Moving at the Speed of Creativity

One of the highlights of my day yesterday in Rotorua, New Zealand, was visiting Te Puia and seeing the mud pools as well as geyser basin. This was an introductory “welcome” video I recorded in the morning from my hotel balcony, overlooking part of the crater lake of Rotorua.

I am now COMPLETELY sold on the value and utility of flash-based camcorders. I took 24 video clips (1.5 minutes long and less) at Te Puia, but have not had the time and bandwidth to upload all of them to Flickr yet. I have, however, uploaded my photos from yesterday at Te Puia.

Some daring kids were actually swimming in the pool just below this geyser as it erupted yesterday. We considered joining them, but in the end decided not to. This is certainly a scene we wouldn’t see at Yellowstone National Park. The kids were having a GREAT time. What an exciting place to swim!

Here are two videos of the geyser eruption as well as the mud pools at Te Puia.

In addition to seeing geothermal features at Te Puia, we also learned a great deal about Maori culture from our tour guide, including information about Maori traditional woodcarving and weaving.

I hadn’t realized the Maoris were cannibals. I found the history of the Moa in New Zealand particularly interesting this trip. Like the Dodo, the Moa is now an extinct bird. The Maoris ate the moa until it was extinct, however, whereas European visitors were the scourge of the Dodo on Mauritius.

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maori, rotorua, geyser, newzealand, moa, dodo, cannibal, mud, tepuia

Today was another marvelous day in New Zealand. Thanks to the generosity and kindness of friends, I had an opportunity to realize a dream: I saw and stood near the actual landscape setting for “Edoras” in the film trilogy “The Lord of the Rings.” Mount Sunday is located near Mt Potts Sheep Station in the Rangitata Valley of New Zealand’s south island. It is surrounded by mountains in a broad river valley which must be between two and three kilometers across. The weather was rainy down on the Canterbury plains, but thankfully there were some breaks once we got up nearer to the mountains. The mountain peaks were still obscured, but we were able to see Mt Sunday as well as the broader Rangitata Valley. It was amazing to see this spectacular valley in person.

We drove up a highway which eventually become an unimproved (gravel) mountain road and took us to Mt Potts Sheep Station near Mt Sunday. Before hiking closer to the site of Edoras, we drove further up the road to Erewhon Sheep station. Erewhon was named by Samuel Butler, who published a book titled “Erewhon” anonymously in 1872. According to our guide today, Butler was the first white man to settle at the sheep station in the Rangitata Valley now known as “Mesopotamia,” and gave the sheep station “Erewhon” further up the valley its name.

Erewhon sheep station is just about a two hour drive from Geraldine, but it is EXCEPTIONALLY remote! The geography here is absolutely stunning. I wish we could have had clearer views of the continental divide and surrounding mountains today, but given that it COULD have been much worse with more rain I’m delighted we were able to see everything we did. Our guide drives further up the actual river bed above Erewhon in his four wheel drive with friends and then hikes from there to the continental divide. THAT is some amazing off road driving!

I posted about 130 photos of this area to a Flickr set I titled “Edoras and Erewhon,” along with about 80 photos in and around Geraldine. Although the cattle industry is booming here now, there are still a LOT of sheep in New Zealand!

This is a photo of cattle with Mt Sunday (Edoras) in the background. This wasn’t a scene you saw in “The Lord of the Rings!”

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erewhon, edoras, mt, mount, sunday, rangitata, newzealand, lordoftherings, travel, tolkien, middleearth, middle, earth

After around a 12 hour flight from Los Angeles, I arrived safely in Auckland, New Zealand, on Monday morning (today) around 6 am. My flight from Auckland to Christchurch was uneventful, and I spent most of the day exploring Christchurch with my host mum (AFS 1987) Shirley. I recorded a two minute Qik video (with Shirley’s help) this evening over her DSL connection in Geraldine, summarizing the day’s events. The Google Map feature of Qik did NOT work for this video, however, since I’m not turning my “phone” on in New Zealand for fear of high roaming charges.

