Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Steve Ballmer has signed a memorandum with China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII) to help the Chinese government with the economic development in China’s rural areas.

"Microsoft will work closely with MII to reduce the digital divide and increase informatization in China’s rural communities." - Steve Ballmer

In this memorandum, Steve has promised that Microsoft will use technology to provide career training to thousands of educators in non-developed areas and will help the Chinese government to deliver distance education to hundreds thousands of students in the country sides. This echoes the recent polices on making rural development a priority.

Microsoft has also promised to train more than 70,000 software engineers through a combination of classroom instruction and distance learning. This deal seems to be a formal response to the high-profile April visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. The Chinese government has promised to further enforce all government organizations use copy-righted software and strengthening the regulations on software piracy. Not to mention, Lenovo (the Chinese company who acquired IBM personal computer division) just signed a $1.2 billion deal with Microsoft.

ETS launched the new version of TOEFL this summer and the first online TOEFL test took place at the end of September. So far the test has been taken place at the Thomson Prometric testing centres across the United States. According to ETS, the online testing environment will be launched in China by May, 2006. This means millions of Chinese scholars will be able to take the test online within China by then.

Web based TOEFL is the first Internet based English qualification and certification process. What's worth to mention is ETS has nicely incorporated the oral testing components into the online testing environment. This is aimed to increase the participants' communication and expression skills. ETS does not differentiate the oral tests from the rest of the exam. Instead, all four (reading, writ in, listening and speaking) topics are evenly balanced together. For example, participants are asked to read an essay and listen to a recording, then to answer the question via voice recording or writing an essay. A standard online TOEFL will take approximately 4 hours.

For the new TOEFL voice testing, instead of a face to face interview, ETS requires participants to record their vocal answers and the voice recordings will be scored by 3 to 6 qualified markers. I am curious to find out the recording technology they are using and how are the file compression effecting the quality of the recording thus may effect the participants' final TOEFL score.

Cyprien Lomas brought me this news. Blackboard and WebCT, providers of educational content management system have announced plans to merge today. Both software companies are well known in the global high education industry.

I have always thought that companies like WebCT and Blackboard are being "sandwiched" in today's market. Refer to my January's article: e-Learning: round up for 04, forecast for 05 [Part 2]

Both WebCT and Blackboard are medium sized e-Learning platform providers, above them, you have Enterprise software giants like Oracle/Peoplesoft, Microsoft, SAP are rapidly moving into this market. Underneath them, you have hundreds and thousands of new companies with cheaper products and fully integrated with all the new technologies like Wikis and Blogs. China alone, there are over 1000 new education technology companies have been established in 2005 alone. On top of all these competitions, you still have some great open source initiatives like Moodle and SAKAI…

Therefore, merging is a great way out for both companies and I sincerely hope their plan works out.

Google recently bid on providing 300 kbps wireless Internet connections over entire city of San Francisco. Of course this service will make profit off the online advertisements. Google will have to compete with more than a dozen ISPs to win the contract. Who just said Google is monopolizing the digital advertising industry? Oh yeah, think it was Bill.

Annunced today, the Norwegian company finally switched off the ads from one of the best browsers in the market - Opera is now a freeware. After ten years of existance, Opera has been developed into a solid web browser with high performance and unique features. We use Opera (the ad-version) to diagnose the network requests when we test the Flash templates in Pachyderm developments. Opera shows all of the internal and external requests and list the URLs according to the loading sequency. This makes it to be an ideal browser to test dynamic flash applications.

for 2.6 billion dollars!!! I can smell the blood from the telecommunication market. (Google talk, Ebay Skype, MSN, Yahoo, AOL...) What happens when IM and VOIP market collapse?

According to Xinhuanet, China will soon put into use electronic GPS maps in 142 cities in order to weave a network across the country within 10 years. This project is carried out by China's Planet Map Publishing House and Shenzhen Maxwell Technology Corp. Ltd. The overall investment is at more than 100 million yuan (15 million CAD dollars), hoping to make the system cover major Chinese cities, counties and towns. According to the paper,the two companies have so far developed electronic GPS maps covering 19 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. The GPS system will be ported to standard GPS devices and advanced mobile devices (cell phones, palmtop computers etc.) The return of this investment is also huge, experts are quoted as saying that the market volume of electronic GPS maps is huge, exceeding 10 billion yuan (over 1.5 billion CAD dollars). With the increasing demand of automobiles, a consummate GPS system will gain its market in no time.

