SimplyBox is a free browser plugin that is part:

• screen capture tool
• screen touring application
• organizer
• collaboration tool

According to the website:

“SimplyBox is a free service to Capture, Share, and Organize ANYTHING you find on the web”

Using SimplyBox, you capture images, videos, or text from web pages and organize these screen captures into boxes (thus the name SimplyBox).  You can then organize boxes into containers.  Add comments to your screen captures, and even return to the original web page(s) to see your clippings in context with the click of a button.  (Watch a brief demonstration video.)

SimplyBox in Flock 2.0 Browser

Boxes (collections of screen captures) can be shared with others for collaboration.  You can invite anyone to collaborate on a box, whether they have a SimplyBox account or not.  Collaborators can visit the sites represented by the screen captures in each box and post comments on each capture.  If they also have a SimplyBox account, they can even add other captures to the box.

I can see SimplyBox being used for learning:  Instructors can create boxes with information relevant to their current topics and invite students to view, comment, or even add to the content in the boxes.

I can see SimplyBox being used for organization:  Think of “boxes & containers” as a visualization of bookmarks.

I can see SimplyBox being used for work:  Organize various web sources into boxes in preparation for blog posts, research papers, or presentations.

I can see SimplyBox being used for collaboration:  Use boxes to collect and share resources with colleagues and to collaborate with project team members in pursuit of a common goal.

SimplyBox in a Learning Scenario

SimplyBox is available for Internet Explorer 7 (or higher) and Firefox 2 (or higher).  It is compatible with Windows and Mac.  My default browser is Flock 2.0, the Social Browser, and SimplyBox works perfectly with this spin-off of the Firefox 3 framework (although SimplyBox is not willing to advertise this at present for support reasons).

I initially had a bit of trouble getting SimplyBox to work properly in any browser.  I found a feedback form, which I used, but I really didn’t expect a response.  I am glad to report that a SimplyBox team member answered my query and was able to quickly help me get the tool working.  (Find contact information here:  http://simplybox.com/index/contact.)

Here’s a tip for anyone who decides to give SimplyBox a try.  After installing the browser plugin, you will need to sign in to your SimplyBox account by clicking the Settings button on the SimplyBox toolbar.  You will be prompted to enter a user name and password.  You may need to use your email address as the user name rather than the user name you chose when you signed up for the service.  This was the fix that their helpful support team shared with me.

SimplyBox, as the name implies, is simple to use, and it is worth investigating if you want to:

• add a little Web 2.0 spice to a traditional classroom setting
• visually organize your thoughts and resources for current and future projects
• share and collaborate with others

Courtesy of lisa_funtime

Free education?  I’m not referring to grants or scholarships.  I’m talking about a change in the way we acquire marketable knowledge and skills.  Could there really be such a thing as free education?

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has made essentially all its course content available in a free, web-based format.  Tag line:  “Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required.” Other institutions are offering similar content and services.  Are there any drawbacks?  In the current environment, yes.  There isn’t an accepted accreditation model for this mode of free learning.  How do you prove the knowledge and skills you learn from non-traditional sources?

Harold Jarche broached this topic a few weeks ago at AcademicInfo, citing George Siemens.  He identifies three components of free, web-based education:

1) Content

There is a wealth of educational content online, and it increases every day.  In addition to well-funded educational portals like MIT’s OpenCourseware, there are countless smaller-scale opportunities.  A few quick searches of Ning, for example, revealed communities for learning everything from gardening and automotive repair to javascript and Web 2.0 tools.

2) Connections

How to find this free learning content?  Harold states:

“It is also getting easier to connect and have conversations from micro-blogging to collaborative web spaces. No longer are learners confined within their LMS. Social networks like Facebook and Linked-In are being used by people to connect and learn, and user-defined spaces on Ning or Grou.ps allow anyone to start a community space for free.”

3) Accreditation

Free content.  Check.  Connections for locating free content.  Check.  Accreditation…  The missing component.

Without some form of accreditation to prove competency, traditional colleges and universities will likely continue to be king of the learning hill.  However, I don’t expect this barrier to remain intact for long.  With the wealth of information on the Internet growing exponentially every year and the creative ways of harnessing this wealth also gaining steam, why should we pay tens of thousands of dollars for inconvenient schooling over the course of our lifetime?