Flying from Auckland to Christchurch, I was impressed with the views of both the Cook Strait (which separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand) as well as views of the Canterbury Plains as we approached Christchurch.

This photo is of north Canterbury. I was surprised to learn that in south Canterbury, near Geraldine, much of the farmland is now being used to raise diary cows instead of sheep. Large corporate farms are buying out individual farmers, in a scenario which reminds me of farming trends in the U.S. heartland. There are pivots (irrigation sprinklers) all over, reminiscent of the farmland around Lubbock, Texas. In addition to being surprised by the cows (which have replaced sheep in many fields) the weather is also unexpected! It feels more like winter than summer here. Interestingly, the weather back home in Oklahoma looks to be more like late spring than winter. Have our seasons flipped?!

One of the highlights of the day was certainly touring the cathedral in downtown Christchurch. (Those photos are still uploading to Flickr so I can’t link any of them yet.) In all took about 250 photos today on my iPhone and Sony GSC-1 Flash camera, including photos at the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch. We saw blue penguins, which are native to New Zealand, as well as learned a great deal about the international scientific work continuing in Antarctica. All flights bound for the international research center in Antarctica leave from this center in Christchurch.

Tomorrow afternoon, weather permitting, we are headed for Mount Potts which was used for some of the sets of Edoras in “The Lord of the Rings” film trilogy.

New Zealand IS “Middle Earth.”

Addition: Here’s one of the photos of the Christchurch cathedral:

Note the image of Christ in the center of this beautiful stained glass window series depicts him as Maori.

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travel, newzealand, christchurch

I’m here for three days in Portland, Oregon, attending and presenting at the 2009 ITSC (Instructional Technologies Strategies Conference.) I’ve updated my blog handouts page with links to my five sessions, two of which are repeats.

I absolutely LOVE mountains. As a “flatlander” growing up in Kansas and spending most of my adult life living the midwest in Texas and Oklahoma, I don’t get a chance to see scenes like this one which I photographed yesterday with my iPhone out the window of our Southwest Airlines flight, on the descent into the Portland airport.

I’ve submitted this photo and several others to the Southwest Airlines Flickr Group. As you can see, newly submitted photos have to be approved by individuals moderating the group. This is further proof of why I love Southwest Airlines: They are an innovative and cutting edge company.

Is this a beautiful sight to see or what? According to WikiPedia, “Mount Hood’s snow-covered peak rises 11,249 feet (3,429 m) and is home to twelve glaciers.” I wish I had time for a closer look on this trip, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

As we continued on our descent into Portland, we flew directly by and over the Columbia River, which was used by Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition west to reach the Pacific by land. This image shows the Columbia near Portland. Again according to WikiPedia, “The river is 1,243 miles (2,000 km) long, and its drainage basin is 258,000 square miles (670,000 km2). Measured by the volume of its flow, the Columbia is the largest river flowing into the Pacific from North America and is the fourth-largest river in the U.S.” We don’t have any rivers this size in Oklahoma!

I was seated on the left side of the plane, so as we turned east (towards Mt Hood) I was able to catch a glimpse of cloud-shrouded Mount St Helens to the north. Awesome!

Portland is a beautiful place! According to the hotel travel guide, the USGS rates the chances of Mt Hood (a “dormant” volcano) erupting as “a 3 to 7 percent chance within the next 30 years.” I think the Cascade range is one of most beautiful and breathtaking mountain ranges I’ve ever seen. Some day I hope to hike and climb in the Cascades with my family.

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This podcast is a bit of an ecclectic mix of ideas, song snippets, and educational project ideas. Foundationally, these relate to the idea that we’re going to have an enduring need to help younger students as well as older learners use digital tools in powerful, appropriate, and constructive ways. Whether we use the words citizen journalist, digital witness, storychaser, or ethical digital citizen, the ideas of responsibly using media to publish at will on the global stage of the Internet are included. The prospect of the Heartland Flyer Amtrak train being extended from Oklahoma City to Kansas City in less than two years will open up some exciting possibilities for a summer digital media travel experience for teachers and students in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The Storychaser’s Peace Train would begin in Saint Louis and end in Fort Worth, providing opportunities for student-teacher teams to develop and refine their own storychasing skills alongside others from around our nation. Stopping in small, rural communities along the way to learn local history and interview community members, to videoconference “live” back to home communities via satellite-based videoconferencing units, and “sharing the journey” with others via photo sharing, video sharing, and blogging would all be part of the Storychaser’s Peace Train experience. Who knows where these dreams and our digital connections will take us in the months and years ahead? Perhaps the Storychaser’s Peace Train will be passing through a small town near you soon.

