Google's Gapminder Tool

Last June, Alan Levine pointed me to the talk by Hans Rosling at TED. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit group that looks at global data through visualization. In his talk he demonstrates how looking at data over time can help us challenge our assumptions and biases about conditions in the developing world. It looks as if Google has been working with him to develop an interactive web tool that takes the Gapminder data and allows you to manipulate and compare the the data in a web browser. For example you can compare life expectancy and annual income and plot the results. I created a quick video which demonstrates the timeline feature, also have a link to the Rosling talk.

I wish I had a tool like this to look at student data...

by way of Paul English...

Technorati Tags: Hans Rosling, TED

Shaded Relief Map Mashup

Noel Jenkins of Digital Geography points to a great teaching resource created by Jon Parker. Jon has created a Google Maps mashup that overlays a relief map on top of Google Maps. His site, shaded-relief.com provides a number of options for moving from one view to another.

Technorati Tags: geography, maps

Google Book Search Adds Maps

Google Book Search has added a new feature creating maps of places mentioned in the book being searched. For example the book, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, when searched on Google Book Search returns a map with push pins to denote places mentioned in the journals. The information behind the pushpin includes a snippet of text and a link to the pages where the place is mentioned.

By way of Inside Google Book Search...

Technorati Tags: books, Google Book Search, maps, search

4 Generations: How to Save a Life...

Jason Kottke has a post about a water buffalo, a poor family in China, and people who want to help. A story about symbolic giving that turns into a real gift. Robert Thompson picks up the story, acts on it, and creates for me the best video I have ever seen on the web. A glimpse of what we call the read/write web can be. Watch this video by Robert Thompson, and see what I mean...

Technorati Tags: Robert Thompson

First Life...

This is pretty funny...

First Life is a 3D Analog World Where Server Lag Does Not Exist...

Access your closet to build your First Life look...

Twitter

In the 1972 movie, Play It Again Sam, Tony Roberts plays a business man who is constantly calling into his answering service (this is 1972 folks, long, long before mobile phones and such...) and reporting his whereabouts and leaving numbers where he can be reached. It is a running gag in the movie and is really pretty funny. Twitter is the web 2.0 answer to this.

"Twitter is a community based website where users post what they are doing at any given moment. Tell friends, colleagues or strangers what you are snacking on, your current interests, favorite websites or just plain goofy nonsense!"

You can update your Twitter information via a web page, a mobile phone, an instant messenger client and if you are running Mac OS X, you can update via Twitterrific, an application that lets you both read and publish posts or "tweets" to the Twitter community website.

Think of this as taking your instant messenger status (Away, busy, etc...) notice to extremes. :-) While I can't see doing this all the time, I can see where at conferences and such it might be fun to play around with. You can choose to make your updates public or private. I've added the Twitter widget to my sidebar so you can see an example of how this might work.

Technorati Tags: twitter, twitterrific

Drupal Weblogs For Students...

This week with the help of Steve Burt, and with some suggestions from Bill Fitzgerald, I finally got Drupal installed and running as a student blog/writing engine. We basically set up a private Drupal space and using the UserPlus module created accounts for each 4th and 5th grade student. I then worked with each of our 4th and 5th grade classrooms and introduced the system to them and showed them how to login. We are also using Gallery as an image archive tool and Drupal has a module that allows you to incorporate the Gallery images into Drupal. There is also a plugin for iPhoto that makes it very easy to add images to our Gallery archive. I need to look around a bit and figure out how to set it up so that students can easily click on an image and incorporate it into a post. The next step is to set up teachers with RSS readers so they can easily track student work and read and respond.

Technorati Tags: Bill Fitzgerald, Drupal, Gallery, Steve Burt

Jeff Han article in FastCompany.

Last week I wrote about Jeff Han and his work on touch screen displays. Today I learned that FastCompany has an article about him and his work. Can't Touch This - Jeff Han - Touch Screen, the article gives a bit of background on his work and his company.

Technorati Tags: Fast Company, Jeff Han

Another Snow Day...

Portland Public Schools was closed again today because of the weather. (local media coverage here, here and here...) An opportunity to catch up on some work and to become acquainted again with our local transit authority, TriMet. The stop for the #75 is a nice hike from my home, but it stops right in front of my school. Of course today it stopped about 8 blocks away because the road was too slick for the bus to travel its normal route. I got to walk the rest of the way. I left my car there last night and took the bus home. Today the roads are clear enough to drive home if one sticks to the major streets. But then I don't live on a major street, so it should be interesting going home...

MLK, YouTube, Google Video

Lots of folks are pointing to the 18 minute video of Dr. King's speech during the 1963 March on Washington. It is available on places such as YouTube and Google Video. It is great that it is available. The unfortunate thing is that every idiot with a keyboard has left a hateful or racist comment on the video pages. Luckily Google allows you to download the video file. I plan to share it with my students off of one of our internal pages, without the comments. Both YouTube and Google Video have policies on offensive materials. I wish it extended to comments on their pages.

Technorati Tags: Dr. King, YouTube, Google Video