Focal an Lae - Irish Word a Day

We've launched our
Irish Word a Day service over at www.talkirish.com. We've also launched some new site features. Check out the Audio and Flashcard gallery where you can download any of the audio or flashcards for use on your pc/iPod/phone.

You can sign up to receive the service by email, or you can just visit the site every day to check out the new word.

Words so far include droim, seangán, bolg and scamall...want to know what they mean and learn how to pronounce them? Visit www.talkirish.com.

We're in the final stages of beta testing our games, dictionary and quizzes. They'll be released in coming weeks.

Is Surfing the Internet Changing Your Brain?

Well yes. Of course it is. Working in a repetitive factory job or driving a taxi around London will change your brain. But it's still interesting to read this news story on how the the Internet is not just changing the way people live - it's also changing the way our brains work. If you search the Internet or text message, you're making your brain better at filtering information and making snap decisions.

Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California, argues that this is an evolutionary change. As with all evolutionary changes, there are winners and losers - the winners in the digital evolution will be those who are tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.

So the Geeks Shall Inherit The Earth? It's not as simple as that. Technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity. But it also allows people to isolate themselves and 'live' online. But succeeding in the new 'digital' era will require a mix of traditional and technological social skills.

I know many people who can communicate and connect effectively through blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook, myspace, podcasting etc etc etc. But not all these people can connect effectively in real life. Then there are those who are brilliant at traditional social skills. But can barely type an email or reply to a text.

I learned my traditional social skills in a variety of sometimes challenging situations - by having to attend funerals and weddings, by participating in cultural gatherings such as birthday parties, or through institutions like school and college. Mostly I was guided (or coerced) through these situations by an adult who taught me how to socialise. But I've been learning my technological social skills by trial and error.

Gary Small's conclusion that tomorrow's winners need to be comfortable in two worlds is hardly mind bending. But I like to think that those of us who straddle two worlds, who know how to sit on a bus with a complete stranger and talk about the weather for an hour as well as twitter our way through the US election, maybe we've got a headstart in this race :)

Irish Web Award Winner

Congratulations to Fís Book Club, who won the Best Education Website at the Irish Web Awards. Fís (Irish for both Video and Vision) is a great little site for teachers and pupils in Irish schools who can use it to upload video reviews of the books they love. Users can browse all the video reviews to see if they can find a great new book to read. Congrats again!

Open Source for Schools

http://www.opensourceschools.org.uk/ is a new site that aims to promote, review and document usage of open source software and tools in UK schools, although I imagine they're happy to include Irish schools.

OSS offers a space where schools can share their experiences of open source software, with the aim of increasing confidence and knowledge levels - they hope thes factors will drive uptake.

Open Source For Schools is just in beta, so they're happy to listen to all your feedback and will welcome and support new members.

They're seeking Case Studies from schools using open source, so if you're in this space, share your knowledge.

I don't know if the UK or the Irish governments have strategies on driving the uptake of OS software in schools...seems like something that might just have got missed out...the government pushes the use of computers in school, and loads classrooms with computers, but is there a strategy on what software and tools are useful?

Twitter Ye Not...100 e-learning tweets

Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies recently published a list of 100+ (e-)learning professionals who twitter. My twitter feed was on the list. This explained to me why I have suddenly been getting followed by all sorts of interesting e-learning heads from all different parts of the world.

The problem? My tweets were personal tweets, designed to feed into my personal blog. I've been intending to set up an e-learning twitter - two in fact. One for this blog, and a content-based feed for my Irish language site. I'd started twittering for my personal blog just to get a feel for how it worked, before doing it 'professionally'.

Tony Karrer has since reviewed and slammed the tweets from Jane's list as being 'banter' and not something he'd subscribe to. And underneath there are a lot of comments both in favour of Tony's opinion, and against. I don't really get the need for people to decide whether or not e-learning twitterers are good or bad, whether Jane's list is useful or not. Try twitter. Like pistachio ice-cream, you can take it or leave it.

Personally, I'm a twitter convert. I love the way I can connect to people I don't know but have heard of, and learn about their work flow, what's interesting them, and get tidbits about their life. It helps me talk to them when I meet them face-to-face, or to reach out to them on email.