 

 Podcast299: Dreaming of the Storychaser's Peace Train [21:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1540)

Show Notes:

1. Railroads and virtual connections
2. Roads of Learning in the 21st Century (v 1.0)
3. Roads of Learning in the 21st Century (on blip.tv)
4. Storychasing the 2008 XIT Rodeo and Ranch
5. 72 Years of Free Barbeque (StoryChasers video)
6. Lessons Learned from two more Ustream.tv remote webcasts
7. RoundTrips: Interactive Video Conferencing from Anywhere (Lewis and Clark trail – roundtrips.org)
8. Reflections about old jails, land appraisal, and high speed infrastructure in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas
9. An Oklahoma City to Kansas City Amtrak Connection may be coming!
10. Cottonwood Falls Kansas (Flickr Set)
11. Heartland Flyer Train (Amtrak)
12. City of New Orleans (song)
13. Storychasers.org
14. Celebrate Oklahoma Voices
15. The Digital Citizenship Website
16. RoundTrips.org
17. Contact Wesley Fryer

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The iReporters were out in mass yesterday, and the geo-tagged map of their submissions to CNN looks quite different than it did right before inauguration day.

Before:

After:

I love these types of mashups involving storychasing (citizen journalism and digital storytelling) with geographic maps. Geotagged content offers great opportunities for exploratory learning.

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cnn, inauguration, obama, report, journalism

This is a GREAT piece of news for our family, and possibly for yours if like us you LOVE TRAINS and travel in the midwestern United States. We’re getting closer to restored passenger rail service between Oklahoma City and Kansas City!

This past Saturday afternoon, we had the pleasure of taking a driving trolley tour in Guthrie, Oklahoma, which is about 20 minutes north of where we live in Edmond. Our driver had recently taken the Heartland Flyer Amtrak train from Oklahoma City to Fort Worth and then on to San Antonio, and he gave us an update on a proposed extension of Amtrak train service.

This past summer, our family took the Heartland Flyer from Oklahoma City to Fort Worth to visit Six Flags and loved it. Riding a train (as the person who normally does most of the driving in our family) was a WONDERFUL experience! We had more leg and chair room than you typically have in “coach class” on an airplane, there was the snack bar on the first level of our car, and we could do whatever we wanted: talk, listen, day dream, sleep, look out the window, read a book, listen to music, or watch a movie on an iPod. As a bonus, no one had to wear a seat belt!

Our driver in Guthrie Saturday told us that when he was in San Antonio, Amtrak folks he talked to said the Oklahoma City to Kansas City extension of the Heartland Flyer Amtrak run is “a done deal.” This hearsay is supported (although less definitively) by the December 4, 2008, Edmond Sun article “Edmond on list for Amtrak study” which reported:

Edmond is one step closer to being included in a proposed 606-mile passenger rail route from Fort Worth to Oklahoma City to Kansas City. The Kansas Department of Transportation and Amtrak have agreed on the scope of an Amtrak expansion feasibility study, officials said Thursday. Intermediate Oklahoma cities identified for the study are: Ponca City, Perry, Guthrie, Edmond, Oklahoma City, Norman, Purcell, Pauls Valley, Davis and Ardmore. Amtrak officials said being in the study is not a commitment by the city or the states for the cities to host a station.

This is GREAT news! It would be particularly great if Amtrak would put in a station in Strong City, Kansas, just north of Cottonwood Falls.

According to Gerald Kopiasz, that’s a possibility.

