Keene on Tech

Many of you have undoubtedly heard of Dr. Michael Wesch by now. His Web 2.0 YouTube videos have been viewed millions of times. His work is rapidly breaking the traditional education mold of how today’s students learn (or don’t learn as the case may be). He has embraced many of the emerging social networking tools and has taken a critical look at the brief history of YouTube. A cultural anthropologist by training, Wesch is applying this to how students learn in this new digital media age and what it means for the future of education. Recently, Wesch posted another stellar video of a presentation titled A Portal to Media Literacy he gave at the University of Manitoba on June 17, 2008. The YouTube video is just over an hour long but well worth watching in its entirety… I think the ideas, techniques and tools Wesch presents in this talk deserve active discussion and experimentation in the educational community. With higher education at a crossroads in terms of how digital media is changing and challenging educational institutions it is important that educators understand not only the technologies causing these changes, but how students and can utilize these developments and fold them into true learning tools and experiences rather than mere entertainment. Wesch points out that there are no natives to these technologies. Old and young alike are being exposed to these very new and rapidly changing social technologies. Due to this, both groups are learning how to use these technologies at the same time and each can offer the other group something from their collective knowledge. Teachers should not assume that their students are complete experts with these tools. I would urge you to look at all of Wesch’s videos on YouTube. They all offer unique insights into the current issues at hand with higher education and technology. AND Wesch gives a nod to NMC’s Horizon Report in particular as a good source for seeing what is coming down the road.

Michael Wesch’s Netvibes website is mentioned in the talk and demonstrates some of the information aggregation aspects he discusses. It can be viewed here.

Wesch’s Digital Ethnography Working Group blog at Kansas State University (where he teaches) can be found here.

Keene Haywood (University of Texas@Austin – DIIA)

Today Google announced that they are releasing the Google Earth plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows. This is quite a significant announcement because almost as soon as Google Earth was unleashed in 2005, people have been clamoring to have Google Earth work in the browser rather than as a separate software application that has to be downloaded and installed. With this release, the Google Earth API is also released giving developers a rich array of options for tapping into Google Earth’s functionality and imagery through an extensive JavaScript API library. Pardon the pun, but the sky may be the limit now for developers who want to embed Google Earth’s features and images into their own websites. The API includes access to Google Sky as well (which was browser compatible a few months ago) so one is not limited to just working with Earth imagery. If one is already using the Google Maps API, then enabling the 3D Google Earth feature in Firefox or IE, requires only one new line of Javascript (much more of course if you want to do lots of customized things). If one had to pick a defining moment when the online mapping world jumped up in versions, this might be it. I tentatively say welcome to web mapping v.2.5. This should open the flood gates for new 3D applications built around Google Earth/Maps and the web browser. The link to the announcement is here and the API link is here. Oh, and like just about everything Google, the Earth API is a beta release

The announcement was made at Google’s I/O conference for developers. This conference initially began as a small gathering for geospatial specialists working on Google Earth and Maps but has since become much larger and now incorporates a range of Google apps for developers.

Mac users: A Mac version of the API is due to follow shortly according to this post at O’Reilly’s Radar.

Keene Haywood (University of Texas@Austin – DIIA)

The ProgrammableWeb posted a piece on May 5th that mentions they now track 3000 mashups on their website. What is interesting is they break down the numbers and it turns out that 39 percent of these mashups are mapping in nature. While the term mashup entered into popular use through the music industry, the explosion of mapping on the web, especially through Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps has been one of the driving forces of mashups and has helped bring the term to a wider audience…read on!

As the APIs for these mapping applications mature, one will see more and more examples of “mashing” together of geospatial data from various sources (it will get easier and easier for less technically inclined folks as well). One particularly cool mashup developed by Map Channels is called Dual Maps. What is interesting about this is that it pulls together two very different sources of geospatial data from Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth imagery. Google Maps (and now Google Earth) have the cool unique feature of StreetView, while Microsoft has the unique and cool Bird’s eye view. But until Dual Maps came along, you could not display this type of imagery together. Now you can, but there is much more. Dual Maps allows for lots of customization and then allows you to embed your custom map into your web page or blog. Its quite nifty. Having the best of what Google Maps and MS Virtual Earth offer side by side is very nice. And it all happens in the browser so you don’t have to worry about platform issues (Virtual Earth is Windows only – not surprising). While Dual Maps is not overlaying data onto these maps, it is mashing together two different map sources to increase the value of the geographic information.

So if you want some inspiration and or a nice tool to add more dimensions to your online mapping, check out Dual Maps, its very unique. In addition, Map Channels has other projects that you might find useful or interesting. Keep in mind that StreetView and Bird’s Eye view imagery may not be available for your area. Many areas are mapped with this technology, but there is still much more to do.

Keene Haywood (Univesity of Texas @ Austin)