In the past, before the craze of e-learning tools like learning management systems, people who wanted to create instructional material either to sell or for use within an organization created paper-based material like textbooks, and enriched the program with audio and video material. Of course, textbook publishing, is still a big business. And the idea of making a living by creating knowledge to be used in an academic or professional setting is still exciting for many people.

If you’re one of those people, remember that in this information era, writing and selling instructional material in the traditional fashion may not be as easy as you imagine.

Textbook prices have reached new highs, indicating a competitive market in publishing and distributing paper-based material. According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, textbook prices have outpaced inflation 2-to-1 in the past twenty years.

We can see this effect in universities and other higher education systems, where students must reach into their own or their parents’ wallet to pay for learning material. For students working their way through college and paying out of their own pockets, being taken back hundreds of dollars for one semester’s worth of books is especially difficult.

Combine a competitive industry, publishing companies taking advantage of writers, and increasingly expensive publishing with the hardships of getting published in the first place, and it’s not a pretty picture for textbook writers. —the life of a textbook writer is not smooth sailing.

Creating instructional material using online tools is the answer for many subject matter experts. Learning management systems (LMSs) and courseware platforms are instructional formats increasing in importance, while the 2-D, wasteful, paper-based instructional medium of textbooks is on the decline.

LMSs give course material creators a great deal of power and room for creativity, using multimedia tools like video and audio, simulations, animations, screen and audio recordings, and the integration of Web 2.0 tools for student interaction and communication with each other and the instructor.

But make no mistake–although it’s possible to find user-friendly and simply LMS tools, preparing the actual learning content for uploading to an elearning platform doesn’t happen instantaneously. Even the most knowledgeable subject matter experts require time and a great attention to detail to create learning content for an online course. Just like preparing a semester’s worth of lesson plans, the information won’t travel directly from an expert’s head and onto one’s computer.

But that’s part of the fun. In fact, oftentimes when you’re collecting and organization material, you’ll discover holes in your understanding of a topic. Taking the time to fill these holes will not only enrich your online course, but your own expertise. Furthermore, these filled holes could be platforms for further research.

Some LMSs allow courseware system developers to create and migrate training modules free of charge. In this kind of system, developers retain ownership and copyright of all their IP and learning content, and the LMS provider gains a small percentage every time courseware is purchased.

Once you’ve migrated your online courseware, it isn’t set in stone. You have complete control over your course, and the power to modify or delete some or all of it. You can also choose to syndicate it, meaning that other relevant web publishers can publish and sell your online courseware on their websites. An elearning platform that helps you syndicate your courseware should provide you with complete control over which sites you want to publish your elearning content. You’ll decide how much revenue you’d like to share with them each time you make a sale.

Syndicating online courseware is a smart choice for a few reasons. First, doing so gets your product out there on the market and expands your audience. Equally importantly, it can greatly expand your revenue. Online courseware creation means a learning experience not only for your future learning management system students, but for yourself. Creating great elearning material is a financially, professionally, and personally rewarding enterprise.

Create engaging elearing content using Coggno’s learning management systems and elearning solutions. Ask us how you can avail of a free account, visit http://www.coggno.com/lms