Harold offered the following example while musing on this topic:

“Now what would happen if an applicant arrived with a certification from the web showing specific skills such as an ability to get published on a respected online journal or a blog with a readership in the thousands? Will the market accept these as readily as a degree from a journalism school?”

Good food for thought.

On a related note, Tom Haskins, in an article titled Goodbye college diplomas, lists the reasons he thinks college degrees will be worthless in the next ten years or so.

TrainingZone.co.uk recently published an interview with Jay Cross that adds some simple truths to this discussion as well.  Here’s a brief passage:

Cross says: “The question is not; which course do I go on? But of all the many options for learning, which one do I choose : do I work with an expert, do I want to find it on Google or talk to my friends in the pub, or social network? These are all valid ways of learning.”

According to Cross, the power of Web 2.0 with its wikis, blogs and social networks is that people learn as they would through natural conversation and dialogue. This democratisation of learning does mean a perceived loss of control by those who control the training purse strings. Cross finds that many businesses are nervous about the power of informal learning. As he says: “I’ve been talking to a group of senior corporate executives who were worried about informal learning styles.’Does it work?’ they ask. ‘Of course it does, how did you learn to talk, eat or walk’.”

In my opinion, this trend toward free education is likely to be driven by learning professionals.  Those that are passionate about learning will always find ways to continue their own education.  Not many people can shell out boat loads of cash over the decades to further their educational pursuits – especially when it means attending traditional universities whose schedules are rigid and disruptive to everyday life.  The emergence of online, collaborative forums are likely to escalate.

Education is just as important as it ever was.  The mode of acquiring education is changing.  How will traditional colleges and universities respond?  How will the work place respond?

I am a Johnny-come-lately to the Twitter scene (Twittersphere).  I thought Twitter was nothing more than instant messaging on steroids.  Forget information overload.  I saw it as information suicide.  Experience has changed my mind.

It’s Thursday evening, Thanksgiving Day in the United States.  I’ve been following the #Mumbai hash tag on Twitter, and it has been a learning journey in more ways than one.

• I’ve learned that Twitter can be a source of up-to-the-second information from around the world.  No filters.  No holds barred.  Twitter updates are flooding in as fast as I can read them from people around the world who are either following the Mumbai terror attacks as I am or who are actually witnessing the events.
• I’ve learned that the world is smaller than ever before.  I’m part of a community of people from countries around the world who are engaged by the same event at the very same moment in time, communicating in real-time.  It’s mind-blowing.
• I’ve learned that micro-blogging services like Twitter are useful learning tools after all.  Mashable reports that CNN claims the Mumbai attacks have heralded Twitter’s “coming of age.”  I don’t doubt it.

When I recently succumbed to the Twitter movement, I began tentatively, following only a few individuals.  The daily information I receive is so useful and informative … and it is flavored with the personalities of those who are tweeting.  I’ve even joined the chorus with tweets of my own.  You can distill a great deal of information from following twitterers, and you can ask questions and offer advice.  I’ve found that the Twitter community is always willing to help.  I’m still a Twitter newbie, but I am now sold on its worth as a learning vehicle.

For anyone not familiar with Twitter, watch Common Craft’s Twitter in Plain English video below.  Subscribe to blogs like TwiTip for Twitter tips, tools, and best practices.  Jane Hart is cataloging a directory of learning professionals on Twitter, which is a good place to start if you want to find well-informed twitterers in the learning industry.

My Twitter ID is @davidfair.

Use Ning to build online communities and memorable learning experiences.  Ning is a free social networking platform that offers a wide array of features and capabilities.  Networks can be public or private, which gives facilitators greater control over the direction of their communities.

My recent experiences with Ning (as a learner) have been excellent!  (Work Literacy Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals, 25 Tools by Jane Hart, and Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations 2008)  I highly recommend that you experiment with Ning if you want to augment offline courses or if you want to build online learning workshops.

I was trying to explain Ning to a group of people today when I came across Michele Martin’s blog post “Course Community Building with Ning”.  She shares a presentation created by Dr. Alisa Cooper of South Mountain Community Colleges, which I have also embedded below.  Visit Dr. Cooper’s blog, The Maricopa Experience, to learn more about how she uses Ning in a learning environment (VoiceThread presentation).

