615 - Outsourcing Friends, Slipper Learning, Patent on Whiteboard Writing
April 1, 2010 Learning TRENDS by Elliott Masie - April 1, 2010.
#615 - Updates on Learning, Business & Technology.
54,909 Readers - http://www.masie.com - The MASIE Center.
1. Friends-R-Us: Outsourcing Friends and Social Media.
2. Constriction Constricts Learning.
3. Warning: Another Patent Claim on Classroom Teaching.
1. Friends-R-Us: Outsourcing Friends and Social Media: As professionals and large organizations consider the appropriate use of social media, a new industry has started to provide outsourced assistance. We were recently contacted by the CEO of an about to be launched company, “Friends-R-Us”.
They will offer several key services:
* Managing Your Facebook or LinkedIn Account: For busy professionals, they will go in every day and provide interesting stories, updates and make up engaging tidbits to provide you with a great presence online. They will also accept your friends and more. For extra fees, they will Twitter on your behalf every day, hour or with the Gold Plan, every 15 minutes.
* Leasing “Friends”: Some senior executives are quite worried that they won’t have enough friends showing on their accounts or following them on Twitter. This group will lease you “Friends” in blocks of 50. You can define the demographics or region of these friends.
The CEO of Friends-R-Us was quite interested in expanding their services to support Social Learning and has considered starting a division to outsource learner’s collaborative assignments in online education processes.
2. Constriction Constricts Learning: The MASIE Center is always on the look-out for interesting and divergent research on learning and cognitive science. Researchers working in Alaska have found an unexpected relationship between footwear and short term memory. Based on a study of 580 learners, those wearing tighter or uncomfortable shoes had a much lower memory retention than those wearing older and more comfortable shoes. The highest performance came from learners wearing soft moccasins. Similar results were found for both classroom and on-line learning. The researchers speculated that the ability to wiggle toes during learning difficult new concepts of procedures was related to cognitive retention. Follow-up studies are underway now to monitor learners toes real-time during long duration classes. We did an informal LAB study here in Saratoga and I must report that my own mastery of JavaScript went way up as I was wearing my soft moccasins and dropped off when I wore my tuxedo shoes from my wedding.
Corporations may need to rethink their foot dress code if these results are validated in future studies.
3. Warning: Another Patent Claim on Classroom Teaching. There are a number of “highly questionable” patent claims being made in lawsuits by groups these days. Yesterday, another suit was filed by a company called YouLearn! They were issued a patent in 1991 that claimed they invented writing on whiteboards and flipcharts in a left to right, horizontal manner. These “business process” patents are granted if an applicant can claim to have invented something unique without any disputes of prior art. Since corporate trainers are doing a lot of writing in this manner, we would advise it would be safer to start to write in either an upward or downward slant. Our legal team does not think that Hebrew writing that is right to left is covered by the patent. But, this is an example of the risk of these poorly reviewed patents. You can, of course, license their technique of horizontal left to write writing for only $12 per one-day class. Many companies are thinking of settling to avoid the cost of litigation.
Once a year, we celebrate April Fools Day here in the United States with a few jokes and satire. May your April 1st be a bit lighter. If you want to add your own item to this list, send me an email to emasie@masie.com
Here is the link from last year’s April Fools Day:
Yours in learning,
Elliott Masie
email: emasie@masie.com
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