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To enhance the customers experience with the help of the development of content to be published all over the web is what adaptive content is all about.

In Professional Learning in the Digital Age: The Educator's Guide to User-Generated Learning, Kristen Swanson shows educators how to enhance their pro...

Robin Good: The Contextual Thesaurus is a working experiment of Microsoft Language Labs, which visualizes alternative ways of expressing the same idea both as text phrases as well as visual map made up of all the possible alternative combinations.

The Contextual Thesaurus is an English-to-English machine translation system that employs the same architecture that the Microsoft Translator uses when translating different languages.

While an ordinary thesaurus provides synonyms and near synonyms, usually only for single words, often without offering much information about when to use these terms, the Contextual Thesaurus provides multiple full-phrase alternatives.

How to use it:
Type a short phrase into the input box. Then click the Submit button (the arrowhead in an orange circle) or hit the Enter key on your keyboard. The system accepts only one sentence at a time.

Some suggestions:
Limit your input to 4-8 words. Even two or three words will sometimes be enough to retrieve a useful set of equivalents.Formal language works better than colloquial language.

Click one of the paraphrases to highlight the path through the graph taken by that sentence. If you click on a word in the graph, the top-ranked paraphrase containing that term will be highlighted. If you click the check mark beside a paraphrase, the text will be moved into the input box in order to be paraphrased. This way you can round trip your paraphrases to see more alternatives.

What is this good for?
Among many other things: Writing assistance, document simplification, document style adaptation, in-house style enforcement, summarizing and abstracting, question answering, conversational agents, interaction with game characters, search and information extraction and retrieval.

P.S.: API coming
It makes a lot of grammatical errors.

FAQ: http://labs.microsofttranslator.com/thesaurus/thesaurusfaq.html

Try it out now: http://labs.microsofttranslator.com/thesaurus/

Heiko Idensen reports in his curated newsradar "Online Curating & Social Learning Tools and Applications": "Learnist is a new pinboard where users can organize their learning materials. It resembles Pinterest except that Learnist is just for sharing learning resources.

The website is still in beta but looks really very promising for both teachers and students.

Here is a set of the main features that Learnist offers to its users :

It is freeItis easy to useIt has a user friendly interfaceIt lets users create pinboards around a certain topicUsers can create different boards and invite others to collaborate on themIt lets you pin images,videos, and text to your boards with a single click from Learnist bookmarkletUsers can also upload resources to their  boards using URLs

Free to use.

Try it out: http://learni.st 

MentorMob, which launches today, turns educational content on the web into step-by-step "playlists."...

The logic of MentorMob is simple enough. The site posits that there already exists out there, in the tangled and sprawling World Wide Web, the materials to constitute excellent online courses in an array of subjects. MentorMob seeks to create communities that organize all this content into a curated, directed experience. These learning “tracks” were already out there on the Internet. Only, nobody had organized these materials into a step-by-step course--until now. The site could also make money off of corporate clients who would like to use MentorMob for corporate training; it already has a few paying clients. Given that MentorMob draws its content from a wide range of sources, and mostly from non-scholarly websites, how does it remain assured of its quality? MentorMob will largely follow the Yelp and Wikipedia model of engaging an elite crop of users, for whom curating quality on MentorMob is inherently rewarding. “Structured mediated aggregation is the way most [user-content generated] sites are going.... MentorMob is built with the understanding, as many others have recognized, that not all users are alike, with some being readers, others being light contributors, and others being heavy contributors.” MentorMob goes further by developing a site which recognizes “different roles for the same contributor, in some contexts as a mentor and in another as learner." Chinosorn says he foresees a time when MentorMob branches out into more academic or traditional content. He says that the site already has a lot of professional educators who were among the private beta user base, and that his site has been used in a course at Columbia College in Chicago. “Eventually we want to be the Pandora of learning, to personalize learning. So we’d see what type of learner you actually are: We’d see you are a visual kinesthetic learner, and know you need video and Flash games to learn.” MentorMob would then optimize your very own playlist.
“We know that this isn’t better than going to college yet,” Chinosorn admits. “But this could be the beginning of something really big.”

Robin Good: I have just received an invitation to test the new content curation platform Zeen, and here I am with some early impressions on what I have seen.

Zeen is a content curation tool designed to create good-looking magazines on a specific topic or theme. Setup and configuration is very easy and straightforward and it allows you to connect your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.

Once you are in, you can immediately set up a Zeen magazine, by selecting a title, a description and a cover image. From there on you are free to use the integrated search feature to find web articles, news, images, video clips or tweets relevant to your magazine. You just start a search after having selected what kind of content you are looking for and Zeen presents you with a set of relevant results. One-click on any of them and they are inserted instantly in your magazine.

You can also create as many "tags" (Zeen calls them "labels") as you like and assign each content item to a specific label.

The final magazine issue offers an automatic visual table of contents, in which you can organize by dragging and dropping the order of your selected contents.

A Zeen magazine can be made of multiple issues, instead of being like Scoop.it, a continuously growing content holder. You select the content items and you produce an issue (which can be still edited after publication).

N.B.: There is no way to edit or modify the content picked and added to your magazine, including the use of images.

You can't create new content but only pick and organize existing resources.

Here is an example of a Zeen magazine: http://zeen.com/read/ODgO94/toc

and here is another one on barbeques: http://zeen.com/read/KuJoAW

More info: http://zeen.com/

Useful presentation from Shel Holz that shows actual examples of curation for internal communications.

He talks about the stages of the process and demos various examples of how curation is being done by organizations from Ragan and Smart Brief to the NYT.

Shel notes areas where internal communicators could use curation -  for news about the company, competitors, the industry or the marketplace - and shows how AEP curates content on its intranet.

He quotes the head of  internal comms for AEP "The external news helps employees ot better understand the external forces that affect internal decisions. It's clear to me that our employees are much more informed as a result."
 
Another emerging trend is the ability for employees to share articles from the company , provided they do not contain proprietary information, via social media as a way of promoting the company. 

Shel then turns to the use of curation in training - and shows an example of curated instructional video for a health care client. Another great idea!

Vital professions - how about finding an enthusiastic professional in the firm to curate useful professional info for the others?

 Needless to say, there is a ton of useful, practical information in this presentation. It is an hour long ( including Q&A) but it's definitely worth it.

Original video: http://vimeo.com/30168580 ;