Google Ocean View. Underwater panorama photography like the Street View you've come to love for finding your way to unknown locales. Well, a reef is an unknown locale to many and this new offering from Google is yet another slice of geolocated beauty. Read more here at the Lat Long blog.
If you're feeling like a little vacation to a warm and lovely place, spend a some time swimming with the sea turtles, rays and Nemos in the Google Gallery.
Then check out this "hangout" they did while shooting the reef.
Wish I could have helped out with this project when I was living in Barbados.
The Grenadines MarSIS project web page now links out the the KMZ file that I've been working on. Find it here. You can also get the nautical chart. We made a video to help folks navigate the many layers of geo-data. I think it might help since there are a lot of layers to keep track of.
The URSI (Undergraduate Research Summer Institute) summer program at Vassar teams Vassar professors with a student or students interested in a compelling research project. Check out Prof. Mary Ann Cunningham and Earth Science major Laurel Walker VC '11 working on a bird project and using GIS to bring it all together. Mary Ann teaches the GIS classes at Vassar. Plus you can also check out Vassar's GIS Lab!
This post is a little on the late side and I am trying to play catch-up. I attended the Educause Learning Initiative annual meeting last week in Orlando, Florida, which coincided with the first week of classes at Vassar. I'm just a bit behind. The ELI conference, for those who do not know about it, is a showcase for teaching and learning innovations in higher education. Instructional Technologists, such as myself, flock to this meeting.I wanted to mention a couple of topics of interest that relate to the usual topics found in this blog. Tablet PCs. Mobility. SmartBoards. And Promethean Pen-enabled White boards. There were loads of talks and presentations on the use of pen-enabled technologies in teaching. On a related topic, there was a lot of discussion on mobile technologies, as well. We use our tablets for their mobility and processing power, but the mobile devices discussed at ELI were more on the line of hand-held PDAs devices and clickers.
The photo above, shows me co-presenting with the Skyping-in Lucy Johnson, Anthropology professor. As I said, classes just started and Prof. Johnson needed to be in Poughkeepsie to teach, but she was a sport and video-conferenced in for our paper on "Technology in the Field: Tablet PCs in Higher Education." Thank you Jim Vanides of HP for the invitation to present our work and to ISTE for funding my travel. Below you can see me, my colleague Cristian Opazo in Orlando, and Prof. Johnson and my colleague Ginny Jones in Poughkeepsie. Great fun.
Another pen-based presentation was called "Active Learning in Field-Based Classes Using Tablet PCs for Collaborative Data Collection and Mapping" given by me, Lucy Johnson and Bob Fritz, from the Biology department. Many people were surprised, I think, at the ease with which one can get up and running with tablets PCs in field-based classes. The software is what one uses on a desktop computer. The major expense are the tablets themselves, of course, but the prices keep coming down.
Not like some of these conferences you go to and there is a whole section dedicated to vendors, ELI is much more low-key. There were very few vendors and those that were at ELI, were either presenting as a poster or sponsoring and providing the technology needed for the presentations. I met a vendor selling an alternative to SmartBoards. Promethean ActivePanels and Promethean Interactive WhiteBoards sold by Logical Choice looks very promising.
Finally, the Faculty Innovation Showcase stations (shown in the first picture above) were sponsored by HP, Smart Technologies, Tidebreak, with all the furniture and technology design provided by Herman Miller. All the laptops that I saw where Windows, provided by HP, and were running Windows XP.
I put up another video on our YouTube channel. This one shows the use of a tablet PC with a GPS receiver plugged into the USB port and how to collect point data in ArcGIS software.
I haven't heard much of what went on at the WIPTE conference in October, but I did hear about this video. It's a take-off of the I'm a PC commercial. I'm posting about it because I'm fond of tablets, of course, but also, these folks missed one of the greatest reasons to have a tablet PC. They should redo this and and have some geologist in boots and sunglasses saying, "I'm a tablet PC and I'm collecting tsunami inundation measurements." Then they can add an ecologist in hip waders saying, "I'm a tablet PC and I'm mapping invasive species." Nobody asked me.
I recently started using TechSmith's Camtasia and hope to make some short, instructional videos showing how to do different functions in GIS and geospatial software. I'll put these videos on the GISatVassar YouTube site. And if anyone wants to see a particular function done as a video, let me know at mestewart (at) vassar (dot) com.
We made a video that I'd like to share here. It has everything that this blog seems to be about, tablet PCs, mapping, instructional technology. I mentioned this video project in my last post, but I think this deserves its own post. In April we got funding from HP Philanthropy & Education to make a student-produced video documentary showing other students and professors using tablet PCs in classes. At Vassar, we teach with tablet PCs primarily in an outdoor, field-based setting. The following is the resulting video. It is 11 minutes long, so we made several shorter 'episodes' for each of the individual classes that we highlight. We hope you enjoy it.
This episode shows how Anthropology Professor Lucy Johnson uses tablet PCs in her Field Archaeology class. Professor Johnson is involved in an on-going excavation of a site at the Mohonk Preserve and her students are helping with that research. It is believed that the site was a shelter over 6,000 years ago. The students document the test pit excavations using a tablet PC and Word for drawing and writing up their observations.
In this episode, Keri VanCamp is showing how to document and map an invasive species at the Vassar Ecological Preserve. Biology Professor Robert Fritz teaches Ecology at the Preserve and his students are part of a longitudinal study of mapping the expansion of the invasive garlic mustard. The students use tablet PCs, a camera, a Word document with the various species they might encounter, and Photogrid (used for mapping ecological research sites).
And this episode shows Earth Science Professor Kirsten Menking with her Geomorphology students along Vassar's Casperkill creek, mapping the stream meanders. They are using a tablet PC, ArcGIS software and GPS receivers as well as older aerial photographs to measure the amount of stream migration over time.
And finally, this is a shorter version of the longer video. It is simply the beginning and the ending of the longer video, but we think it gives a succinct overview of how Vassar is using tablet PCs in some of our science classes.
The new tablet PCs for the Mobile Mapping lab come with cameras, so I felt compelled to document the un-boxing experience. I hope to make a video or two in the future with a little more substance, but in the meantime, this is the first one I've done.
Came across this nice Google Earth video by EarthOutreach. When you mouse over the bottom of the video, you'll see there are different "chapters" on the different and most interesting Global Awareness Layers in Google Earth.<object height="290" width="450"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/p/43EFB9039CFB8BD8"> </object>
