A new site currently in beta, VerveEarth, allows users to link their blogs on a GoogleMap.  You can browse blogs, newspapers and other local content in a particular state or region and view a pop-up that includes a feed of the latest posts.  Users registered at the site can also share favorites with friends and leave comments.

With the growing interest in the use of blogs in education, particularly for projects seeking to engage the local community, VerveEarth provides another outlet for viewing and promoting student work.

http://www.verveearth.com/ 

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The prestigious journal Nature has commissioned a series of articles in which experts speculate on important developments in the next few years in their fields. One of the first is “Chemistry for Everyone“, which describes an ‘open’ approach to chemistry. In this approach, chemists format data to help computers access the scientific literature in order to make scientific information freely available and accessible. This will facilitate better sharing of ideas between professional chemists as well as teachers, students, and anyone interested. For example, CrystalEye is a free web application that gathers open-access crystallographic data and allows it to be searched and manipulated. This article is an exciting look at the future:

“As new ideas and technologies arise, the blogosphere spreads them almost instantaneously. And the message from the blogosphere is clear: the next generation of chemists needs open, integrated, semantic systems.”

Read some of the Chemistry blogs on Chemistry Blogspace.

And if you are looking for service learning ideas in Chemistry, check out the blog Chemists without borders.

A post about open source Chemistry requires mentioning my favorite open source Chemistry project by Jean Claude Bradley. Read about his open notebook laboratory, and get more information about this project here. He makes the process of science totally transparent, shares all lab results (positive and negative), and finds great new collaborators.

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To incorporate real-world, current issues in your course, consider using resources recently made available about the human impact on the oceans. There are engaging photos, interactive graphics and accessible articles, which could complement courses on public policy, the environment, biology, chemistry, writing and social sciences, as well as others.

The New York Times has a series of thought-provoking articles and resources about human impact on the seas:

* “Human Shadows on the Seas” reports on the first worldwide portrait of human impacts on the oceans, revealing a planet-spanning mix of depleted resources, degraded ecosystems and disruptive biological blending as species are moved around the globe by accident and intent.

* Pictures of reefs and the scientists working at them are in a slide show “Before they vanish“.

* An interactive map, “Mapping the Other 70 Percent”, allows you to display data on the human impact, shipping, invasive species, temperature, ultraviolet light and acidification.

* An article “Coral Reefs and What Ruins Them” describes recently published research results (listed below) . Comparing the popular press version with essays written by the authors and the scientific research report could be a useful educational opportunity.

PLOS Biology has an open access essay on “Shifting Baselines, Local Impacts, and Global Change on Coral Reefs” to accompany two research reports published in PLoS ONE. These research reports, “Baselines and Degradation of Coral Reefs in the Northern Line Islands” and “Microbial Ecology of Four Coral Atolls in the Northern Line Islands”, are open for online discussion and annotation. Currently, readers can access the Editor’s comments and comments by the Faculty of 1000. Discussing research papers online provides a window into the process of scientific research and showcases critical thinking.

For more information about Coral Reefs, engaging photos and other multimedia, see the Coral Reef Alliance. The resource library section has extensive links to visualizations about changing climate, videos, photographs and other educational organizations.

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Here’s a great story for Lincoln’s birthday. An essay by Kitty Eisele on National Public Radio this morning described photographs of Abraham Lincoln that were recently found in the Library of Congress. They had been misclassified in the past, but a researcher using the Library’s digital image collection noticed the error. The NPR essay, Uncovered Photos Offer View of Lincoln Ceremony, states that the library had received a large collection of Civil War photographs in the 1940s, with handwritten logs. Some of the writing was hard to read, and over time, the caption for these photos were misplaced. But recently, a researcher in Colorado spotted the mislabeled Lincoln photographs in the Library’s online collection.

The Library of Congress is also experimenting with putting some of its image collections on Flickr and asking the public to add descriptions to them. Try tagging some of the photographs yourself - who knows what you’ll find!

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An article at Campus Technology discusses a NEH funded project that allowed art history students to create 3d models of the ancient Greek site of Delph in a cooperative project between Arkansas State University and Coastal Carolina University.

Dubbed Ashes2Art, the project aims to encourage students to use 3d software to recreate and study ancient ruins, a type of work typically done by professional modeling firms.  A variety of software tools were used in the project, but many of the students gravitated towards Google SketchUp, a free software package that is easy to use.

The students are encouraged to do historically accurate renders, drawing on excavation reports and other published archeological evidence.  In some cases, for a project focused on Florence, students had to translate original materials from French as part of their research process.

article at Campus Technology

Ashes2Art website

DigitalDelphi website

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A classified advertisement in last Sunday’s New York Times (2/3/08) states that New York University is “establishing a multi-school center for the research, design and development of electronic interactive games” and is seeking a Faculty Director for that center. The ad goes on to say that “…games are in the process of becoming a major art form, a site for new convergences of art and technology, vehicles for new approaches to learning, and opportunities for cultural studies.” Housed in the Tisch School of Arts, the Faculty Director will be expected to work across multiple schools, develop curricula and hire additional faculty for the center.

I’ve heard of courses and programs on gaming at various schools, but the NYU gaming center sounds like an ambitious and broad-based initiative.

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