News from the scientific world tell us that there is a “warp” in the universe whereby the speed of light, and the passage of time, are so strangely related that the mere act of measuring them alters their performance.
Einstein spent his life trying to find the “quantum mechanics” of nature whereby moving clocks run slower, and light travels faster, when we watch them. He called the phenomena “spooky action at a distance.”
The great theoretician expressed the relationship in his famous “special theory of relativity” formula: E=MC2 – Energy equals Mass, times the C-speed of light, squared.
Neither he, nor scientists since, have determined the “general theory of relativity” that would explain the relationship between light, time, gravity, electricity and magnetism.
The theory of relativity was proven by a simple experiment. Three atomic clocks fitted with short-wave radio switches were calibrated precisely the same. One was put aboard a jet plane. The other two were placed on the ground along the plane’s flight path. A signal station was located midway between the ground clocks.
All clocks were started by signal when the plane was at full speed. All were turned off three hours later. Upon examination, the airborne clock was found to have marked off less time than the stationary clocks. A Limerick reflects the anomaly:
There once was a lady named Bright
Whose speed was faster than light.
She traveled one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
Einstein equated time to a “fourth dimension” — corollary to the three dimensions of the everyday world of length, width and depth. Some scholars theorize there may be additional dimensions. Comprehending them is daunting.
One scientist comfortable with the new mechanics is Thomas Banchoff, chairman of Brown University mathematics department in 1985. He used his computer to create two-dimension “shadows” of four-dimension objects.
A four-dimension universe may be a twin of ours – perhaps impossible to see and certainly difficult for most of us to comprehend.
Banchoff told the Christian Science Monitor – one of the nation’s leading newspapers specializing in science information – that he was inspired by an 1884 novel titled “Flatland” by Edwin Abbott.
“The book depicts a world of 2-D creatures who won’t accept the idea of another dimension, even though they’re visited by a Sphere from a 3-D world.
“A Square, returns the visit to the third dimension and sees what theretofore was unimagined. He suggests to his spherical friend that maybe there is even a fourth dimension. The Sphere scoffs.
“The Square returns to his 2-D world and tells friends of his journey. They jail him for heresy.”
Dr. Banchoff describes his computerized 4-D depictions as analogous to casting on a wall the shadow of your hand.
“To a flat 2-D creature on the wall surface, the shadow of your 3-D hand would be mysterious. It would change shape – growing fatter or thinner, as you turn your hand.
“If you move your hand out of the light, it would disappear altogether. In reality, of course, it only appears to do so for 2-D creatures.
“Similarly, a four-dimensional creature invading our world would presumably appear just as odd – contorting, turning inside out, appearing and disappearing.”
* * *
The bond between time and light is little understood. Several decades before Einstein, Thomas Young fired a light beam of photons through two slits in a screen. Through the process of “interference” of light rays with each other, this projected a series of light strips.
When Young sent photons to the screen one at a time — and measured which slit they went through — the interference stripes became just a bright spot. Having knowledge of what slit each photon went through, apparently altered the mechanics of light.
In a recent experiment, Raymond Ciao and associates of the University of California at Berkeley seemingly got light to travel faster than 186,000 mps.
The Berkeley team fired particles of light toward a detector. Half were sent through the air. The other particles were directed to a glass mirror en route.
All but one percent of the focused particles bounced off the mirror and was lost. However, the surviving one percent tunneled through the mirror and hit the detector 70 percent quicker than the unimpeded particles.
Ciao calls his results an “illusion.” But he can’t explain it. “One implication,” he says, “is that you can affect the past.”
There is something occult, magic, about these phenomena. Simply measuring time and light seems to affect their performance. This raises a profound question: does human consciousness have an impact on the universe?
* * *
In seeking answers to relativity, cosmologists have overturned the long-held belief that light travels at a rate of 186,000 miles per second, and nothing else in the universe exceeds that. Now we know that speed is relative to the observer.
If Einstein’s conclusion that the universe is warped – curved, saddle-shaped, turned back on itself — then light speed will vary as it traverses peaks and valleys of space.
A curved space suggests that an astronomer looking into the cosmos, with a powerful enough telescope, would be able to see the back of his head.
The speed of light is affected by gravitational attraction of stars as it passes near by. Einstein’s supposition — that light can bend — has been well proven by observations of our Sun during an eclipse.
A curved universe suggests that a rocket craft could reach point X on a space journey faster by cutting across a circle rather than “directly” around its perimeter. Astronomers have discovered “wormholes,” spaces between heavenly bodies along which light moves more rapidly than elsewhere.
That which goes up, must come down. Or, to state it another way, that which speeds up must slow down. Interstellar space travel may be more feasible than we think.
Other properties of the time-light partnership might be exploited. Dr. Lene Hau, of Harvard, has succeeded in slowing the speed of light through ultra-cold gas – abundant in the universe – to 38 miles per hour. He hopes to slow it to 20 miles per hour for wireless super-computers.
* * *
Scientific American magazine two years ago asked Prof. Gary T. Horowitz, physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, if it was possible for a human being within one lifetime to travel into the distant future, or past? His answers were (1) “Definitely yes” and (2) “Maybe.”
“If we were to depart from Earth in a spaceship that could accelerate continuously at a comfortable one-times-gravity, we would begin to approach the speed of light in about a year. Clocks, and people, aboard the ship would progress at an ever-slower rate relative to the earth.
“Under such circumstances, a round trip to the center of our galaxy and back to Earth – a distance of some 60,000 light-years – could be completed in only a little more that 40 years of ship time.
“Upon arriving back a Earth, astronauts would be only 40 years older, while 60,000 years would have passed on Earth.
“Time travel into the past is much more uncertain. There are many solutions to Einstein’s equation of General Relativity that allow a person to follow a timeline that would result in someone encountering his/her self – or deceased grandparents – at an earlier time.”
Horowitz points out that no experiment or observation has ever indicated that time travel is occurring in our universe. Theoretically, however, one could place a time machine at the mouth of a wormhole and give it a good push. Passage through the wormhole would then would allow travel to the past of the universe – not to our personal lives on Earth.
Now that everyone understands everything about time, all we have to figure out is where God was standing when He/She created heaven and earth.
“Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligent life here.”
February 18, 2001
Click here to see this article on Lindsey Williams’s website
Lindsey Williams is a Sun columnist who can be contacted at:
LinWms@earthlink.net
LinWms@lindseywilliams.org
Website: http://www.lindseywilliams.org with several hundred of Lin’s Editorial & At Large articles written over 40 years.
Also featured in its entirety is Lin’s groundbreaking book “Boldly Onward,” that critically analyzes and develops theories about the original Spanish explorers of America.
(fully indexed/searchable)

Exploring the possibilities of time travel including: Time paradoxes, worm holes, 4 dimensional space, atomic clocks and NTP servers.

