Have you met TED yet?

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) began as a conference in 1984 to bring together from these three worlds. It has expanded to encompass the brightest minds in science, business, and the arts. From the yearly conference in Long Beach, TEDtalks emerged, free video of each of the TED conference lectures available at www.ted.com. According to the website, "We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other."

There are currently over 500 talks available, covering a wide range of topics and each around 20 minutes or less. These videos were released under a Creative Commons license, making them perfect for use in the classroom or online. The website allows you to search through the videos based on subject or theme. Each video is closed captioned and many are translated into multiple languages.

Be careful... once you start looking through TEDtalks, you may find you can't stop! Here are a few of our favorites:

Pattie Mayes demos the "SixthSense"
Mike Rowe celebrates Dirty Jobs
Jane Chen: A warm embrace that saves lives

Attentionomics

It's a fact: people have a finite attention span. Your students have a finite attention span. Are your PowerPoint presentations helping student grasp the course content? A traditional bullet-point layout may not be the best way to go.

Chris Atherton, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Central Lancashire at Preston in the UK, developed this PowerPoint to demonstrate a different and possibly more effective way of presenting information. This type of presentation would work especially well in distance courses.

Chris Atherton at TCUK09

View more presentations from Chris Atherton.

For more information, check out Chris Atherton's blog, finiteattentionspan.wordpress.com.

Elearning and the iPad

Last week, Apple launched its long awaited iPad.

Here is a link to its capabilities and here is a link to its implications for eLearning.

While the first version of the iPad certainly has some eLearning limitations, I believe that future versions will have a significant influence on learning, especially in higher education.