It is becoming common for users of Twitter to associate images with their “tweets”. The two services used most frequently are TwitPic and Twitxr. Images can be uploaded from a desktop machine, but the intended purpose is for people to send images from their cell phones or other mobile devices. From a phone, one can e-mail the image to the service and that generates a Twitter message, which includes a link to the image. It is also possible to look at the service’s website directly and see all of a user’s images with their associated messages.

Twitpic requires a Twitter account and the functionality is currently limited to posting through Twitter. Twitxr is a social networking site in itself, in that you can have “friends” and “follow” other users. You can also specify locations for each image and then view maps that display where all of the recent images were posted. Twitxr also allows users to send images to Facebook and Flickr, in addition to Twitter.

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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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You may post your vacation snapshots on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, but the Library of Congress has bigger plans.

This week the library was overwhelmed by the public response after it put 3,100 of the most popular photos from its collection online at Flickr, getting them outside the Washington library walls and into the hands of people who want to use them. (The selected photos have no known copyright restrictions.)

See more at The Wired Campus

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Would you like to have your students work together to build an annotated map? Google Maps has just added a collaboration feature. When you are creating a personalized, annotated map using the “My Maps” feature of Google Maps, there is a new button entitled “collaborate“. This feature allows you to email an invitation to others to allow them to help annotate the map. For example, a group of students could create a map based on a course reading, annotating placemarks with insightful interpretations. Alternatively, students could map geological features, watersheds or species distributions. Students involved in community projects could place their own pictures together on a map.

Next to the collaborate button on Google Maps is another feature for sharing information. If you’ve found or created a wonderful KML/ KMZ file using Google Earth, and want to share it with someone who does not have access, click the “import” button to upload the file from the web or your computer. You can then send Aunt Mary the link to see your vacation trip, or share the link with your students via Blackboard. Your students or Aunt Mary do not need to have or use Google Earth to see your map.

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Google has added a presentation package, similar to PowerPoint, to their free online collaborative tools suite, GoogleDocs.

The presentation tool in GoogleDocs is simple and lacks many features - it offers limited choices for fonts, color and layout and doesn’t offer the ability to “build” a sequence to demonstrate a concept. However, it does allow multiple people to edit the same slides in real time.

Slate has a review of the software and, at the end of the article, a PowerPoint presentation presented as a movie that summarizes the article - it’s a good example of ways that presentation tools can be used to emphasize points or clarify concepts.

review at Slate

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Google Earth has updated its images for North Carolina (and many other places) on October 23, 2007. Bostock library is now visible in Google Earth (but not yet in Google Maps)! Below,  I’ve embedded the Google Map above an image from Google Earth. Do you see what’s missing in the map?    Google Maps images of Duke were updated less than a week after Google Earth; now the images are the same.

There have been updates to other areas - Crater Lake in Oregon is an even better demonstration of the terrrain in 3D.

There are new tutorials for Google Earth to show you how to publish the same material in both Google Earth and Google Maps, including videos in your materials.

Here’s a PowerPoint presentation on including Google Maps in your website. And a tutorial. (But, it’s pretty easy - you can go to Google Maps, click “link to this page” and follow the directions. )

Frank Taylor, on his Google Earth Blog, points to several sources of images and mapping tools for the California fires.

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Technology plays a major role in Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s new course titled Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century. The course “makes innovative use of all the tools and technical know-how a major university can deliver” including a course Web site with texts, images, artwork, music, geographic, cultural, and historical resources, even a virtual ship tour. According to Greenblatt, his use of new technologies - including GoogleEarth, digital images, and digital video - reflects his latest scholarly thinking, allows for true interdisciplinary approaches and stimulates deep engagement with the material and creativity in his students. Greenblatt is a world-renowned scholar of Renaissance literature and University Professor of the Humanities working on ways to “cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties.” For details of how the course is organized and how technology is used, see the Chronicle of Higher Education’s description.

The library guide for the course reflects the rich array of materials used.

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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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The outreach showcase describes a wide variety of projects   that use Google Earth to bring geographic context to their stories. The resulting visualizations may complement course content or spur ideas for your own projects. Examples of projects:

• Visualization of South American trade - each country is mapped to show exports to all other countries with lines, and the dollar amount is mapped the size of the circles at the end of the line.

• 
• The life and work of Henri Rousseau, the French artist.

• A guide to global environmental issues, created by Popular Science.

• A Malaria Atlas Project with over 20 years of data.

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