Learner-Shaped Technology

On the Google Earth Blog, Frank Taylor lists the top ten Google Earth time animations for 2006. Time animations were added in Google Earth 4 and are a great way to view data that changes over time, for example animal and human cases of avian flu (Declan Butler’s blog). Authors simply add a time span element to data in kml files, like so, and Google Earth renders a time slider bar in the user interface.

<TimeSpan id=”ID”>
<begin>begin date here </begin>
<end>end date here</end>
</TimeSpan>

The time slider is highlighted in a screen shot of the avian flu map below.

There are some Google Earth software limitations that were apparent when viewing Hurricane Katrina data. I wished I could have incremented the “animation” in hours rather than days. There are some great suggestions for improvement on Stefan Geens’ Ogle Earth Blog, so I won’t rehash them here. This functionality is a great addition to GE!

Tim Lauer of Lewis Elementary School points to an interesting use of Darwiin Remote Software and the Nintendo Wii remote to run a Roomba (a robot which will vacuum your house). I don’t have a Nintendo Wii game, but if Darwiin will capture 3D acceleration from the Wii game remote, it shouldn’t be too difficult to determine force information from the remote. So if someone is playing Wii baseball for example, it should be easy to capture the force of their swing. Perhaps students could experiment with different variables to increase the force of the swing and determine the impact on the distance the batted ball travels. Does the game show the force of the swing already?

In my physics classes we used the Vernier accelerometers to capture 3-dimensional acceleration on different amusement park rides. Although the experience turned me green, we got exceptional data (see image and graph below). I wonder if using a combination of a Wii remote, Bluetooth, and some sort of handheld device if the same sort of data could be gathered on the ride? It still doesn’t solve my motion sickness, but maybe it would save a few bucks and be fun to try.

Okay, if I get up before the sun comes up on vacation to catch up on my blog, does that mean I’ve joined the ranks of the blog-addicted? I mentioned in a previous post that I converted to a MacBook Pro this summer for my new job at Furman. Faculty in Math and Sciences have both Macs and PCs, so I figured I could best support them with a Mac running a VM with Windows XP, using Parallels.

There are many times I need to be running a local web server to experiment, and since I was more comfortable with PC, I’d run WAMP (an easy installation for Windows of Apache, MySQL, and PHP). After wrestling with some issues running MediaWiki on WAMP/Windows, I decided to give MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) a try. Now I have one more reason to hang out on the Mac side. This is way easy! It literally took 5 minutes for me to get MAMP set up and install MediaWiki on my laptop. Here’s a shot of the MAMP control window.

I don’t do much Java coding now (I used to do a lot), but this summer I was able to set up Eclipse as a Java IDE on the Mac side easier than on the PC. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe my next personal purchase will be a Mac! Rhapsody is one of the few reasons I fire up parallels now. The web client just doesn’t do it for me.

After complaining this summer about the limitations of PowerPoint as an information-sharing medium this summer, Dr. Jane Love at Furman pointed me towards Edward Tufte’s essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Great stuff! I was really struck by the chasm between what our brains and eyes want to see and what a PowerPoint presentation gives us instead. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to read his book The Visual Display of Quantative Information and get one of Tufte’s posters like the one graphically displaying Napolean’s march.

Shortly after reading Tufte for the first time I added the Information Aesthetics Blog to my reader. I enjoy the blogs but confess I usually have to go to the source to understand the data being represented. Below is a nice link from infosthetics to a Google video comparing stellar and planetary sizes. Although one missing planet begs a question that would leave my kids unable to contain silly laughter. That’s where their sense of humor is right now.

I’ve recently been looking into open source content management systems (CMS) like Joomla and Drupal as potential frameworks for a new version of CTEL’s website. I checked into Drupal after learning on Tim Lauer’s blog that it was being used to power his school’s website. We’re looking to move our registration for workshops online, and while we could write a custom application, Drupal (which also led to an exploration of Joomla) seemed to provide a great framework for a website, along with event management. Joomla bubbled up to the top, but only because it seems to have more options for events than Drupal, for the time being. We’ll still have to do some custom coding to get the registration application the way we want it, but we’re moving ahead with Joomla based on events and some of the following features (to name just a few):

• Themes
• Built in Search
• Print and PDF maker
• Contact Management
• RSS Feeds
• Polls
• Most Popular
• User Management
• Usage Statistics
• Events Management
• Content Management – Edit in Place, Setting View and Expiration Dates, etc.

