Like Apple, Scribd will also abandon use of flash for document publishing. Here is a link introducing Scribd in html5

Here is an article about UC Davis' decision to stop using Gmail.

Microsoft just launched docs.com, a site which one can discover, create, and share Microsoft Office documents with Facebook friends. Another interesting social project launched is Spindex. It shows an aggregated stream of updates from Facebook, Twitter, and Bing and gives personalized recommendations and search engine on the basis of that. These two projects takes social networking a step further. We can envision implementation of similar functionality in teaching and learning network in which students could get relevant status updates from different networks at single place.

We recently got the news that "Pundit: Intelligent Recommender of Courses" was accepted for a poster presentation in EDM 2010 conference. Here is list of all accepted papers and posters. Special thanks to Hui Soo and Faisal for continuous help and support.

While thinking about the design of the Teaching and Learning Network, I came across this article. Even though it is somewhat old, it provides an interesting aspect of social networks such as collaboration, optimum production, innovative uses, creativity and networking in the context of education. Following are excerpts from the article -

Most conventional educational environments are "Objectivist" in nature and highly structured in terms of students progress and choice. Social networking essentially requires a less controlled, user-generated environment, which challenges conventional views of the effective "management" of teaching and learning. Therefore, can social networking both as an instructional concept and user skill be integrated into the conventional approaches to teaching and learning? Do the skills developed within a social networking environment have value in the more conventional environments of learning?

A short movie inspired on numbers, geometry and nature -

Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

On March 1st, Holi - A festival of colors was celebrated in India. Here is a glimpse of it.

I've always thought of a device which could translate different languages in real time. Here is an attempt from Microsoft Research to accomplish exactly that. It's a very difficult problem because it consists of a mixture of problems, speech to text -> language translation -> text to speech, that too in REAL TIME.

Here are some of the important questions asked frequently about recommendation systems -

1. How much data do I need?
2. How good are the recommendations?
3. What is the best way to convince users about the recommendations?

This blog gives short answers to these questions.

I think answering these questions are very important for the development of future versions of Pundit (course recommendation) and Journal Article Recommendation System (JARS).

Yes. According to this article.