Educator.com: Equalizing education

This should particularly appeal to students who want to get up to speed in learning online with highly qualified professors.

Educator.com styles itself as a pioneering E-Learning startup looking to equalize education. Its Twitter profile says it specializes in Algebra, Biology, Calculus, Chemistry, Java, Statistics.

I did a quick look at its main website and for Mathematics alone, it currently has 34 course offerings in Mathematics.

The Educator.com experience seems designed to recreate the live tutoring experience on to the internet. For example, a middle interface video lets the readers know exactly what's being explained while keeping an eye on the lecturer. If users need help in any of the scholastic subjects they offer, Educator.com sounds like a blessing to them. The site is currently still in expanding mode as the people behind it are getting more professors to fill in the subject such as physics, trigonometry, and more advanced topics like calculus.

Educator thus looks like it should be a must for those looking for the best scholastic content on the Web.

Here are a couple of samples:

First up, learn chemistry will take you to Advanced Placement Chemistry which is being run under Dr. Harold Goldwhite.

His background and the scope of the course follow:

"University of Cambridge educated (Ph.D and B.A.) Dr. Harold Goldwhite guides you through Educator's Chemistry course. Professor Goldwhite has taught all over the world, from 46 years in Los Angeles, to several years in England, and visiting professorships in France, Mexico, and Venezuela. His experience on the History Channel and vast knowledge of chemistry transform his lectures into an informative and fascinating journey with a comprehensive syllabus that covers standard and accelerated one year courses. Topics range from Atomic Theory, Chemical Reactions, Bonds, Kinetics, Acids and Bases, Thermodynamics, Electrochemistry, to Radioactivity. Each lecture is accompanied by multiple examples for each new idea and detailed notes of things to remember."

Next up, learn calculus leads you to the online class of Professor Murray. More below:

UC Berkeley (Ph.D) and Georgetown (B.S.) educated Dr. William Murray instructs Educator's Calculus II course covering from Advanced Integration Techniques and Applications of Integrals to Sequences/Series. Professor Murray demonstrates his extensive teaching experience by clarifying complicated topics with a wide array of examples, helpful tips, and time-saving tricks. Will's course is essential to those struggling with Calculus who would benefit from clear explanations and examples of common problems. Each video lecture is accompanied by several worked-out video examples and important notes to prepare for any examination.

There's a whole lot more but you may wish to quickly search the site for quality learning wherever, whenever.

Social network + online store = Sandbox

Don't know about you but after I've joined tons of Social Network Sites in the last 6 years, I realize that I go through the cycle of technology adoption from trigger to peak of inflated expectations all the way to plateau of productivity. In between, I also tend to sink into some sort of SNS fatigue. So when a new site turns up -- usually every six months, I routinely create an account, based on each one's relative novelty.

Most usually come within my online attention radar. This time, I came across Sandbox via a huge billboard among a bunch of others along the stretch of Highway 54 in Makati, EDSA to the younger generation.

Ok so I ask myself what else is new? You've seen one with a lot of videos. And another with a lot of pictures, and yet another one with loads of music. What else could be different with Sandbox? Perhaps, the following?

To the younger set it could be a provider of services like friendster but with online store.

To the more mature and sophisticated netizens, it could very well be a source of services like facebook but with online store.

Then again, probably the best thing that makes Sandbox different from other websites, is:

It's an online store that allows you to download music, games and movie-themed content to your mobile.

Hold on, give me time to create a new account and go through the cycle again. And good thing there are open APIs. You don't have to really abandon your other SNS so long as the accounts could cross-connect.

[Edit] - After creating an account and doing the usual validation steps, (Note: They are rather particularly stringent about the usrn@me + p@ssword specs.), I was taken to the site. One thing that caught my attention, the right-hand side application icons that move like those of the Mac during Mouse hover. Will give myself more time to explore its digisoria section. Looks interesting.

It's ok here

Or that's how the site AyosDito.ph would translate to English. Site's title tells us it has something to do with buying and selling in the Philippines. A comprehensive nationwide buy-and-sell website is something that I've actually been looking for in the last 4 weeks for posting an advertising for a school to no avail. So I had to go via the usual route of newspapers for national reach plus the plain old community approach of handing out flyers. Turns out I missed this vehicle by two weeks. Still it might be worth mentioning in this blog post.

You might be interested to find out that AyosDito covers the entire archipelago of 7,100 islands. And that means you can even browse regions from CAR to ARMM. Check out NCR to see some used items. Now if for some reason you'd want to buy or sell a bicycle, you may wish to click on bike.

Currently, the site is on very active mode, to wit:

Post an Ad for FREE and WIN Big Prizes!

Weekly prizes: HP Mini-note, Sony Digicam, and iPod Touch

Check out the amazing prizes that we are giving away and find out if you are one of the lucky winners of AyosDito.ph Post and Win Contest!

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... seems like they'd have to do that on twitter for the most part.

Blogging could perhaps give way to micro-blogging for now.

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Kairos has patiently waited on me

Image credits: http://www.masternewmedia.org/

Sometime in 2007, I discovered Yahoo Pipes. It's a service that allows one to "program" mash-ups using feeds and other inputs to generate custom feeds. True to form, I started toying with some sample Pipes, e.g. pulling word-of-the-day inputs from freedictionary.com and producing "interesting" photo-collections.

In 2008, I came across a protomnema-inspired vocabulary-building educational framework, and after vaguely mashing the two ideas simply gave them short shrift.

Then for some reason, I suddenly felt a need for Yahoo Pipes. So I picked the 2-year old mash-up and tinkered with it again. Click on the Word-to-Flickr Image Aggregator.

Get RSS results here.

For a moment there, it all seemed like a result of random collaboration.

Immersive gaming: Where is your reality?

Image credits:http://buffetoblog.files.wordpress.com

David Needle reporting on the Web 2.0 Expo says that according to Will Wright, the gaming industry legend perhaps best known as the creator of SimCity and Spore: "The richness of Web-based environments is starting to blur the distinction between games and reality."

Among other things, Wright talks about the possibilities for the concept "immersive". Here's his take on Nintendo's Wii: "Most of the entertainment around the Wii is watching your friend act like a doofus, swinging the thing (Wiimote) around."

More of the serious stuff here.

Nowhere to go but up?

Better yet, what happened to the American Dream?

This is part of Slate's Shoot the Recession Project.