Proposed stops in Kansas include Lawrence, Topeka, and Newton as top contenders. Other new stations suggested include Emporia, Strong City, Wichita, and either Winfield or Arkansas City.

A Strong City Amtrak station would be about a half-hour from my hometown of Manhattan, Kansas, where my parents live. It would be SO COOL (as well as relaxing) to be able to head “to grandmother’s house” for the holidays BY TRAIN in a year or so!

My fingers are crossed! Go Amtrak! Make the Oklahoma City to Kansas City passenger train connection! This is something I think I’ll write our state legislators about, since it will apparently be up to them after this feasibility study is completed in 2009.

I have 87 photos of trains and railroads in my current Flickr stream. I’d love to add even more as an Amtrak passenger in the years ahead! We are seriously looking into the possibility of taking Amtrak to NECC next summer in July in Washington DC. That would probably require us to catch the train in Kansas City, however, or in Newton, Kansas. I’m sure any train trips we take in the future will provide good opportunities for more reflections on “Railroads and virtual connections.”

Click to play

If and when this OKC to KC Amtrak line is active, I’m going to book a face-to-face field trip to see Eric Langhorst and his 8th grade US History class in Liberty, Missouri! My sister and family are moving to Kansas City next summer too, so this railway line could be a GREAT physical connector for our family and theirs! I also think this rail line could be of great potential benefit to the StoryChasers project.

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train, amtrak, kansas, oklahoma, texas, study, feasible, edmond, strongcity, cottonwoodfalls

“The 21 Steps” by Charles Cumming is a wonderful example of a multi-part, text-based digital story related as a Google Maps mashup. More background information about this story is available on Charles’ blog. Unfortunately the story does not appear to be embeddable, so you’ll have to click the story link itself to view it.

This story is part of the “We Tell Stories” site, which according to the project’s about page is the:

most ambitious digital writing project to date [of Penguin UK involving] top authors to create new forms of story – designed specially for the internet.

One of my first thoughts about this form of geographically linked storytelling is how a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style story could also be written in this format.

This also reminds me of the Murmur place-based digital storytelling project in Canada, which I heard Joe Lambert discuss in his SITE keynote about digital storytelling back in March of 2007.

I love geography and digital storytelling, so it should come as no surprise I LOVE projects like this which combine both of these passions!

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geography, googlemaps, story, storytelling, google, maps

This past week I used my Garmin GPS unit in the air on my flight back from Boston and MASSCUE to Oklahoma City, as well as on a drive today from OKC up to Kansas for Ron Prince’s final football game as head coach at Kansas State. This was the first time I’ve used the GPS unit in the air. This photo shows our altitude at 25,958 feet above sea level on our descent into the Oklahoma City area:

One of my classmates from the Air Force Academy used to fly U-2s at Beale AFB in California, and flew T-38s for proficiency. He told me back in the late 1990s (I think it was around 1998) that his handheld Garmin GPS unit was far superior to the antiquated guidance avionics in the T-38, so he actually used his GPS unit for navigational purposes. I found that amazing.

That was probably the second time I’d heard about using a handheld GPS in the air for flight navigation. When I lived and studied in Mexico City during 1992-93, I flew up to San Antonio at one point with a state department official who was also assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. He was a co-owner of a private plane, and we were joined by a former Air America pilot who was in private business in Mexico. I remember two main things about our flight:

1. The former Air America pilot had loaded a bunch of large, ceramic pots into the back of our small aircraft. The state department pilot was concerned the weight limit for our aircraft might be exceeded by this additional cargo. (Density altitude should be a concern of every pilot, of course.) I remember the Air America pilot telling the state department official, “Don’t worry, it looks fine. We’ll be good.” And with that evaluation, we went ahead and took off… We didn’t have any problems on the flight to San Antonio… thankfully! It was a bit hair raising to fly in a small plane with a pilot taking advice which amounted to “kick the tires and light the fires” — It certainly made for a memorable trip!
2. I also remember that the state department official used a handheld GPS unit to navigate us from the airport near of Mexico City into San Antonio. Those were the days when “selective availability” for GPS was still enabled, which was “intentional, slowly changing random errors of up to a hundred meters (328 ft) in the publicly available navigation signals.” Knowing we were using a civilian GPS receiver, I was a little concerned we were relying exclusively on GPS for navigation and not even using an alternative like VOR navigation as a backup. Thankfully, everything turned out just fine for our flight.