Just learned from REUTERS, one Chinese astronomer-Zhao Haibin announced today, "Actually, our country has its own Deep Impact plans, it’s just we’ve never revealed them to the public before." Instead of research on how long has life existed on earth, China’s Deep Impact mission would be mainly aimed at protecting the planet from being hit by a comet or asteroid. According to Zhao, China would use a method called “pasting”, aims to soft-land a craft with an engine capable of pushing a comet or asteroid off a collision course. It looks that China is really getting ready to enter the Star War competition. China is the third nation to launch a man into space. According to the proposed timeline, China is ready to lift two astronauts into orbit within 3 months and eventually sending up a space station and even a manned mission to the moon.

Google map is no longer a new toy. Millions around the world have experimented and enjoyed the amazing interactive map engine. Recently, a programmer, Cristian Streng whom used the feature that Google may pin down a location via the Latitude and Longitude, created a small software that displays Google Maps and Keyhole satellite imagery on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones or other devices. The software is free, however, I imagine the amount of data need to be downloaded from the internet via WAP, which would show up on your monthly bill from your wireless service providers. Anyway, if you want to impress some one or have a really good deal in wireless internet browsing, download it here:
http://www.mgmaps.com/download.php

Google GPS

When my buddy Joel sent me the message this morning I thought he was joking. Wow, 2 long term competitors are going into a joint adventure? Over the last few years, Adobe faced serious challenges from Macromedia. As a relatively younger company, Macromedia has done an amazing job to take over the web design and online media development market. Adobe tried to produce their version of "Dreamweaver" (Go Alive) and "Flash" (Live Motion), but both attempts failed. Macromedia faced same challenge, however, their "Fireworks" did take over a large number of (Photoshop) users (myself as one of the converted Firework user). I personally believe this acquisition will make the product line much stronger but of cause the consumers will be lack of choice and the market will be dominated by a giant Blue Chip company. I am however, anxious to find out how will Flash change over the next period of time since many of my current projects are related to the technology, Learning Object Authoring Templates, Pachyderm and more...

Did you know you can get $500 US dollars for every bug you find on Firefox?! The Mozilla Foundation is committed to this promise so seriously that they made a public offer to a German bug hunter $2,500 US dollars for the five vulnerabilities he discovered. This once again reflect the bright future of the open source community. In contrast, the software giant-Microsoft only relies on a team of beta-testers who tests the programs without being rewarded at all other than a price reduction or bonuses for the program they are testing.

I truly believe the current product oriented business model will soon be replaced by service oriented business model in the software industry. This may also help the software providers to fight against the increasing piracy issues.

Google announces today that they will double the Gmail user space to 2GB in the next few weeks. According to New York Times, Gmail also plans to remove limits on message capacity as it competes for users with Yahoo Inc. This makes me think when will Microsoft eventually give up on making money out of their email services. The 3 giant online service providers (Yahoo! Google MSN) are really heating up the battle recently, like expected, 2005 is going to be an exciting year for the IT industry.

The two well known “non-crackable” hashing schemes have been successfully de-ciphered by a team of computer scientists in Shandong University, China. This surprised the cryptography community [and possibly the NSA] with an threat of implemeting a new scheme in the coming year. The SHA-1 function is widely used for digital signatures in such applications as e-mail and Web browsers. The SHA-1 function produces a hash 160 bits long. In theory, it should take 2^80 comparisons before two identical, random message hash results are found. That is several years' work for a huge number of cooperating PCs or one very powerful supercomputer. The recent SHA-1 break is a collision in which two random, non-meaningful messages were found to have the same hash in 2^69 comparisons, or about 2000 times faster than the brute-force method. That is still a very long job. Furthermore, the researchers applied some constraints on what the input message can look like in order to achieve this result. The National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] previously recommended migration to SHA-2 by 2010.

It's funny that this morning on the way to work I was thinking about how flickr should expand their service to a wider audience. I know such a service can be really profitable in Asia. Then here I read this from a Chinese news network (Xinhua)

BEIJING, Mar. 22 -- Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd. President Stewart Butterfield on Monday confirmed Yahoo has agreed to acquire its photo-sharing Web site Flickr.

Wonder what's Yahoo really up to, they have recently acquired multiple companies and rolloing out bundled services such as blogging, wiki and group organizers. Here's a quote that may answer the question:

Last week, Yahoo said its 360 service will combine instant messaging, photo storage and sharing, and Internet radio together. It is currently being tested by employees, and will be made available to Yahoo users by March 29.

So I guess Yahoo = search engine + game + instant messaging + blog + photo storage + internet radio + 300 other services!

Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Awards is a program showcase and recognizes the outstanding examples of innovative learning each year. This award accepts entries in three categories: Custom Content, Innovative Technology and Outstanding Case Studies. Custom Content category is defined as A browser-based course, delivered via the Internet or an intranet, created for a specific audience and not sold as an off-the-shelf product. Innovative Technology includes Innovative software or hardware to create content, manage, or deliver training. Outstanding Case Studies are written descriptions of effective learning programs and initiatives in user organizations. The deadline for submitting the proposal is April 21, 2005. However, it does cost $495 US for each entry submission. I personally don’t understand why the expensive submission fee, because I don’t believe any one in the public institutions can afford $650 CAD just for an award application. It almost seems that the award is built for the commercial products and private education institutions only…

There have been multiple times that Bill Gates mentioned in the public that one of his biggest regret which is also one of the Microsoft’s biggest misjudgment is to let Google took the lead in the search engine industry. Gates also warned Google to look out that Microsoft is not giving up on the big pie; they will upgrade their current search functions which are built in their operating system and browser to compete and gain back the lost market. However, internet rumors say one of their core OS engineer - Mark Lucovsky has switched over to Google. Although no one knows what kind position is he going to hold in Google. Mark worked for Microsoft more than 16 years, and he is one of the core developers in Windows NT technology (in charge of NT core, Win32 runtime components development). Mark has expressed his disagreement on how Microsoft Ships Software via his blog. However, the million dollar question is what does Google want from Mark? A Google OS? With Firefox, I guess Google is really ready to take on Microsoft’s next generation product – Longhorn.

To follow up with the US waste 21.6 billion dollars each year on spam emails posting, I came across this news today: Earthlink is ready to take actions fighting against spam email. EarthLink is going to sue multiple spam email service providers in US based on the law of federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They are currently collecting evidence on how spam emails causes damages to individual and commercial organizations. EarthLink also announced that they will collaborate with yahoo to develop a new way to filter spam emails using digital signatures...

If you have been using a pirate version of Microsoft Windows XP, and you are calling Microsoft and its loyal consumer’s suckers, then you will probably be the next sucker coming up. US Microsoft Corporation just announced plans in Beijing, China to stop the pirated copies to future retrieve updates and security patches from the Microsoft servers. This means the pirate copies will be vulnerable to the upcoming hack attack and viruses.

This will be the biggest corporate strike to the software piracy world. Only this time, Microsoft is relying on the hackers and virus creators to teach the pirate traders a lesson. According to the strategy of war, Microsoft has made a beautiful move: security attacks and piracy acts are the two biggest threats to this giant corporation, and now, Microsoft stepped back and let the two figure the thing out themselves. LOL, man, what a great move…

If you read chinese, go to this URL to read more:
http://www.tj.xinhuanet.com/2005-01/28/content_3649595.htm

What is Rapid e-Learning?

A new term was derived by the e-Learning industry in the year 2004: Rapid e-Learning. To make it simple, Rapid e-Learning contain 3 unique characteristics: 1) Content authoring should be simple and web based. 2) In order to minimize the time from content authoring to content publishing, the subject matter experts (SME) must take the primary role instead of the instructional designers. 3) Each learning/training organization must have a content sharing platform/database.

Here are some common factors of Rapid e-Learning:
- Common web authoring software like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and Flash are not being used. Instead, SME use web based authoring tools/platforms to generate digital contents. These contents will then be delivered to the learners as html, flash and other media formats via the web.
- SME needs minimum trainings from using these authoring tools/platforms.
- The learning contents are in smaller “chunks” usually, say, less than 30 minutes of studying time for each “chunk”. Then the course creator will “assemble” these “chunks” into a self contained courseware. These chunks can be viewed as learning objects.
- The learning materials can be delivered in synchronous, asynchronous and mixed mode learning environments.
- The contents must be learner centric instead of the “instructor feeding” style.
- Each content module must have a clear theme which allows the module to be presented as a stand alone learning object thus the production time for each of these objects can be “pumped out” on a efficient time basis.

Why Rapid e-Learning?

In the new millennium, production cycles in most of the industries are shortened. Enterprise and institutions are constantly facing changes in the surrounding environment such as new product demands (e.g. Oracle acquires PeopleSoft ), new government polices (War against Terror), new market competitions (China joins WTO), new diseases (SARS) new technologies (Blog) etc. The entire chain of learning is reacting to these changes in a faster and faster pace. e-Learning in general is playing an more and more important role in our society. In order to deliver the most accurate, the most up-to-date, the most high quality knowledge to the learners, us educators must restructure the traditional ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation) model, and come up with a new solution. Thus Rapid e-Learning was born. Where do we go from here depends on how our learners respond to the change of the world.