And I think twitter can really add something to my blog. I'm overwhelmed by the sites and tools I've discovered that I want to blog about. My backblog of really great sites I've been asked to review is weighing me down. So I want to use twitter to alert people to those great little tools or sites that I want to blog about, but either won't find the time, or don't need to write a long post about.

I don't have a problem with anyone following the saga of my broken gas boiler as I twitter as michellegallen. But if you'd like to get the fewer and more relevant e-learning tweets, try following searchfindlearn at Twitter.

10 scientifically-proven facts about learning

Donald Clark has written a nice piece for Line entitled '10 facts about learning that are scientifically proven and significant for training'.

There's nothing terribly new in the article, but it's great to read and remind yourself of these key factors in learning. I've printed the list and pinned it up to focus me when I'm planning work. Synopsis below, but I think you should go read the article - it's short and snappy.

* Spaced Practice - we learn through practice, little and often
* Cognitive overload - too much, too long!
* Chunking Information - less is more
* Order - learn stuff in a useful order
* Episodic and semantic memory - teach for the types of memory we use
* Psychological attention - hello? anyone out there?
* Context - learn on the job/task
* Learn by Doing
* Understand peer groups - teachers and parents don't matter. Peer groups do.
* Murder the myths - bye bye to learning styles, left-right brain, NLP etc etc

Line have also published a series of white papers - I've not read through all these, but they look useful:

Rapid development of e-learning - risks and opportunities
Making e-learning a viable business tool
Understanding the culture of e-learning
Podcasts and learning
Beyond blended instruction
Web 2.0 and learning

Thanks to Deborah Limb of Learning Pool for the link!

Shortlisted for Best Education Website - Irish Web Awards

Liquid e-Learning has been shortlisted for an Irish Web Award - Best Education Website. Yay :)

busuu.com - another social network for language learners

busuu.com is yet another social network for language learners. It's a start-up based in Madrid and is still in beta. Users can access all content for free at the moment, but there's no indication of how much it might cost when it leaves beta behind.

So what's on offer? Well, busuu.com offers the usual big-hitters: English, Spanish, German, and French.

I have to admit that one of the reasons I'm reviewing this site ahead of so many others in my 'backblog' is because busuu.com is soooooo pretty. It captivated me visually. I wanted to get in and learn more about the site. And busuu.com made that easy.

It's simple to sign up. You're not browbeaten into giving away too much information - just enough to be useful.

Once you're in you've got four main tabs to navigate with:

- home
- friends
- inbox
- busuutalk

The friends, inbox and busuutalk tabs are self explanatory.

On the homepage you can see your friends, online users, recommended units, 'winners' and are prompted to take part in activities. Or you can click a tree (oh go see...it's pretty) to access the 'language garden' of your target language.

Language Garden
The busuu.com language garden lets you add units to your learning journey. You can study up to 5 units at a time. The units are pretty standard e-learning with a five step process to learning:

1 Vocabulary
Here you learn key vocabulary by watching a slideshow with audio and text. Hardly high-tech, but OK.

2 Dialog
Here you listen to an audio file with a transcript of your target language.

Alongside this, you can see and listen to an English translation.

After this, you test your knowledge with three multiple choice questions.

3 Writing
Here you can write a piece of text and submit it for peer review. Text entries are reviewed and rated.

4 Speak
In this section, you can speak to native and fluent speakers. I'm antisocial, so I only checked the feature out for how it looks - I didn't attempt to speak to anyone! Luckily, just looking completed this section for me, so I didn't have to do anything ;)

5 Test
Here's where you'll get a multiple choice picture and sound file quiz - with some very strange audio feedback in the form of cheerful or very ominous piano notes!

THE END
After you've completed a whole unit, it disappears from your learning garden and you can add another unit.

busuu.com - so what works and what doesn't?

The e-learning is not very high-tech. The slideshow method of learning a word and image by viewing and listening to about 20 words at a time doesn't really work for me. Our working memory can grasp about 7 items at a time. I'm not sure how a complete beginner could remember so many words all at one go.