It took a little while, but once the concepts of module, component, section, category, etc. took hold, I was able to throw together a robust website very quickly. I experimented with Joomla locally with a WAMP installation and pretty minimal setup. My next step is to turn a small application I wrote to capture faculty availability times into a Joomla component and hook into their user API. Look for changes on the CTEL site in the next couple of months. Open source rocks! Here are some other plugins from Joomla that I’m checking out now.

• DocMan – document management
• Generic Form Creator
• Forums
• Blog
• Newsletter Creation / Management – Manage subscriptions, etc.
• Google Maps Integration / Plot Visitor Geographic Distribution on Google Maps
• Versioning
• Portfolio
• Folksonomy tags
• Dropdown menus
• Wiki
• Podcasting
• Surveys (Joomla SurveyForce)
• Template Builder for Dreamweaver

I think it’s probably prudent for us to wait for Joomla 1.5’s release before we unveil the site, but it looks like that’s coming very soon.

There’s no turning back now. Last night I paid my 80 bucks and hit the submit button on the sign-up form for the Atlanta ING marathon. I feel like I have a decent base from running the Shut-In Ridge Trail Run in November, but I still have a lot of work to do. I hope the knee holds up! I started a running blog to keep up with my training, so I don’t muddy the edtech discussions here, but I figured by writing this here, I’d be ramping up my commitment level even further. There are quite a few people from Furman signed up for the race, and my brother-in-law is running as well, so that should be fun. The race will be a Boston qualifier, but I’d have to have an extraordinarily good run to hit that mark, but a guy can dream ….

As I mentioned in a previous post we’ve just begun to explore the use student-generated wikis to help students construct chemistry knowledge, making use of ChemDraw to generate chemical structures. After an initial introduction today, ChemDraw seems to be a great way to create very nice chemical structures for a final page. However, it’s definitely not as quick as drawing the structure on the back of a napkin, so the extra time involved in creating the structure could limit a good wiki collaboration. I read that the open source course management system, Moodle, is looking to integrate a collaborative whiteboard currently available through Jabber / Coccinella. I tried it out and it’s pretty simple. Since Moodle has a Wiki module and will soon have an interactive whiteboard via Coccinella, we could do what we need with Moodle and ChemDraw. While the wiki page is undergoing development, the students could “hand draw” the chemical structures and then use ChemDraw for the more formal, final presentation.

One of the output formats of Coccinella is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) but not jpeg. Although the new Mozilla browser supports SVG display, I didn’t want to bank on the fact that everyone’s browser would support SVG. I found a nice SVG converter online, so I was able to convert the molecule above to a jpeg from home, without photoshop.

GE has a collaborative online whiteboard as well that looks potentially useful. The sketching session can be saved, so that you can see the progression of the diagram as well as the final product.

I’m experimenting with Google Docs and noticed there’s a feature to publish the collaborative Google document directly to a blog. I’m going to give it shot, so if you see this, it worked! This may help me get around the fact that I haven’t had much success getting a spell checker installed in WordPress. This seems to be a really nice way to collaborate, as opposed to emailing a document back and forth with tracking turned on. Nice! You can save as a pdf, open office document, and more. The only problem is that the title didn’t transfer. I added that manually. Other than that… very smooth.

You’ve probably experienced AJAX through google maps and other websites. It makes for a great web experience, especially for the impatient. Dr. Lloyd Benson provided this timeline link. My colleague, Dr. Diane Boyd, had a great idea to combine timelines and maps, updating the map as the user progressed along a particular timeline. We’ll have to learn AJAX programming to do it, or perhaps it might fit into an First Year Seminar with a historical and technological focus, and the students could drive the construction. It’s definitely something to keep on the radar as we continue to strive to help students incorporate historical perspectives into their learning experiences.

We’ve formed a group to explore the potential of gaming for education. Here’s an interesting implementation in organic chemistry. This paper (created via wiki) explores two games, OrgoFrag and Wheel of Orgo, and has several screenshots and examples. Here’s an example of one taken from the following website.

You can even download the free version or full version of Unreal and download the games from Drexel. Setup is explained here. There were some issues with video drivers and parallels (I’ve been converted to Mac / Parallels user) when I tried this, so I’ll have to wait to try this on a real PC. I’m trying to sound like I know what I’m talking about. I’m not a gamer, so this is new territory for me!

Structuring the activity so that students that are pressured by time constraints or hindered by the competitive atmosphere can still get the most out of the opportunity would be very important. If we decide to explore this, I’ll share those strategies in a future blog.