Traveling with a GPS unit can be enlightening. The GPS unit calculates your live groundspeed, and it’s a lot more impressive to watch speed statistics in a commercial airliner than in a private automobile. This photo shows our groundspeed was 516 miles per hour on our descent into Oklahoma City!

Last summer, when we were driving as a family to camp in New Mexico, my son was using our GPS unit and one point and was monitoring our speed. It was a different experience to hear him ask from the back seat, “Dad, what is the speed limit here?” That question was followed up by him informing me of my current groundspeed, according to the GPS unit. A new type of family accountability on a road trip!

I thought of my GPS unit when I was flying from Minneapolis down to Oklahoma City Wednesday night this week, and I looked out the window to see the lights of a large city. My GPS unit shows cities in close proximity to my current location, and I was able to figure out I was looking down at the lights of Wichita, Kansas. Very cool.

Today as I drove up to Manhattan, Kansas, I pulled out my GPS unit again and compared the calculated groundspeed to the speed shown on my speedometer. My GPS unit indicated that my speedometer is about 4 mph slow.

My geocaching experiences with my GPS unit have been pretty limited to date. (1 – 2 – 3) The power of GPS is stunning, however. I hope in the years to come as my kids go further in Boy and Girl Scouting we’ll use GPS together more. When we’re on vacation together, hopefully we can make time to do more geocaching!

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gps, geocaching, travel, garmin

ClustrMaps and feedjit.com continue to be my two favorite tools for tracking website visitors. Feedjit provides real-time visitor tracking showing not only the countries associated with web visitors’ IP addresses, but also the web browser, computer operating system, and search site the visitor used (if any) to link to your website. If a search query was used, that is also shown.

ClustrMaps shows a graphical geographic distribution of website visitors, which (since I pay for a “plus” account) is clickable to enlarge each continent individually. ClustrMaps (which I’ve snapped to Flickr fairly often in the past few years) never cease to amaze and humble me.

Tonight I noticed ClustrMaps has added a new feature: textual lists of “Current Country Totals” for a particular website. This is a different presentation of geographic web visitor data from that previously presented by either Feedjit or ClustrMaps.