Time travel has always been a much loved concept for science fiction writers. From HG Wells’ Time Machine to Back to the Future, travelling forwards or backwards in time has captivated audiences for centuries. However, thanks to the work of modern thinkers like Einstein, it appears that time travel is much a possibility of science fact as it is fiction.

Time travel is not only possible but we do it all the time. Every second that passes is a second further into the future so we are all travelling forward in time. However we think if time travel we imagine a machine that transports individuals hundreds or thousands of years in to the future or past so is that possible.

Well, thanks to Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, time ravel is certainly possible. We know thanks to the development of atomic clocks that Einstein’s theories about speed and gravity affecting the passage of time is correct. Einstein suggested that gravity would warp space-time (the term he gave to four dimensional space that includes directions plus time) and this has been tested. In fact modern atomic clocks can pick out the minute differences in the passage of time every subsequent inch above the earth’s surface as time speeds up as the effect of the earth’ s gravity weakens.

Einstein predicted speed too would affect time in what he described as time dilation. For any observer travelling close to the speed of light a journey that to an outsider may have taken thousands of years would have passed within seconds. Time dilation means that travelling hundreds of years into the future in a matter of seconds is certainly possible. However, would it be possible to get back again?

This is where many scientists are divided. Strictly speaking theoretical properties of space time do allow for this, although for any travelling back in time a worm hole would have to be created or found. A worm hole is a theoretical link between two parts of space where a traveller could enter one end and appear somewhere completely different at the other end this may be another part of the universe or indeed another point in time.

However, critics of the possibility of time travel point out that because travellers from the future have never visited us that probably means that time travel will never be possible. They also point out the any travelling backwards in time could create paradoxes (what would happen to you if you were mean enough to go back in time and kill your grandparents).

However, time paradoxes exist now. Many computer networks are not synchronised which can lead to errors, loss of data or paradoxes like emails being sent before they were received. To avoid any time crisis it is important for all computer networks to be perfectly synchronised. The best and most accurate method of doing this is to use a NTP time server that receives the time from an atomic clock.

Richard N Williams is a technical author and specialist in atomic clocks, telecommunications, NTP and network time synchronisation helping to develop dedicated NTP clocks. Please visit us for more information about an NTP server or another time server solution.

Many are convinced that we cannot travel thru time and they say we will never be able to do so. This has been a subject that has hung up more than one human mind in deep thought for years upon end; considering the ramification and potential eventualities of time travel. In the end many give up, yet some come to conclusions. One conclusion often reached is that it just is not possible. Yet others are steadfast in their believe that it is not only possible but it is only a matter of; you guessed it time. Recently in an online think tank a fellow thinker; Marv stated:
“Time isn’t something we can travel through because it’s not a “thing”. It’s only a metric, a concept of change.”
Indeed time may not be a thing; such as a wave, but it might be a direction and perhaps traveling “thru” time is the wrong verbiage of what would be occurring. For instance you would not travel thru time, but “to” a time, which would be a place, which is a thing [noun; person, place or thing].
For instance if we see the birth of a star on the other side of the Galaxy, assuming it is “X” number of millions of light years away, then what you are seeing happened long ago and you are not observing an ancient event. However if you traveled to that star now; it may have lived, expanded and burned up and may not even exist any longer in the now.
So if you traveled there within seconds, you would be in the future from the perspective of those observers on Earth viewing the past. Indeed you would be traveling to “time” from your former perspective, not thru time. Although as you traveled the perspective would be changing rapidly and thus one could say you were traveling “thru” an observational perspective of time.
Now then if you were far away and saw a huge explosion in space which send a intensive burst of energy hurling towards Earth and you traveled faster than that energy and warned everyone to go under ground for a few days to be safe, then you would know the future of the event from Earth’s perspective.
Kind of like knowing a team is about to make a touch down before it happens due to a delay in the TV videotape relay so you can bet your friends and know in advance. So, in this case you traveled faster than the observable event and thus; Did you travel back in time and foretell of the future? Or did you simply see of the present from a different perspective of an event unfolding? If you have the time to consider time travel, perhaps you might think on this in 2006.
“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/