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Twitter has recently introduced a valuable feature for tracking concepts/products/ideas.

We have discussed several communication/collaboration tools such as Wiki, Blog, Skype and the like. Innovative web entrepreneurs/educators are deploying these tools for facilitating teaching/learning. A few such services are discussed here.

Skype, the online telephony tool, is popular among netizens for speaking with people across the Net. Besides being used a communication tool, Skype is increasingly getting used for distance teaching. For instance, the online service, ‘Echineselearning’ ( http://www.echineselearning.com/), based in Beijing, China, uses skype for teaching Chinese. Anyone from anywhere on the globe with a Skype account can join this service and enjoy live, one-on-one teaching. In fact, it resembles a classroom setting — the student can see the teacher, interact with her and clear the doubts instantaneously. To get a feel of the course you can take the service’s free trial lesson. In this regard, the demo available here ( http://www.echineselearning.com/demo.html ) also could be useful.

Another emerging trend is to use the Web 2.0 community concept for implementing an interactive learning environment. The newly launched language learning service ‘Live Mocha’ ( http://www.livemocha.com/), a start-up of Shirish Nadkarni, a U.S. settled Indian techno-entrepreneur, is a good example. ‘Live mocha’ borrows the community contribution/participation idea from the Web 2.0 world and provides an opportunity for its user to talk with other people around the world to learn/practice her target language. This means, if your mother tongue is Hindi and you wish to learn English, ‘Live mocha’ offers you an opportunity to talk to native English language speakers to improve your proficiency. And you can reciprocate by helping people who wish to learn Hindi. To facilitate communication among its members, the service offers web-based text/audio/video chat tool. Though this facility is almost like skype, the advantage here is that you do not need to install any software. Another unique feature of this free service is the availability of instructional content to learn the fundamentals of a language. At present, ‘Live mocha’ supports six languages that include English, Hindi, French and Spanish.

Yet another on-line tool, fast catching up among the teaching fraternity, is Wiki. Wiki, as you would already know, is a web site with pages editable by its visitors. If you wish to know the variety ways in which this technology is used in teaching, take a look at the various educational Wikis listed here: http://

educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/. Apart from the students of Statistics, several others (like scientists and business analysts) need to do statistical computations. Though statistical programmes (like SPSS Stata and the like) are helpful to do such computations, everyone may not have access to them always. To counter such difficulties, on-line statistical calculators are in place. Graphpad, the on-line service pointed out by Prof. U. S. Mishra, a NetSpeak friend, is an appropriate example. A variety of on-line calculators available with this service (http://graphpad.com/quickcalcs/index.cfm), can come in handy for those who need to process some statistical data quickly. Statistical parameters such as chi-square and t-tests can be computed inside your browser quite easily with this service. Stat Pages (http://statpages.org/) is another wonderful resource worth a try.

The famous messaging service, Twitter (http://www. hindu.com/biz/2007/03/26/

Twitter has recently introduced a valuable feature for tracking concepts/products/ideas. By sending the command ‘track name-of-the-subject’, you can automatically receive all the twitter updates that match the string ‘name-of-the-subject’. If you want to collect all the twitter messages about a company or person or a concept, this feature could come in handy. Be careful while you try this with a popular service such as Google (you could be flooded with instant messages!).

Looking for a simple text to speech converter? If so, jump over to the on-line text-to-speech conversion service, VozMe (http://vozme.com/). Paste your text on to the input box and obtain a downloadable MP3 file by clicking on the ‘Create MP3’ button.

Anyone exploring a topic on the web needs to visit several sites relevant to her subject.

It is impossible to have prior knowledge of all the sites pertaining to a subject. In this regard, the site recommendation service Youlicit ( http://www.youlicit.com/ ), meant to provide sites similar to the one being viewed, could come in handy. To use the service directly from the browser, install the add-on that places a couple of buttons on it. Whenever you wish to obtain sites similar to the one being read, just click on the button ‘Youlicit Next’.

Anyone with a web site is keen to obtain feedback from its visitors. Though guest-book kind of tools are helpful, a facility to have a live chat with a visitor willing to communicate with the web site could be valuable. The newly launched service Tringme (http://tringme.com/) is one such product worth a try. The service allows you to plant a widget on your blog/site that enables a visitor to leave a voicemail or initiate a voice chat with you via an IM client (currently it supports only gTalk). As soon as the visitor leaves a voicemail, your gTalk gets fired and plays the voicemail. If your IM client is not live, the service sends the voice message to your e-mail address. Tringme also provides a web page (example: http://tringme.com/reachme.php?uid=2244-42312238538) with this widget embedded.

Also, the service allows you to receive the voice-message on your mobile/land phone (however, this facility is at present not available in India).

J. MURALI

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