Slate has an online feature as part of their election coverage that allows you to trace the activities of the various Presidential candidates.  Using Google Maps, the page lets you view a timeline of their campaign stops, select candidates to follow and get more information including news and video feeds from YouTube.

The page could be used as a discussion starter for classes, but is also another good example of how Google Maps and other location-based applications are creating new ways to visualize information.

article at Slate.com

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The Creative Commons add-in for MS Office allows you to embed a CC license of your choosing in your Word document, Excel Spreadsheet or your Powerpoint show. A big advantage of doing this is to explicitly specify how you would like others to use your work. For example, a “Share Alike” license specifies that others may use your work as long as it for non-commercial purposes, you are given credit and anything they make with it has to carry the same license. You can get the add-in or read more about Creative Commons.

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Verizon has announced the Verizon LG Voyager to be released in the Fall of 2007, a product that will directly compete with the Apple iPhone. Verizon’s Wireless Chief Marketing Officer claims, “It will kill the iPhone.”

The Voyager has a touch screen exterior (like the iPhone but smaller), but users will be able to unclamp the phone to reveal a second screen that comes with a full QWERTY keyboard. Other features include:

* HTML browser
* Full V CAST-capabilities
* V CAST Mobile TV
* V CAST Music
* Ability to play .mp3, .wma and unprotected .aac files
* V CAST Video
* High-Speed Wireless Broadband Access
* Removable microSD memory (8GB).

Verizon says the Voyager should be in stores for the holidays.

You can see photos of the Voyager or watch a video demo of the phone. No word yet on the price, but reviewers say they expect it to be in the $300 and up range. One reviewer gushed, “The Voyager is so awesome, your hand will tremble in fear.” (Maybe he works with the Verizon Marketing Officer.)

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“Authentic learning”—or learning-by-doing— engages students in the multidisciplinary problem solving and critical thinking researchers and experts use every day. Advances in technology enable access to a greater range of real and virtual environments. Why Today’s Students Value Authentic Learning, a white paper from the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI), explores student attitudes toward authentic learning, highlighting its benefits as well as potential concerns.

Haptic technologies are one way to make learning more realistic for students. Haptics simulate physical properties such as weight, momentum, friction, texture, or resistance through interfaces that let users “feel” what is happening on the screen. For example, medical students may use haptics for a simulation of giving an injection or performing a surgical technique. ELI’s paper on The 7 Things You Should Know About Haptics provides a simple overview of how haptic technology can enable authentic learning.

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A new software package, eJamming, available for the Mac and Windows, allows musicians to perform together live through the Internet.  The software is free during the public beta period.

The software synchronizes audio from different users in a “group” so that they can play instruments and sing in “real time”.  There’s a slight delay in the audio due to Internet latency, but the site has a tutorials that teach you how to work with the delay and features of the software.  The site also includes a forum where users can look for other musicians to form an online group or to offer or take lessons.

Besides musicians, the software might have applications for actors performing radio scripts or readings or different types of language instruction activities.  The software is getting considerable attention in the press and the founders were named in May as one of the top 24 new innovators on the net by “Fortune” magazine.

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Google Earth has recently published new imagery, allowing higher resolution viewing in some areas in over 130 countries. You can read more about it and follow clues to the new images at the Google Lat-Long Blog.

The Google Earth Blog (not affiliated with Google) highlights interesting uses of Google Earth, including a visualization of Burma, and a description of new, free tools to explore census data in Google Earth. From Frank Taylor’s Google Earth Blog:

“A nice new US census visualization tool for Google Earth has been released by Zonums Software. The new tool is called GE Census Explorer and allows you produce colorful 3D bar charts, pie charts, histograms, and scatter-plots. FreeGeographyTools has a good review and lots of screenshots. This new tool requires you to download an application, but a web interface is promised “soon”. Meanwhile, you could also try gCensus which does something similar for Google Earth using a web interface.”

The Center for Instructional Technology is offering workshops for anyone interested in Google Earth, including a brief lunchtime introduction, a hands-on workshop to create your own materials within Google Earth, demonstrations by the Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness and a Google Earth users group. Come and find out what you can do! Register on the CIT website for these events.

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Courses, events and campus life activities at the University of California at Berkeley are now featured on YouTube. Much of the content is similar to U.C. Berkeley’s channel on iTunes U.

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See the listing of tools. Many of them are FREE. These tools can be used to capture screens, create screencasts or demonstrations (ie narrated recordings of a system’s screen output) and/or simulations which also include functionality to interact with the simulated system.

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As we know Microsoft rival Google has its own Web-based office application known as Google Apps, users are now invited to pre-register for Office Live Workspace, which allows those with Microsoft Office to access their Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents online. The software giant is dubbing the offering an “online companion” to the Office product. More…

But there is a catch: Users will not to able to edit the documents they are viewing through a browser unless they have Office installed on their computer.

“You need Microsoft Office to edit Office documents, but if you do not have it installed you can view Office documents in a browser [both Internet Explorer and Firefox will be supported] and can comment on them,” a Microsoft spokeswoman told eWEEK Sept. 30.

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Arden: The World of William Shakespeare ended a year of development, but the multiplayer online world modeled on the settings and characters in Shakespeare’s plays is incomplete. The MacArthur Foundation provided $240,000 for the project, but as Edward Castronova, the professor at Indiana University who led the virtual environment project notes in his blog, “…this is very hard to do, and especially hard to do in an academic context. ” As for future development, Castronova writes, “The Bard has left the building for now, and his return date is unknown.”

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