State of Online Feed Readers

Great post over on TechCrunch about the features and state of online RSS feed readers, includes the following chart:

Beyond eLearning = eLearning 2.0?

In the recent Learning Circuits, Marc Rosenberg had a good article on What Lies Beyond e-Learning?

Interestingly, it doesn't include any of his pictures. He doesn't specifically mention eLearning 2.0, but it sounds a lot like it. You can see pictures that go with the story and a discussion of eLearning 2.0 vs. his work in my post:

eLearning Technology: Rosenberg's Beyond eLearning - Is that eLearning 2.0?

Virtual Classroom Tools Survey

Learning Circuits just published the results of their survey around Virtual Classroom tools. There are a couple of interesting charts.

Challenges:

* Technical still at top - but going down
* Lack of engagement and lack of interaction are rising fast

Interestingly, "unskilled facilitators" is going down as a challenge, but given the lack of engagement and lack of interaction going up, I'm not so sure. That's normally what I find to be the biggest challenge.

Top Tools:

* WebEx and LiveMeeting top the list and are going up in market share
* Centra and Interwise appear to be losing marketshare

Interestingly, there was no "other" category. It seems that there are lots of solutions in the market that aim to be lower cost. I would be surprised if there aren't a lot of entrants based on open-source, low-cost solutions offering services over the next two years. TeamSpeak is a feely available audio conferencing system. Good web conferencing can't be far behind. Putting a low-cost service together based on these two would be easy.

FeedYes - Learning Circuits Feed Works Like a Charm

After creating feeds for a couple of the Magazines that don't have RSS and writing about it in my post: eLearning Technology: RSS Feeds from Static Magazines, I became somewhat worried that they weren't working. Well this morning, I got all the recent LearningCircuits articles delivered via my FeedYes feed. Go to the above article if you want to subscribe to that feed.

Typepad Widgets - A Sign of Things to Come in eLearning Authoring / Developement

As I've talked about several times (eLearning Technology: Authoring in eLearning 2.0 / Add-ins & Mash-ups, eLearning Technology: Promise of Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 - Comparison to Macros, IDEs, and Visual Basic) ...

One of the most intriguing aspects of Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 is the ability to compose together separate services to create something new and different.

The "Authoring Tool of the Future" and "LMS of the Future" will be along these same lines where you will be able to compose together point solutions.

As a great example of how this is happening, take a look at Typepad's recent announcement:

TypePad Widgets -

A widget is a little piece of content or functionality provided by a third party
that you can place in the siderail of your TypePad blog. Technically, it's just
a snippet of HTML and/or JavaScript that you can manage like any other sidebar
content module on your blog.

There's a good Analysis on TechCrunch.

del.icio.us Tools List

Even though I've primarily switched to Yahoo MyWeb (read eLearning Technology: Yahoo MyWeb better than del.icio.us, rollyo, et.al. for Personal / Group Learning), here's a great list of:

del.icio.us tools

I would definitely recommend looking at:

http://similicio.us/ - finds similar sites based on common tags

that I talk about in my article: eLearning Technology: Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools to Make Reading & Research More Effective

http://thumblicio.us/index.php?tag=eLearning - Browsing based on screen shots. It's surprising how much more effective it is to see a preview of the content.

http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls & http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls- allows you to put your tags in your blog or site

The list is so long, that it's hard to know which ones really are that useful. If you are using other tools, definitely drop me a comment.

Federal Student Aid for Online Only Degrees

I saw this on Educational Technology. Interesting...

Teaching and Learning Online - Education World

Congress recently passed a bill that ended the requirement that colleges deliver
at least half their courses on campus (as opposed to online) in order for their
students to qualify for federal student aid. Surely, that change is a sign that
online learning finally has achieved a certain degree of legitimacy -- at least
among lawmakers.