United States (US) 10,704
Canada (CA) 765
United Kingdom (GB) 661
Australia (AU) 366
India (IN) 161
Germany (DE) 128
New Zealand (NZ) 104
Philippines (PH) 98
Netherlands (NL) 92
Singapore (SG) 83
China (CN) 69
France (FR) 69
Italy (IT) 67
Spain (ES) 64
Brazil (BR) 58
Thailand (TH) 57
Norway (NO) 53
Malaysia (MY) 51
Sweden (SE) 50
Mexico (MX) 50
Turkey (TR) 48
Ireland (IE) 42
Poland (PL) 41
Indonesia (ID) 40
Korea, Republic of (KR) 37
Denmark (DK) 34
Hong Kong (HK) 34
Belgium (BE) 34
Japan (JP) 32
Switzerland (CH) 32
Greece (GR) 31
Romania (RO) 30
United Arab Emirates (AE) 30
Taiwan (TW) 28
Pakistan (PK) 28
South Africa (ZA) 25
Portugal (PT) 25
Israel (IL) 21
Russian Federation (RU) 20
Czech Republic (CZ) 20
Saudi Arabia (SA) 20
Finland (FI) 20
Egypt (EG) 18
Europe (EU) 17
Bulgaria (BG) 17
Colombia (CO) 16
Austria (AT) 16
Hungary (HU) 14
Argentina (AR) 13
Slovakia (SK) 13
Vietnam (VN) 13
Iran, Islamic Republic of (IR) 13
Puerto Rico (PR) 12
Slovenia (SI) 11
Trinidad and Tobago (TT) 11
Qatar (QA) 10
Venezuela (VE) 10
Jamaica (JM) 10
Chile (CL) 9
Ecuador (EC) 9
Morocco (MA) 9
Lithuania (LT) 8
Serbia (RS) 7
Cyprus (CY) 7
Peru (PE) 6
Kuwait (KW) 6
Bahrain (BH) 6
Oman (OM) 6
Latvia (LV) 6
Croatia (HR) 6
Kenya (KE) 5
Costa Rica (CR) 5
Estonia (EE) 5
Ukraine (UA) 4
Sudan (SD) 4
Bangladesh (BD) 4
Iceland (IS) 4
El Salvador (SV) 3
Panama (PA) 3
Guam (GU) 3
Azerbaijan (AZ) 3
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BA) 3
Honduras (HN) 3
Virgin Islands, U.S. (VI) 3
Nigeria (NG) 3
Brunei Darussalam (BN) 3
Belarus (BY) 3
Barbados (BB) 3
Uruguay (UY) 2
Tanzania, United Republic of (TZ) 2
Swaziland (SZ) 2
Sri Lanka (LK) 2
Moldova, Republic of (MD) 2
Macedonia (MK) 2
Syrian Arab Republic (SY) 2
Dominica (DM) 2
Palestinian Territory (PS) 2
Tunisia (TN) 2
Lebanon (LB) 2
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (VC) 2
Georgia (GE) 2
Jordan (JO) 1
Zimbabwe (ZW) 1
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (LY) 1
Macau (MO) 1
Namibia (NA) 1
Dominican Republic (DO) 1
Faroe Islands (FO) 1
Turks and Caicos Islands (TC) 1
Cuba (CU) 1
Cayman Islands (KY) 1
Haiti (HT) 1
Antigua and Barbuda (AG) 1
Rwanda (RW) 1
Algeria (DZ) 1
Guyana (GY) 1
Turkmenistan (TM) 1
Senegal (SN) 1
Ethiopia (ET) 1
Guatemala (GT) 1
Malta (MT) 1
Grenada (GD) 1
Luxembourg (LU) 1
Afghanistan (AF) 1
Asia/Pacific Region (AP) 1
Suriname (SR) 1
Monaco (MC) 1

This data pastes nicely and directly into Excel, which can readily generate a pie chart like the following:

Again, this represents a visually different way of viewing visitor data which can be more insightful and meaningful than simply viewing tabular data. Data visualization is VERY important in lots of contexts. Visual literacy is important to understand, and I think we need to spend more time helping and encouraging students to cultivate their own skills of expression and communication with visual media.

If you are not already, consider using ClustrMaps and Feedjit on your classroom website, wiki, or blog page to track visitors. Periodically challenge students to visually represent and explain the data included in these sites in a variety of ways. Using these sites can not only potentially foster greater interest and excitement in web publishing, it can also provide good teachable moments for geography, graphing, and data visualization strategies important for 21st century learners to understand both as content consumers as well as media creators.

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visualizing, clustrmap, feedjit, clustrmaps, geography, visitor, website

Today I created a Google Map highlighting the locations of schools which have sent students on field trips (many of them FREE thanks to a generous grant from Dell as well as funding from the OHA Teen Board) to the Oklahoma Heritage Association and Gaylord-Pickens Museum in Oklahoma City so far during the 2008-2009 school year. I also finalized a process for members of our part-time staff to update this information each week, as we send email follow-ups to teachers regarding our field trip curriculum.

View Larger Map

I’m hopeful that in the relatively near-term, we’ll be able to create and share Google Maps which include embedded digital stories created by teachers and students in our statewide Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project. Our current Ning learning community for the project does allow video contributors to geo-tag their videos, but I’m not sure how a larger map can be displayed which shows links to all geo-tagged video content on the site. The Murmur Project is the best example I’ve seen in the past of a project which connects digital storytelling and oral history with places and locations. Liz Kolb mentioned Murmur as well as MANY other great mobile web projects and applications in her Seedlings webcast interview last week, now available as a podcast.

