Recently in E-Learning Category

Today I stumbled over the report from Techcrunch and had a quick look on the new search engines mentioned there.

Whereas Bing is running a big ad-campaign to promote itself, Wolframalpha is just there and provides a nice knowledge database.

I think both portals are well done, but have a slightly different focus. There is just so much rumor going on about Bing, that Wolframalpha can profit form the press coverage (as I do promote both sites here as well).

Francis Pisani has alread written on his blog about ''The Brain, respectively he has done an interview with Hugh Harlan, the founder of the company behind the software. And as it seems it Mr. Pisani a great fan of this tool. I had the honor of having a few lectures from him at the University of St. Gallen. One task we students had to fulfill, was to provide discussion material and maybe some answers to a question with the software. And so did I use The Brain. You can see on the screenshot of how my tiny brain looked after a week.

As I have tried, I would say extensively, the software I can tell you some things about it.

There have been recently a few posts about new tools for learning online, with videos or just with some books. As it seems, the learning goes Open-Source and I have to say that I really appreciate this.

The most recent example of E-Learning is Academic Earth. An initiative coming from the United States as many innovative things come from there. The site is reachable under Academicearth.org. The student or interested person will find there whole lectures and courses on video in good quality, as the example down below shows. There must have been also some effort to cut all these videos, in a way, that the slideshows of the lecturer are shown in the right moment.

What I think is really remarkable about Academic Earth, is the fact that the founders Richard Ludlow (graduated at Yale) and Chris Bruner (graduated at Stanford) have built in from the beginning the networking tools a modern student uses today. You can embed the videos easily (as you see above), can share them on different platforms such as Facebook, Del.icio.us... There are many things more, like downloading a movie, mail a link, rate it and so on. This is really something great.