Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Remember Happy Days? The Fonz?  Need to learn Anatomy of the Heart? No? I didn’t either but thoroughly enjoyed this.

The Fonz and Anatomy of the Heart 101

Great spot by @amcunningham and @BonnyCastle

Meet Sarah, an avatar that learns from you, a virtual assistant using artificial intelligence, or as she says:

“I’ve a human personality, trained to think through complex tasks and my advanced brain learns and adapts from experience, as I chat to a person I build their profile, answering questions while responding to each person individually.

This is a revolution in how people interact with technology and business interacts with customers”

MyCybertwin was founded by John Zakos and Liesl Capper in 2005.  Their mission:

to give every person and every company the ability to easily create an advanced artificial intelligence, which knows what they know, and functions on their behalf.

We want CyberTwin AI’s to live all over the web, making things easier for people, by talking to others and doing things for their owners. We want CyberTwins to breathe life into the relationship humans have with machines, and inside technology-mediated virtual worlds and mirror worlds.

Applications of Cybertwin in health?

Liesl will also be talking about cybertwin and applications in aged care at the Information Technology in Aged Care ITAC conference in Melbourne in July. An avatar could be put to use answering questions that carers have about putting someone into an aged care facility.

The potential is enormous and if you’ve got any questions, just ask Sarah CyberTwin.  It’s a whole new world …..

Changes to the way content is sourced and paid for has led me to search for new startups and business models, some of which I will list over the next few weeks.

Connexions

Connexions allows educational materials to be organized in small modules that can that can be be linked and arranged in different ways according to how the user wants to learn.  They currently have over 9000 modules woven into almost 500 collections. All content is free to use under the Creative Commons ‘attribution’ license.

Collaboration is encouraged – creators of new content are listed as authors, who can assign others to help maintain the content, work groups can be created to look over each others content, changes can be suggested.  If a user wants to take the content in a different direction they can change the original work and derive a new module (while still recognizing the work of the orginal author).
Their business model:  Connexions is supported by money from foundations, people, and companies and is a registered trademark of Rice University – it’s a great way to advertise your University and encourage students to attend your courses.

Maketextbooksaffordable

A site for open-access textbooks — free online or printed for a low cost. The content of open textbooks is licensed to allow anyone to use, download, customize, or print.  The site is run by a coalition of students who are campaigning for free online textbooks – they declare their intent to:

•    Seek and consider open textbooks and other open educational resources when choosing course materials.
•    Give preference to a low or no cost educational resource such as an open textbook over an expensive, commercial textbook if it best fits the needs of a class.
•    Encourage institutions to develop support for the use of open textbooks and other open educational resources.

Free.Ed Net

Free.Ed.Net has been providing free courses and education resources since 1997 and have now ventured into the learning world of Second Life.  The courses cover vocational and academic subjects which students can take at their own pace and use it to supplement their other learning. The site is developed and maintained by David L Heiseman, Sweethaven Publishing Services and makes money from ads and donations.

FlatWorldKnowledge

What is impressive here is that learning really is in the context of social learning.  Their books are also free online, users can buy audio books, chapters, self-print options all for under $30. Books are open for instructors to modify for their own courses, and authors are paid royalties from the money earned.  Books become the hub of a social learning network where students learn from the book and each other. Students can earn money if their study aids are good by uploading them into the ‘market place’ and naming their price per download.  FlatWorld books has just received funding of USD 8M

Nixty

Nixty are relatively new players but their site looks great.  They are creating a global learning environment, providing educators and colleges free tools and students teaching themselves with open free education in a community.

In considering strategies and moves to social learning for want of a better way of saying it, I have become evangelistic in my presentations… “look at what you can learn, see, do, post, share, here, there…”

and then I slow down and hope I can take my audience with me, that they will get to touch the fluidly defined online space I can See. That I’m Part Of.

Enthused, after my second presentation on where we can take learning and content –the response…:

“some of your plans are quite developed” (why thank you)

“some are highly speculative — social networking delivery” (“Not So” I politely rage). This tells me the messenger (me) is not being clear in her message.

The conversation descends into one revolving around online content: what to create, how, writing style, text design, end of chapter questions v testing… which misses the point completely.

Back to the drawing board, and Twitter.

Blog design at the time of writing: blue, three column, CognoBlue theme

It’s not. I’ve spent weeks agonising over what to blog about, what the focus is, and have managed to so thoroughly tie myself up in knots that nothing has been written.
So I’ve decided. I’m blogging about what I’m learning and how to get there. This way no-one expects pearls of wisdom to leap from the pages, or rather I don’t expect that of myself.
I work in publishing, educational and health publishing and this is my personal blog about what I’m learning.
First step – wordpress blog. Well, I’ve started herewith. Next Pictures, I need more pictures, and things down the side, and a banner picture, and a proper blog title….
Thanks to all who have helped so far (don’t go anywhere):
@sandnsurf am getting there… @marksmithers – online helpdesk @neerav – costing a fortune in pizzas and @BitetheDust for saying the blog title was pants (what was wrong with Dreamingspires on Line?)

Blog design at time of writing: blue, three column, Garland theme