Monthly Archives: August 2005

Historical map bonanza

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Every once in a while I run across a Web site or some technology tool that really wows me. I had one of those experiences after listening to David Rumsey’s talk at the Where 2.0 Conference via IT Conversations today. Rumsey gave a fascinating talk about the history of cartography and described some of his recent work applying modern visualization technology to 18th and 19th century maps. I heard enough in the podcast to prompt me to visit his site, The David Rumsey Map Collection, and I was richly rewarded for the effort.

With a collection of over 11,000 maps, the site is an amazing resource for students and teachers. Since 1997, Rumsey has shifted his focus from collecting to digitizing and sharing his collection. The result is a Web site that blends gorgeous historical maps with modern GIS tools and provides an easy-to-use interface to locate maps of particular places.

If you’ve got an Java-enabled Web browser (that’s practically everyone) then you might get a something like the following where I’ve done a search for maps of places in Minnesota.

thumbnail screenshot of a collection of historical Minnesota maps

Then I selected a 19th century map of Minneapolis.

thumbnail screenshot of a historic map of Minneapolis

Finally, I downloaded the Java applet that provides a modern GIS interface to some historical map data. The following screenshot shows a portion of Lewis and Clark’s journey overlayed with some major highways.

thumbnail screenshot of a GIS application that overlays Lewis and Clarks journey and modern highways

Rumsey provides all of the digitized maps under a Creative Commons license that allows for virtually any non-commercial use. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love Creative Commons?) The uses for this site are so vast that I don’t know where to start. Wouldn’t it be incredible to use some of these maps in iMovie projects about historical events or persons? Let’s see, merging old maps with new data, 3D flybys of early 20th century San Francisco, and on and on it goes. I’ve got an email all queued up for every history teacher in my school district to let them know about this collection.

Jargon watch: The Long Tail

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It seems like “the long tail” is popping up everywhere these days so I guess this is a good time for a jargon watch post about it. The long tail literally refers to the general shape of a sloping probability function. Not surprisingly, the interesting part goes beyond the mathematical equation to a principle that seems to be describing elements of a new economy.

The easiest way to think about the long tail is to put it in terms of popularity. Consider the market for DVDs. The left side of the graph represents the Hollywood blockbuster movies and the extreme right end of the graph represents a home movie of the type you might find at ourmedia.org. The point is that without the Internet and the means to find obscure films, the right three-fourths of the graph wouldn’t exist at all. Netflix illustrates nicely how this works. I’ve rated 169 movies on the Netflix site over the last year or so and when I log in to Netflix now I get 243 recommendations. Within two clicks I find a film called Rashomon by acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa that the Netflix system thinks I will like based on my previous ratings and the ratings of others who’ve rating movies similarly. Now I’m not saying that Kurosawa’s film is equivalent to somebody’s home video, but I’m reasonable sure that I wouldn’t have found it at my local Blockbuster.

A couple key points:

  • There are more “things” in the tail than there are in the left side. That could refer to movies, musicians, podcasts, or blogs.
  • Most of the things in the tail aren’t very good, but the important point is that a few of them are really good.
  • Thanks to easy information access it’s possible for bloggers, musicians, etc. to create content for a small audience…and that’s OK.

So let’s bring this back to the world of educational technology. The most obvious point is that there are a lot of great thinkers out there blogging and working in the long tail. If you restrict your students to using a traditional textbook they will never find the gems out there in the tail where so many fresh perspectives and new ideas can be found. We don’t need to wait for information to show up in dead tree form anymore. This blog is great example of the long tail. I’ve never published a book or an article in the education literature (…yet), but that hasn’t stopped me from blabbing on and on for the whole world to see. If you’ve ever found anything worth reading on this site, you’ve benefited from the long tail.

For more information about the long tail you can check out the Wikipedia article or an IT Conversations podcast of a presentation called Economics of the Long Tail by Chris Anderson, the originator of the long tail concept.

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STP #10: Technology planning with Dr. Larry Anderson

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Dr. Larry Anderson is founder and director of the National Center for Technology Planning, an organization dedicated to providing resources for schools and school districts who want to develop dynamic and effective technology plans. From their Web site:

The National Center for Technology Planning (NCTP) is a clearinghouse for the exchange of many types of information related to technology planning. This information may be: school technology plans available for downloading online; technology planning aids (checklists, brochures, sample planning forms, PR announcement forms); and/or electronic monographs on timely, selected topics. The NCTP was created for those who: need help, seek fresh ideas, or seek solutions to problems encountered with planning.

I met Larry last July in San Jose at the Apple Distinguished Educator Summer Institute and have been looking forward to recording this conversation ever since. Larry outlines some of the benefits that schools and districts can derive from the technology planning process, describes a technology planning approach that will be much more meaningful than the typical state-mandated ones, and shares lots of examples from his years of experience. This is a pretty long conversation, but there’s so much valuable material in what Larry has to say that I couldn’t bear to cut it down any more. Please feel free to post comments or additional questions in the comments section. I’m sure Larry would be happy to respond.

A quick production note: Larry and I spoke via Skype and the sound quality is quite good. He was using a headset mic and it made it much easier to set a consistent sound level, presumably because he was staying a constant distance from the microphone. I did all of the editing with Audacity which I am convinced offers the best combination of simplicity, power, and cost.

Download: STP-LarryAnderson (25.7 MB, 56:12)

Exemplary student videos

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I organized a two-day “Filmmaking for Educators” workshop for about 15 teachers last week. The participants learned about the basics of filmmaking, wrote their script, shot the video, edited the footage, and presented their work at a film festival at the end of the second day. Everyone had a great time, and I know that these teachers will be better able to teach their students about communicating with digital media.