GeoGraffiti is another mobile-enabled website which can be used in interesting ways for projects which connect stories to places. According to the website’s about page:

Think of GeoGraffiti as a verbal message board for sharing and retrieving Voice Mark™ messages while you are out and about visiting different places throughout the day. A Voice Mark™ is a short phone message that shares information (e.g. opinions, tips, warnings, advice) about a place, an event, a topic, or really anything else you care to share. The name GeoGraffiti is a combination of the prefix “Geo”, meaning earth or land, representing our location-specific focus; while “Graffiti” represents the expressive and informative content marking those locations.

I almost finished listening to Liz’s Seedlings interview during my morning commute and over lunch today, which is how I learned about GeoGraffiti. Her reference to Gabcast and discussion of how classroom teachers are using it successfully to create “radio theater” podcasts inspired me to develop a procedure for teachers and students to use a Gabcast channel I setup for our museum to share reflections and feedback after their field trips. I hope to integrate those recordings into the VoiceThreads I’ve setup for each “characteristic” of Oklahomans exemplified in our “Oklahoma Through It’s People” museum exhibit:

• Individualism
• Perseverance
• Optimism
• Generosity
• Pioneer Spirit

Viewing Liz Kolb’s 2007 K-12 Online Conference presentation on “Cell Phones for Learning” is a must. Act quickly if you haven’t seen it yet! By the end of the month we’ll all have 40 more K12Online08 presentations to view and take in, so if you haven’t seen Liz’ contribution from last year watch it this week!

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mobile, map, google, googlemap, oklahoma, museum, kolb, lizkolb, cellphone, history, field, trip, fieldtrip, heritage, oha

In preparing for week 4 of the Wednesday night class I’m teaching this term on Google Earth at our church, I discovered the website and Google Earth layer Panoramio. Panoramio is one of three layers which come with Google Earth under the top category “Geographic Web.”

Photographs are submitted by Panoramio’s users to be included in Google Earth as geo-tagged blue dots. In Google Earth, users can click a dot and view embedded photos which are located at approximately the location on earth where they were taken.

The current wait for a new photo to be approved in Panoramio is approximately one month. We had a question tonight in class about whether or not anyone could post any photo to Panoramio. The answer appears to be yes, anyone can submit a photograph, but there is not a guarantee that every submitted photo will be approved and actually show up in GE. The Panoramio acceptance policy provides more details about why photos are or are not selected for inclusion.

Another notable geographic resource we explored this evening was a collection of 23 three dimensional buildings created for Ancient Rome. These have been created by various individuals using Google SketchUp, and are examples of Geo-referenced models included in Google’s 3D Warehouse.

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panoramio, geography, google, earth, googleearth

My 10 year old son and I are continuing to play the free online strategy game Travian, and the game on our server has moved into its final stages. To win the game, members of an alliance must first conquer a village from the Natars tribe which contains the plans for a Wonder of the World (WOW) and then build that Wonder of the World to level 100. Members of our alliance have conquered five Natars villages and are now racing to build our WOWs up to win the endgame.

To calculate which of our WOW villages are closest to my villages for resupply, I used the free Travian World Analyzer (which my son taught me about, of course) to map my own villages. Travian uses an x – y grid coordinate plane, and my villages (along with most of the players in our alliance) are located in the southeast quadrant. After creating this graph, I made a screensnap of it with Skitch and then added my own points to it for our WOW villages. In this way, I was able to determine which WOW villages I can resupply with resources fastest as well as alliance “feeder villages” close to the WOW villages. Mainly our villages need wheat to feed the thousands of troops we have sent to them as reinforcements.

Even though I am very familiar with coordinate grid graphing, it was VERY helpful to me to see this visual representation of both my own village locations and those of my alliance’s WOW villages. It was quite nice and handy to use a website tool to create this initial map and then add my own data points to. This experience reinforces the value of graphing and visually representing information rather than simply viewing it in a textual format. This value is not just expressed in a theoretical or conceptual way, the knowledge gained from this graphing activity is ACTIONABLE. As a result of the information and knowledge I gained by remixing this data and creating this graph, I am now able to contribute more constructively to the WOW village building activities of our alliance.