Another problem with this type of picture, text and audio-based learning is that it's hard to tell what some of the images are. I ended up getting answers wrong in the test section just because I couldn't remember which image meant what. You end up trying to associate the images and audio file as much as you try to learn the meaning. It's hard to get around this.

Like a lot of the other sites I've explored busuu.com doesn't really let you practice half enough. It's a quick introduction to language but I don't know that you get to do enough for the new knowledge to be retained.

It doesn't offer one-to-one lessons with qualified teachers.

Verdict?
There's nothing very new here. And there's a lot of competition in this space now. But there's nothing terribly wrong with what's on offer at busuu.com. The site is pretty. It provides decent e-learning. It doesn't force the learner into linear learning, which is great - it's really good to be able to select bite-sized chunks of learning. It seems like a friendly site...a place you could make friends. However, I see busuu.com very much as a support to classroom-based learning. It seemed like a good way to revise or refresh knowledge, to test where you are.

Why are they called Busuu?
Apparently Busuu is a language spoken in Cameroon. A study conducted in the 80s showed that only eight people still spoke this language.

Irish Web Awards Nomination

Liquid e-Learning has been longlisted for two Irish Web Awards - best education website and best technology website. I'm pretty awed to be longlisted once, never mind twice. I've not been blogging much for the past month because I've been ill (I really want to blog illness and e-learning - it's amazing what you can learn about the human body online). But wow. Double longlisting!

You can check out the other longlisted sites here and if you fancy a good night's craic, you can book your ticket to the awards ceremony on 11 October in Dublin here.

Can Apture make Educational Blogging Better?

Apture provides a rich communication platform that allows publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat pages of text into multimedia experiences. I'm just a new user, so my review is going to focus on what they say, and what I've experienced so far.

You must sign up for apture, and then insert a line of code into your blog/website. Apture then detects you're using it, and opens a small editing toolbar, which allows you to highlight words in your content, and to search for related content.

Once you find the content, you can link to it. When a user visits your site, any linked content can be opened in a small window that you can reposition anywhere on your browser. Try it.

Apture Search and Content Selection
I've not used Apture for long - this post is an experiment in using it. But one concern I have is in how Apture searches for and suggests content for embedding. The default search provides content in these categories:

- video
- images
- reference
- News
- Maps
- Music
- Documents
- web pages

Good, useful categories. But the content it suggests within these is pulled from specific sites - so for images, you get flickr, yahoo image search and wikipedia (could they not get a deal with google images?). For reference they use
wikipedia, crunchbase, imdb and amazon. For news it's the Washington Post, BBC and BBC archive. I'm not sure how they made their selections, but I'd be concerned about a narrow search that might return narrow results.

Using Apture
As far as I can see, Apture lets you add all this rich media after you've posted your blog. I like this. Often I publish a blog a couple of times because even if I preview it, I don't get it quite right until its live. And with Apture, I can add content and tweak what appears. I like that approach.

Apture and E-learning
Apture makes it easy to prettify and enrich your blog posts. But a really interesting feature is apture's wiki mode. You can set this so that anyone with an apture account can come in and edit your content. I'd love to see how a group of students might enrich a basic text article - and what they'd learn in the process of doing so. The student as author is so much more engaged than the student as consumer.

Consuming Aptured Content
I've not been on very many sites that use Apture...so I'm testing it here and on my personal blog. It may happen that Apture is just plain annoying, rather than useful. Or it may happen that it is useful to blog readers, and keeps people on my site for longer (which would be of benefit if I made any money through that!).

Making Money with Apture
Apture claims that publishers can 'monetise' content that otherwise lies dormant but I couldn't quite figure out how. Apture themselves seem to be trying to make money through an ad system. Again, not sure how it works. And it doesn't seem aimed at bloggers. One of the reasons I've steered clear of ads on this site is that I would prefer control over the ads that appear. I want to know that the products or services that appear on this blog are good. However, I often recommend books, services and products to people. If Apture had a means for me to embed a link to the point of purchase, then perhaps I could earn a few cents from the recommendations I make. That would be nice. Sigh.