In Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf deliberated and wrestled long and hard to open the doors to the mines of Moria. In the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, the mouth of the cave was opened by uttering the phrase ifta? ya simsim - 'Open Sesame'. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ healed a deaf girl by uttering the word 'Ephratha' - meaning 'be opened'. All through our history and popular culture we hear stories about difficult problems or barriers being solved or overcome. There are many, many problems in the world, some of which are impossible to solve. Knowledge is like love. MORE >>

This morning I stumbled upon an excellent report ‘ Learning & Education in the Networked Society ’ on the Thinking Ahead section of Ericsson’s website. There’s an accompanying 20 min video titled ‘The Future of Learning’; I’ve linked to that below, take a look. particularly liked some of the thoughts expressed in the video which I reproduce below (may not be the exact words though). They are worth pondering over. Origins of education system lie in the military and industrial revolution, which wanted ‘identical people’ and set out to produce those ” – Sugata Mitra. MORE >>

by Jonathan Shoaf. Adobe Connect is one of the leading virtual classroom products on the market. It has this reputation because it is user friendly, feature rich, reliable, and provides an identical experience for all users on all systems that support Adobe Flash. Adobe Connect competes in both the web conferencing and education markets. There are several reasons it competes well when it comes to corporate learning. First, it is easy for learners to participate. All they need is a web-browser that supports Flash. There is no requirement to get IT involved. Lectures and Webinars. MORE >>

Working on evaluation of learning and development, one of the things that amazes me is how little known, and how little used, is the Success Case Method. It shouldn’t really amaze me that much, as I only discovered it myself after writing my last book, 101 Learning and Development Tools , which means it doesn’t feature in the book, despite 21 of the tools being about evaluation. More’s the pity, as it’s an excellent tool. should clarify that the method is little known or used in the UK , as it is quite commonplace in the USA, and has been implemented by many Fortune 100 companies. MORE >>

Predicting what topics will trend on Twitter — from MIT. Excerpt: At the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks at MIT in November, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student, Stanislav Nikolov, will present a new algorithm that can, with 95 percent accuracy, predict which topics will trend an average of an hour and a half before Twitter’s algorithm puts them on the list — and sometimes as much as four or five hours before. What distinguishes it is that it’s nonparametric, meaning that it makes no assumptions about the shape of patterns. MORE >>