If you want to see what’s possible with student-created video, you must head over to the iCan 6 film festival site and view some of the student films. These amazing films were created by students at San Fernando High School as part of an amazing digital storytelling program run by Marco Torres. You will be amazed.

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STP #8: A chat with the gang

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It’s been long in coming, but the newest installment of the Savvy Technologist Podcast has finally arrived. But it’s not the usual STP. I’ve always enjoyed the Gillmor Gang podcast and I’ve wanted to do something like it in the educational technology category for a long time. Now that I’ve got the home studio operational I leaped at the opportunity to record a Skype conference call with some friends from “coast to coast.”

Steve Burt from Clarity Innovations is the moderator and I’m joined by Tim Lauer and Will Richardson for the inaugural Educational Technologists Coast to Coast Podcast. At least that’s the title one of us thought of about 10 seconds before I hit the record button. (It’s not a bad name, but other suggestions would be welcomed.) We hit a number of topics including Web 2.0 and its implications for education, utilizing the Web for school communications, frustrations about the slow uptake of Web technology in schools, student information systems, and each of us recommends a bit of technology that we think ed tech people should have on their radar screens.

Quick production note: you’ll hear some audio artifacts and a bit of distortion in the other guys’ voices. This is a result of the fixes that were required to bring everyone to approximately the same volume. It’s not too bad considering this is a first attempt, but I think we can crank up the production quality a bit next time. I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Download: STP-ETC2C (18.6 MB, 40:28)

Easy long/lat lookup for geocaching

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I’m hoping to get a little geocaching in this weekend on a brief camping trip. My first step was to head over to geocaching.com and search for any geocaches near where we’ll be camping. Of course there were, but it can be difficult sometimes to know exactly how close they are if you only have a zip code to go from. If you know the latitude and longitude for the place you’re staying then you can do an advanced search at geocaching.com for caches in that vicinity. (Hint: From the advanced search choose “By Coordinate” and then “Decimal Degrees.”) You get much more precise results and you can more easily tell if a particular cache is within easy range.

But how to get the latitude and longitude you need? Google Maps to the rescue. Begin by doing a search for the approximate area. We’re going to be in Lake Elmo Park Reserve. Here’s the trick: as soon as you start clicking and dragging around on the map, Google starts including the latitude and longitude in the URL which you can see by clicking on “Link to this page” in the upper-right part of the screen. Just center the map on your point of interest by double-clicking on it and you’re all set. You’ll get an URL something like:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=lake+elmo,
+mn&ll=44.981010,-92.908115&spn=0.031606,0.052104&hl=en

where you will find the latitude and longitude which in this case are 44.981010 and -92.908115 respectively. (Watch the plusses and minuses. Positive is for N and W, Negative is for S and E.) Once you’ve got those numbers, you’ll all set to do your search. I’ll think we’ll give Bring It Around, Elmo 1 2 3, and What Comes Around… a try.

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DTV : television :: podcasting : radio

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I feel like reprising my first podcasting post from last October. Just when you thought you had podcasting figured out, along comes DTV from the Participatory Culture Foundation. DTV, an acronym I have yet to find defined anywhere but I suspect stands for “Distributed TV,” is a system that mirrors podcasting almost perfectly. If podcasting has led to a democratization of radio, then DTV does the same for television.

The Participatory Culture Foundation, a new non-profit based in Massachusetts, believes (from their press page) that “Internet TV should be open-source and based on open standards, just like blogging and podcasting. We’re working to ensure that the new mass medium of internet TV is free, accessible to all, and built with independent voices.” Their partner list is pretty impressive already featuring, among others, former Vice-President Gore’s new cable TV channel Current TV.

DTV uses RSS enclosures just like podcasts, but downloads and plays video content within the DTV player. Not unlike Apple’s iTunes, DTV has a channel browser built in and allows you to subscribe to particular channels for automatic download later. The secret sauce here is BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing system that facilitates the download of huge files without blowing any one server out of the water. The BitTorrent technology is crucial because the size of video files makes it impossible for the average person to host any substantial files on a hosted server account. The bandwidth costs would be enormous. BitTorrent spreads the load among all users who are downloading and, theoretically, would allow almost anyone to create and host these files.

The DTV folks are also developing software that will help users publish video online. Their software, Broadcast Machine, looks a lot like standard blogging tools and will automate the process of creating the necessary BitTorrent files and will help manage multiple channels.

This is pretty exciting. The use of BitTorrent (and there’s really no other way to do this) will make it difficult for companies like Apple to jump in because their legal departments will have group coronaries at the thought of building BitTorrent into their software. But everyone thinks that Apple has a video iPod on way, and if they do it will take no time at all to add the ability to transfer files to the iPod from the DTV application. Then Apple will be able to keep its corporate hands clean while cementing their position as the mobile device of choice for audio and (maybe) video.

So in the meantime, take every application you can think of for podcasting and imagine how it would work with video.

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Submitting podcast questions

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I’m lining up some interviews for upcoming Savvy Technologist podcasts and I’d like to make it possible for all of you to contribute to the discussions. One of the first ones will be about universal design and accessible technology with Earle Harrison of Triumph Technology. If you have a question on the topic you can send it in text or audio form to savvytechnologistpodcast ((at)) gmail ((dot)) com. (I assume you can figure that one out.) If you send an audio question it might just end up “on the air.”