Nerd Stalker

We talk with Rich Schramm, Rich is the founder of iGotThis - an app, community, and mission dedicated to helping ADHD families and extraordinary kids better navigate the expectations of our ordinary world. Rich has had a number of hands-on and leadership roles in the corporate and consulting sectors of the technology industry over the past 25 years. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife and 3 ADHD kids.

Learning is the work of the future As the pace of economic and social change accelerates, educational systems must continuously adapt and evolve. In this guest post leading up to the Global Education Symposium, OECD Director and Special Advisor Andreas Schleicher looks forward to the future of learning.

Be Somebody New: LinkedIn Learning Opens Up their Courses for 1 week Photo courtesy of LinkedIn Learning On LinkedIn's blog there is a quote " Learning means growing." Here's your chance to grow. LinkedIn announced last Friday that they are opening their coffers for one week to show you the breadth of LinkedIn Learning. On September 22,  LinkedIn announced they finally pulled the Lynda.com library of online training courses into its main service. Lynda.com, now LinkedIn Studios, is still based in Carpenteria and still going strong. 

IMD Professor Stefan Michel on LinkedIn and the Future of Learning in the Workplace New Age of Education Delivery (photo courtesy of Pablo by Buffer) LinkedIn recently announced that it was entering the professional development market. Surprisingly, this news barely caused a ripple. Will 22 September 2016 go down in history as a key milestone in the digital transformation of the professional development market? Only the future will tell.

We Believe In Tech, Startups, Design & You The Nerd Stalker Weekend Edition Tiny 3D-printed medical camera could be deployed from inside a syringe IDEO’s secret recipe for an innovative design team A free bot service, DoNotPay, has helped successfully challenge 160K+ traffic tickets # AI beats expert pilot in air combat dogfight JAM – Online Courses for Kids The Weekend Review - What the 2016 Cannes Judges Think is Innovation Wearable Artificial Kidney Completes First Clinical Trial, Could Free People From Dialysis Why emerging technologies are the next great frontier for # UX Nice Hack: Pre-Paid QR Temp Tattoos

Adolfo and Greg Stalk the Weekly Tech Newscape Streamed live on Aug 29, 2015 Adolfo and Greg pick their tech topics of the Week.

Camperoo goes from education portal to education delivery Startups also pivot to some degree. Camperoo is no exception. The YC Winter '14 graduate, Emmie Chang , is going back to her roots and delivering new age education programs to kids 5 to 12. Emmie left the educational program she built in Texas for the Silicon Valley/SF Tech dream. Camperoo's new age means skills (ie. Creativity) that kids should learn to enter the world in the 21st century. Listen to Emmie to hear what the skills that she feels is not being delivered by the current educational model. 

Photo Courtesy of Xperience2! Education and brands have always been around in technology. Looking back in the rearview mirror, I remember in college when I was developing on an Intel development system and I thought it was brilliant of Intel looking back. After graduating, I was very loyal to Intel for the longest time and felt comfortable developing boards with Intel microprocessors. What did Intel do? They created an ecosystem and fed the pipeline of loyal engineers.

Google executives explain why the MBA approach to building things is 'stupid' I could not agree more and you?

The Techies Who Are Hacking Education by Homeschooling Their Kids | WIRED

Google Inc. has made a one-time, in-kind donation to the nonprofit Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA). Google will be donating 110 Nexus 5 devices and 350 Nexus 7 devices to support the organization’s goals regarding digital-literacy initiatives. MEDA provides asset building to financially challenged Latinos in San Francisco’s Mission District, with a major component of its service-integration model being computer skills. MEDA is also the lead agency of the Mission Promise Neighborhood (MPN), a citywide community partnership that has been created in support of students and families living, working and going to school in the Mission District. MPN brings together schools, colleges, community organizations, businesses and community leaders to help kids graduate and families achieve financial stability. The donated devices will have programmatic uses in the tech labs at MEDA, where digital-literacy classes are taught based on varying skill levels. Richard Abisla, MEDA...

