Cleverbot for students studying English. Comes with ASR. What's that?

A big thanks to Nicholas Walker for introducing me to the subject of virtual characters and chatbots. Cleverbot is one clever robot. But try convincing Cleverbot that he is a robot and you might be facing a stiff fight, er.. I mean conversation.

Launched on the Web in 1997. 65 million conversations since then. Judged to be 59.3% human in the 2011 Turing Test, far exceeding AI experts' expectations, as the humans in the same event "achieved just 63.3%" (Wikipedia). Cleverbot is one impressive piece of software.

Available on the Web with text synthesis and voice recognition, Cleverbot has been mimicking human conversations with uncanny accuracy for more than a decade. Cleverbot is also available on iOS and Android (with a spoken voice!).

Steve taught me to be hungry and foolish.

My tribute to Steve Jobs on http://chrisbetcher.com/2011/10/steve/

Hi Chris.

Yes, Steve will be sorely missed.

      Image by Jonathan Mak , Hong Kong

An interesting way to navigate Moodle with hotspots

  Nicholas Walker of Collège Montmorency has shared an interesting and instructive post on how to create a Moodle block that contains a image with hotspots that link to various parts of your Moodle course.

For those of you who would like a different approach for your users to navigate through your Moodle activities and resources, why not try it out? You can read about his method at http://adte.ca/2011/09/navigate-moodle.

A Youtube video a day makes Jack (or Jill) a Web 2.0 boy (or girl) - how to embed Web 2.0 code inside an ACal Calendar

Ever heard of the ACal Calendar Project? Arthur Wiebe's ACal Calendar is one of those unsung heroes of freeware PHP Calendars.Today's post is something that just hit me as I was about to knock off to bed. So this post is going to be as concise as possible, and yet leave you wanting for more information. So you'll have to figure out the installation steps by yourself for the time being.[Note: I added the installation steps on the next day]