This was timely information for me.  It helped me explain a very useful, free tool that more learning professionals should investigate.

I have two objectives for this post. First, I will review Freepath 2.0 Beta, a free presentation tool.  Second, I will use Freepath to present 25 Free Tools for Learning Professionals as researched and compiled by Jane Hart.

According to Dave Giusti of Freepath, it is:

“… a free tool where you create playlists that contain content that can include websites, images, videos, presentations, pretty much anything. You then call up the content for a presentation when you want it, presenting it in a non-linear flexible way. These files are launched from within Freepath; no need to launch Word, a Browser, [media] player, etc.”

You can also sign up for a free account at https://www.myfreepath.com, which gives you 100 MB of storage space for uploading Freepath playlists for sharing and collaborating.

Although Freepath can rightly be called a screen-touring application, similar to Flowgram (which I reviewed earlier this week), it functions best as a live presentation tool.  Watch a brief tour of Freepath.

Freepath

Benefits:

• Simple interface makes it quite easy to add almost any type of resource to a Freepath playlist.  It’s as easy as drag-and-drop.  Reordering resources in your playlists is just as easy.
• Documents, presentations, videos, audio files, web pages … everything launches within Freepath seemlessly.  No conversion necessary.
• Edit documents in real-time.
• Preview resources in the sidebar.  Even select a portion of a video rather than displaying the entire video.
• Easily switch between modes:  prep (preview) mode, presentation (fullscreen) mode, dual display mode.
• Works with GoToMeeting, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, InterCall, WebEx, and other online meeting tools.
• Upload playlists to myFreepath.com for sharing and collaboration.
• Interact with web page content within Freepath without leaving the presentation (playlist)!  This feature is currently lacking in Flowgram.  (If you click a link in Flowgram, you have suddenly left the Flowgram and must use the back button to return to the Flowgram screen tour.)
• Freepath FAQs.
• Freepath Forums.

Drawbacks:

• Requires a local client to be downloaded and installed.  No web client is offered at this time, so anyone wishing to view your Freepath playlists must install the local client and then download and import the playlists.  In my opinion, this really limits Freepath to live presentations where the presenter controls the application, but I believe this is the thrust of Freepath’s vision.  It isn’t like SlideShare or SlideRocket, which make presentations available to anyone with a web browser.
• Cannot annotate resources (such as web sites) that are added to a Freepath playlist.  Unlike Flowgram, you cannot add notes, highlight content, or scroll to off-screen content automatically.
• Although you can interact with web pages that have been added to Freepath, it is a little clunky.  You have to double-click the screen to “activate” it first.  (Double-clicking doesn’t always seem to work for me.  Sometimes I have to click several times to interact with the web page content.)
• Navigation, in general, seems clunky.  Press the space bar to move from resource to resource … unless you have double-clicked a resource to interact with its content.  In that case, you must use the navigation buttons in the control bar at the bottom of the screen, which may or may not be visible (hover over the bottom of the screen to reveal it).  Spacebar navigation doesn’t work for me on the first screen of the playlist, so I have to use the navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen.  You can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate, but, again, this doesn’t work if you have “activated” a resource to interact with its content.

If you can master the navigation techniques and you plan to make live presentations with a variety of media types, Freepath is great. I also hear that they will be introducing several new features in the next few weeks.  That is certainly worth investigating.

However, if you want to make presentations publicly visible on the Internet (easily) or if you want to annotate the resources for asynchronous viewing, Freepath isn’t the best tool.  For visible (“embeddable”) presentations, try SlideShare or SlideRocket.  For annotating resources in your screen tours, try Flowgram.  So saying, I imagine that there are many enhancements yet to come for Freepath 2.0 Beta.

I have incorporated all 25 of the free tools recommended by Jane Hart for learning professionals into an interactive Freepath playlist.  In order to view the tools and interact with the content, you must download and install the Freepath client.  Then you can download and import my playlist for fullscreen viewing on your computer.  (And there will probably be a little bit of a learning curve with the interface.)

If you would rather not go through those steps (and I don’t blame you), you can view all 25 of the free tools for learning professionals below in the embedded SlideShare presentation (created by Jane Hart).  Enjoy!