Guest Post by Christopher Gil Mission Techie Yaritza opened her weary eyes this morning upon awakening in her Mission District home, the 17-year-old Lowell High senior not sure what her day would bring. She and 18 other Mission Techies, from MEDA’s third cohort of its free young adult program , had been graciously invited to tour the campus of tech giant Facebook. The group MEDA has been guiding on the path to an IT career now had that path extended to the tech hub of Silicon Valley. While it is a mere thirty-mile bus ride from the underserved communities of San Francisco’s southeastern quadrant to the leafy, suburban streets of Menlo Park, Yaritza was aware that a new place awaited. It was time to come face-to-face with that world—a world of high tech, as a group used to getting inside a computer was now being taken inside one of the most powerful companies in the world. “It was like spending a short vacation in a mini-Hollywood.”–Mission Techie Jamar Walker As the bus approached 1...

Lynda.com announces the new title, "Migrating from Flash to Edge Animate" by Jake Stroh. In this interview we talk to Jake about the title, working with Lynda, his other work and more.

Guest Post by Christopher Gil Google & Client Blog “These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise.” So said the late Apple visionary and driving force, Steve Jobs. Yet a walk down one of the main drags of San Francisco’s Mission District reveals two worlds attempting to coexist. At 24th and Valencia, scores of young tech workers clutch strongly brewed coffees as they wait for the bus to take them to the Silicon Valley offices where the world’s next great thing is being developed. Few conversations are had, with most focused on answering their twentieth text on an already-overworked smartphone, even though it’s just 8am. A short two blocks away on the corner of 22nd Street, a line just as long has formed at the neighborhood Social Security office. A disheveled woman in a wheelchair fronts the queue, already clutching the pen she’ll need to fill out the reams of paperwork that can possibly garner enough federal funds to keep her–one of...

Tangible Play is creating a New Play Movement with the launch of its inaugural product Osmo built around its proprietary Reflective Artificial Intelligence technology. Osmo aims to unleash the boundaries of the screen and expands the playing field onto any surface in front of the connected tablet by turning any real world objects - pen, paper, clay, blocks, etc. into a digitally connected game piece that interacts with the digital device. Osmo comes with three interactive games built from the ground up called Newton, Tangram and Words, that all use Osmo's Reflective AI and encourages creative thinking and social interaction. Osmo officially launches on May 22, 2014, using crowdfunding to raise $50,000 to help complete manufacturing of the product and garner early feedback. The device will retail for $99, but presale backers will get discount pricing starting at $49 (limited availability). Special discounts include $5 off for every friend you refer. Osmo is expected to start...

listen to ‘Some thoughts on the state of wysiwyg.’ on Audioboo

Nerd Stalker interview with Dan Shapiro inventor of Robot Turtles . Robot Turtles is a board game you play with your favorite 3-8 year old kids. It sneakily teaches the fundamentals of programming. Robot Turtles launched on Kickstarter, where it became the bestselling board game of all time. Which is pretty darn amazing. The Kickstarter campaign is over. 1,500 copies went up on the Make Magazine store and they sold out in 8 hours. Now there are a few copies at http://buy.robotturtles.com . For you Robot Turtle aficionados make sure to get the e-book here  and use the code " kickstarter " to get $5 off the ebook . We must admit that we secretly bought Robot Turtles under a private name so as to experience the whole fulfillment process like a general consumer would. We received it prior to the holidays despite the hot demand for the game. I sprung Robot Turtles on my six year old daughter who was thrilled with the game. In no time she ran through the basics t...

Nerd Stalker interviews Jake Ströh the Lynda.com author of " Up and Running with Hype ". Jake enjoys the balance between practitioner and educator. He operates an interactive design and development company, Lake Effect Multimedia , LLC, where he manages and directs web-based projects that focus on brand-centric development and integration for regional and national clients. He also teaches motion graphics, web design, and digital storytelling at his alma mater, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, where he enjoys educating young talent on the latest creative technology and career trends.

Nerd Stalker interview with Google Software Engineer, Neil Fraser at O'reilly Maker Faire. Blockly is a web-based, graphical programming editor. Users can drag blocks together to build an application. No typing required.

How do you provide value in education? Give them options. And that's what Sameer Bhatia and his team at ProProfs have done. Starting out with a simple quiz tool, ProProfs have pivoted onto what is an educational and training goldmine. Sameer discusses how tapping into a global market helps learners succeed and how a customer's voice shaped their product offerings you see today.