, the worlds oceans, the global health system and so on — before sup­plying an explanation of how we are building an instrument or a network of sensors to map out that system comprehensively and, in some cases, to track its real-time behavior.

                      We learn in one chapter, for example about workflow and the impact of workflow tools on Data-centric research. We also come across general purpose open source workflow system include Taverna,Kepler,Pegasus and Triana for scientific application. In another chapter, I learn about new term ‘eScience’ where “IT meets scientists.”                    

                      The book is also about the next step in libraries: digital data libraries. It concerns the whole range of issues to do with curating, preserving and making accessible, now and in the future, scientific data.

                   I believe that we will soon see a time when data will live forever as archival media—just like paper-based storage— and be publicly accessible in the “cloud” to humans and machines. Only recently have we dared to consider such permanence for data, in the same way we think of  “stuff” held in our national libraries and museums! Such permanence still seems far-fetched until you realize that capturing data provenance, including individual researchers’ records and sometimes everything about the researchers themselves, is what libraries insist on and have always tried to do. The “cloud” of magnetic polarizations encoding data and documents in the digital library will become the modern equivalent of the miles of library shelves holding paper and embedded ink particles.

                        What is envisaged here is an interlinked network of the world’s scientific knowledge in one big database.

Socialbakers.com daily updated Facebook Statistics  shows India as third top most Facebook user country in the world. This statistics is obtained from over 200 different countries. Socialbakers.com also gives Users & Demography for the India, surprisingly FB user rate increasingly gradually. The total number of FB users in India is reaching 41402420 and grew by more than 11926680 in the last 6 months. User age distribution on Facebook in India shows that largest age group(49%) is currently 18 – 24 with total of 19 873 162 users, followed by the users in the age of 25 – 34.There are 73% male users and 27% female users in India, as given by  Male/Female User Ratio on Facebook in India.

This situation is before AAKASH, the cheapest tablet of the world. Last week 14 lakh AAKASH tablet is ordered online.

(Sandesh, 4th-January,2012)

Students are eagerly waiing for AAKASH and after AAKASH there will be definitely  sudden increase of FB user in India. Moreover Horizon Report-2011 and top technology in Education included Mobile in 2012. So are we ready for Mobile & Social Media Teaching & Learning?

Lets see how one can use facebook in Teaching & Learning

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media