Thanks for sharing Jon, and that article is mind blowing and full of reality. What we are facing today is control on human thought, rather than giving everyone ability to learn in enjoyable, flexible and creative manner. In general sense, what students are racing for is to get better grades at the end of course and very few actually taking just for the sack of actual learning, is that pressure from society, your family, your co-worker and from within.

I am big fan of Open Learning Concept where there is no boundary, no restriction and at least no money involve. Anyone can share and learn from each other by collaborating.

We should consider our self as students for life, like a famous saying "Learn like you never going to die, and live like you will die tomorrow" apologies if did not say it right.

Thanks again 

At first glance, I thought to myself, "well why don't we want to leverage personalized learning?!?" Many a person has said that they are a [visual/audio/independent study] type of learning, or "I learn better when [blank condition]". 

But after reading the referenced article, I can see what was meant - it's not what I thought at all. I don't know whether the "each person has their own learning style" stuff is myth or not, but I can see the controversy. It sounds like people are capitalizing on these 'myths' - true or not.

These notions seem to be conventional wisdom, so leave it to the free market to capitalize on parents who want to believe that their *ahem* snowflake is different from every other snowflake. It seems that rather than teachers adjusting to their students, or tweaking a class or grouping of students, it makes the education system formulaic. This idea of personalized learning seems really dangerous - that it allows a computer formula to gradually adjust test (task) difficulty until individual students succeed. Sometimes we need to push people, we need to let them fail and put themselves back together. Learning can be acheived through pressure and adversity if used correctly.

Javascript unlocked the doors of closed web technologies, once again.

Having setup a few Openfire servers (including at home) I've been watching WebRTC development and from the pletora of projects Jitsi has emerged as the leader.

Just like Firefox Hello these projects aren't only handy tools but a great source of learning and while I don't mind Skype or Google Hangouts, knowing that I have control over my data is a huge bonus.

Thanks for sharing Jon, you can't beat the price but are you getting enough in return. As you mention it is good for Indian market not so much for us because we are spoil with the latest and the greatest and want to get as much as from the money we spend.

On the other hand this product has a great potential for developing countries like India where people can't afford to buy basic food and can't think about this luxury.

Govt need to step in and help spread this among schools all over the country so future of the country can achieve their real potential.

Just my two cents :-)

Shafiq 

Indeed, Shafiq, for a few more dollars we can get things that actually work properly.

From a different perspective, though, and bringing it home to AU, the average saving on e-textbooks compared with paper ones is around $37, I think. There has been a bit of resistance to our move at AU to e-textbooks, not all well-informed (there are big learning advantages to e-books as long as they are not used on traditional PCs and not locked in by unreasonable publisher-set conditions) but some of the criticism is well-justified, and most of it relates to inadequate technologies for reading. For an extra $6 on top of our current spend, we could give everyone a device that not only adequately replaces the paper book (and improves it in many ways) but also gives access to most of the online teaching tools we offer and much much more. For courses with two textbooks or for students taking two or more courses, we could give away these devices, greatly improve the learning experience for students, and still save money. The price therefore might make this a pretty disruptive technology. I want to try this out: it might not be adequate and maybe we need to wait a little longer for the right technology to arrive, but it's worth doing the research!

Jon for some reason I thought that you lived in the UK.  That looks like a happy dog.  My cat was no enthusiastic about the snow ;-)

Happy dog!

Hope that you been well Dr. Dron. :)

Cheers,

Simon

- Simon Chandler

Thanks! Yes, one happy dog. And indeed, Apostolos, my cat is not at all keen on the snow either. Although, of course, when it is freshly fallen she will yell and shout until she is allowed out in order to confirm that she still does not like it. She prefers to warm her paws on my skin after this experiment  but, failing that, any formerly clean rug will do.