Many people are posting on Social Media, and there are many who don’t want to constantly follow everything live that is said by their friends. For them there is now Social Digest. Social Digest makes it possible to get a full list of all the tweets send by your social group, whether it’s the public stream, DMs or lists – which I’m sure Scoble will like. It also lists the users who were active that day. It’s like having your Facebook wall in your mail, although Facebook support is in the pipeline.

There is also integration for people who want to follow what their friends are listening to on Last.FM. The other service they currently support is Hyves, but I doubt that they will limit their scope to only these services.

For the business users there are plans to make it possible to get digests over multiple Twitter accounts in one digest mail so business users can do the due diligence over their multiple accounts. And after showing them the wonderful features of DataSift they are looking into implementing a similar mark-up language to be able to extract data which can be flagged with in the Digest. And I see further potential for integration with DataSift.

I’m happy to say that as the twitter whale in the pre-alpha I helped them discover many faults with the algorithm and forced them to turn the Twitter API inside out to be able to do some of the requests.

They have plans for a 2011 launch.

When I was shown this in January I wasn’t surprised to see a turn based with Twitter as the transport mode appear, I was very happy that turn based social gaming has left Facebook. The first step by twitgam.es was to implement a javascript based chess and checkers client which posts a challenge and the subsequent moves to Twitter via the public stream or via DM. There will be a leader board to track progress in the games.

The public version makes it possible for others to follow the moves of the people they follow by using the short link posted in the message, as seen below. And the private version doesn’t spam your followers with messages for people who don’t want to clutter their public stream with messages.

They have plans to launch in 2011.

Image source: Doug Wheller

Oplerno—a groundbreaking online educational institution—has launched a crowd-­‐ funding campaign on Indiegogo to raise $100,000 to further the mission of redesigning higher education from the ground up.

“Much of the current system is out of control, with skyrocketing administrative costs, interfering corporate interests, and lack of faculty empowerment,” says Robert Skiff, founder of Oplerno. “Furthermore, student debt is increasing at an alarming and unsettling rate. By allowing students to connect directly to their instructors and giving instructors ownership and control of their teaching content—as well as at least 80 percent of the tuition they bring in—we are removing the excesses of the modern educational industry. Let’s give students the skills they seek, the credits they need, and an entirely new way to think about education,” stated Skiff.

The centerpiece of Oplerno’s redesign of the higher education model is the way that teachers and students are treated. At Oplerno, faculty own and control the course content they create. They decide how many students they will teach (though no more than 30 per class, guaranteeing a personal learning experience) and what to charge students for their services. Faculty members take home at least 80 percent of the tuition dollars they generate—between $5000 and $36,000 per class, depending on class tuition and enrollment. Students control their education through a degree of choice unavailable at traditional institutions. They choose their own teachers based on the types of skills they want to learn, outside reviews of classes, and affordability of class tuition. Typical costs for students will range between $500 and $1,500 per class. Using proprietary software, Oplerno will allow for the creation of an open and transparent marketplace, where learning can occur without the limitations imposed by many of the traditional structures of higher education. Oplerno will use the money raised by the Indiegogo campaign to pay for various start-up costs associated with accreditation, faculty support, and student advising. If Oplerno reaches its goal of $100,000, the organization has promised to donate one percent of its net profit—forever—to projects proposed by faculty and students that focus on education, ecological restoration, and economic development. As part of the crowd-funding campaign, Oplerno is offering a ten percent discount on tuition for 10 years to individuals who donate $1,000 or more.

“We have already created the foundation for massively increasing access to higher education on a global scale, while lowering costs for students and increasing pay for faculty,” Skiff says. “Now we need some help financially to bring our vision to scale. We want everyone to benefit from the work we have done to this point, so we have created some long-term value for people who are willing to help us build a new kind of learning organization.”

Oplerno currently has more than 50 faculty from all over the world, creating graduate and undergraduate courses in fields ranging from engineering and the sciences to the liberal arts and humanities. Courses are being developed in English, Spanish, and Chinese to meet the needs of the global marketplace. Oplerno is committed to seeking regional and national accreditation as soon as possible. It plans to offer classes early in the first quarter of 2014 that will be available from any location on the planet with Internet access.

Recently I’ve gotten the online learning bug back, not that it’s ever away for long, so I’ve been busy again on Coursera. And thanks to a HTML 5 course I also started to use Udemy. An Eric Ries course is waiting on Udacity for me to start it. In the past I used to use iTunesU to follow online university courses, such as Yale’s Game Theory Lectures by Benjamin Polak.

Coursera

I’m currently enrolled in 6 courses, and I’ve followed a number of courses here, yet none to completion within the time period set by the tutor. Often the amount of time I would need to set aside for the course can be between 6 and 12 hours each week, this is entirely possible and I often do manage to do a couple of hours in the evening. Another issue is that to receive course credit these Problem Sets need to be in at a certain date, or courses which have been running over 1 week it is often impossible to submit these on time to be eligible for course credit.

Coursera does allow you to download all the video’s, so it is possible to view these at a later date, or even from the beach somewhere. And they sometimes offer the course multiple times, so in the example of Model Thinking I have enrolled a second time so I can complete easier.

Coursera also makes it possible to earn a Verified Certificate, for Model Thinking it is possible, for a fee, to get official recognition from a University and Coursera for your accomplishment with a verifiable electronic certificate.

Udemy Courses

Udemy

I’m currently enrolled in 3 courses, and busy with 2. As Udemy allows courses to be completed in my own time it is much easier to miss a couple of days. The tradeoff is that I don’t get course credit. There are also far less courses, and less languages to choose from than Udacity or Coursera. These courses are hosted on YouTube, similar to Khan Academy and can not be downloaded for later or offline use.

Udacity Courses

Udacity

I’m currently enrolled in 1 course, and have completed none. Udacity, which boasts supporting 63 languages, is again lacking course credit. What it does have are big names who are teaching courses, these courses look like they are extensions of their books, and as such can have large fees attached to them. Here the parts of the course can be downloaded, although for the most part they have not made it easy to do so.

Image source: me