Andrea Novicki and I (Shawn Miller)  attended the Educause Learning Initiative’s 2009 Conference January 20-22 in Orlando.

Link to Educause conference archive (videos, ppts, etc): http://connect.educause.edu/term_view/eliannual09

The conference: the meta-experience

ANDREA: ELI is attended by people who are excited about using technology in teaching. The attendees (faculty, learning center folks, instructional technologists) may also be excited about technology in general, but the focus is on the possibilities that technology provides for education.  The organizers and attendees are the sort of people who are willing to try things to find out what works. Therefore, there are many experiments at this conference: types of sessions, varieties of activities, and how people learn at the conference (which is the most interesting to me). It’s like being able to see into the future, or, even better, getting to play in the future.   (more…)

Google Earth has exciting new features.  Download the new version and explore underwater as you have explored land.

1. Google Ocean – the sea floor is now mapped, and data, pictures, videos, user-generated content are all now available (for example, you can check the the water temperature in the Florida Keys ( 71 F)).  Here’s a video with Sylvia Earle exploring the new features.
Duke’s Pat Halpin contributed to Google Ocean and participated in the launch.

2. Sharing Tours to share content, you can create, narrate and share tours that others can open in Google Earth 5.0.  The tour will run just as you recorded it, but it can be interrupted by the user to look around.  It does not make a video, but is an easier way to share information. Here’s how, and even more help.

3. Historical information Google Earth has incorporated old images, like from San Francisco in the 1940s.  Read about the historical imagery in Google’s Lat Long blog.

4. Google Mars Yes, you can explore Mars, too.

Watch Frank Taylor explore Google Mars.

More information:

Google Earth blog video showcase

Google Earth blog descriptions of updates

Still not sure?  Take a tour.

Instructors wanting students to do some simple photo management and editing in classes or in their own work have sometimes turned to Picasa, an application from Google.  However, the application has been Windows only, until now.

Google has released a beta of Picasa for the Mac, available at picasa.google.com/mac/ .  It requires Mac OS X version 10.4 or later and an Intel based Macintosh is required.

A blog post at Wired has a quick review of the beta, finding it faster at loading and managing photos than iPhoto, which ships with the Mac.  It’s only missing a few small features when compared with the Windows version, including geotagging.  However, if you’re using an iPhone or other device that geotags photos, it will preserve the geotags for use at a later time in the application.

blog post at Wired.com

Have you seen this around Duke’s campus?  It’s a model of a mock rock outcrop, to be measured and described by students in Dr. Alex Glass’s EOS 11: Dynamic Earth course.  Students are using GPS to find and mark the stations (there are 60 around campus), each of which provides data on the type of rock, its dip (the angle at which it tilts into the ground), and its compass orientation (known as the “strike”).   This data will make it possible to infer the (virtual) bedrock geology under the Duke Campus.  Students will pool their data to map the rock layers, and then predict where oil might be found.  Mapping “strike and dip” is a common activity for professional geologists.  Dr. Glass constructed the stations and planned this activity for his students to have real, hands-on experience using GPS, making measurements and observations, inferring underlying structure from surface observations, and making predictions, just like professional geologists.  Students are participating now; we’ll find out what they think soon.

This project was funded by a Jump Start Grant from the Center for Instructional Technology.

Dr. Peter Haff’s class here at Duke used Google Earth for their final project in the American Southwest (EOS 181S.01).  They  took a field trip to the Mojave Desert in October to study geologic features, including volcanism, tectonics, soils and weathering, paleo-lakes, wind-blown sand and dust, landslides, and alluvial fans.  Prior to the field trip, the students selected biological, geological and astronomical topics to prepare for presentations in the field.  At the end of the semester, students took the Earth and Ocean Sciences department (and me) on a virtual tour of their field trip using Google Earth.  We followed the track of the trip to see the geological features and embedded photos and information supplied by the students.  The students took turns explaining the features illustrated in Google Earth and their photos, including dunes, granite outcrops, vegetation zoning, desert pavement, dry lakes, badlands, bighorn sheep, craters, fault scarps, petroglyphs, a borax mine, relic shorelines, lava tubes and alien fresh jerky.

The students and Dr. Haff collaborated to create the Google Earth file, pooling their pictures and information.  The students found that using Google Earth enhanced their learning because it provided:

• a sense of scale
• the ability to make measurements
• an overview of the area
• context for what they were seeing
• orientation.

Read more about this course in Duke Magazine.

More information, examples and tutorials about Google Earth can be found on their website;  or, contact CIT for help incorporating Google Earth into your course.

The Chronicle of Higher Education features an article this week on literary scholarship that is using technology to investigate new questions with texts that are available online.  New tools, such as Google Earth, are allowing professors to map and sort textual information in new ways and extend the scholarly process into the classroom.

The article takes an in-depth look at an online project, the Map of Early London, edited by Janelle Jenstad, an assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria.  The map, using John Stow’s 1598 work A Survey of London, overlays place information contained in literary works produced during the era.  Users at the site can explore proxmity of authors to places mentioned in works, the cultural life of different parts of the city mentioned in literature, people mentioned in connection with specific places, and many other geographic aspects of the texts.

The Chronicle has assembled an audio slide show tour of the Map as part of the article.

Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube are a few examples of social networking sites that are popular these days. If you are involved in more than one of these communities, is there a way to make the sum of social networking sites greater than the parts (the individual sites themselves)?

Flock is a web browser, based on Mozilla Firefox, that attempts to unify social networks. Read a Technology Review article about Flock.

WRAL has an article on one of Google’s latest initiatives, called “Friend Connect“. “Friend Connect” provides a framework, no programming required, that will enable people to interact with their friends and use favorite applications they have accumulated on social networks even when they aren’t visiting those sites.

And to consider future possibilities with social networking read the Technology Review article about MIT students who are exploring the power of an open source cell phone operating system, provided by Google. One idea is a social-networking program that helps people make new friends in their area using geolocation. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine how a service like this could be integrated with social networking sites. For example, the cell phone software could help create spontaneous in-person connections leveraging connections made online through social networking sites.

An interesting and very mainstream article about how humanitarian applications for Google Earth are blossoming.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/08/google.refugees.ap/index.html

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/ 

EveryBlock is a new website that aims to collate localized information for major cities and urban areas. The site, which now includes information on New York, San Francisco, and Chicago brings together publicly available mapped information, such as Flickr photo feeds and restaurant inspections, with local news and other information from providers such as CraigsList entries.

Mapping is a larger trend on the Internet, with services such as GoogleMaps proving to be popular among users. EveryBlock, as it expands listings for other cities, could prove to be a useful resources for visualizing a wide range of information about cities for discussions and class activities.

http://www.everyblock.com/