I love the way playing Travian has provided my son and I ongoing opportunities to use and practice mathematics skills. I wrote about this a bit in May in the post “Fun learning math while conquering a foreign village.” For more background, see our podcast discussions about Travian from March 2008 and December 2007. I AM looking forward to the game on our server winding down and ending, and I don’t think I’ll be playing “another round” on a different Travian server, but this experience has certainly been filled with learning on multiple fronts for both my son and I as well as fun!

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These are my notes from Jan Zanetis’ presentation at MODLA 2008 titled, “Beyond the Virtual Fieldtrip and the Collaborative Project…KC3: A National Challenge.” MY THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS. I am recording this session with permission and will post it later here as a podcast. This is a GREAT project and exactly the type of interactive collaborations we need more students and teachers doing!

The official session description was:

The KC3 Project is a national project designed to empower students to direct their own learning. This standards based project seeks to tap into the creative nature of students as they look at their own communities with new eyes and explore ways to share their findings with others using videoconferencing and other technologies. In its first year, the KC3 students developed an informational program geared toward a specific audience educating them on their topic. Each project team used the CILC Program Posting Format as they developed their content program. Topics submitted by teams from across the U.S. included: Astronauts and Limestone; Lawrence County Indiana History; Texas Black Gold: Oil; Fire Ants: The Real Ant Bully; The Haunted Mansion by the Bay; The Underground Railroad and the Ohio River; Low Bridge: Clinton’s Big Ditch; Wind Power; Linear Relationships in the Texas State Capitol; William Joel Bryan and His Legacy; Hawaiian Food and Diet: Past and Present; The Origins and Culture of Hula Participants. This session will provide video clips of the winning teams’ virtual fieldtrips. This project is a clear demonstration of Constructivist pedagogy. The Project is in its first year and will expand to include elementary teams as well as teams outside the United States.

Jan has worked for Tandberg for the last 3 years. Prior to this she wrote a book on videoconferencing collaborations, helped start the Vanderbilt Virtual Schools project

The evolution of Video Applications in Distance Education
1- distance classes
2- accessing content providers (this like Jim and Tim’s preso last session)
3- collaborative student projects
4- content creation in the classroom

this is a pyramid, more people are doing the things at the top than the things at the bottom
- purpose of this session is to bring you up the pyramid

CILC is great resource to access over 150 videoconferencing content providers

we are turning the technology over to the kids
- asking them to use the tools and create a project
- constructivist learning is going on

we see a blend of these different things going on now with video in classrooms
- interactive distance learning continuum: a blend of the 4 uses stated above

as people become more comfortable with the technology

A Texas Tale
- Tommy Beardon in Texas
- Tommy tending to his cotton crop
- Tommy has had his students create the “Cotton Plant: Many Uses” virtual field trip
- geared toward middle school students
- addresses history, science, math
- students do 4 or 5 of these every month

A challenge from a Legend: story from Alan November
- took the idea from Alan November to create the KC3 project: Kids Creating Community Content

The nuts and bolts of this project
- marketing
- website (with CILC)
- Pre-Production
- Showtime
- Evaluation
- Awards

Schools had 3 months to put together their projects
- then sent out an “all call” via the AT&T Videoconferencing listserv and the CILC’s listserv
- within 24 hours, we had over 150 teachers saying they wanted to receive and participate
- we were streaming and capturing all of this too
- had participants with their own bridges and content servers

Schools from Hawaii to New Jersey were sharing content

developed a rubric which was utilized by educator-raters to determine winners of the content

1st Place: “The Mound Builders: They Myth, The Legend, A Tale of Historic Treasures”
- teacher: Tammy Parks, Howe, Oklahoma

2nd Place: Fire Ants: The Real Ant Bully
- teacher: Deborah Birdsong, Stamford, TX

3rd Place: The Fascinating World of Aquaculture
- Lynne Sueoka, Honolulu, Hawaii

Winning teacher will be at BLC
- 1st – 3rd place winners

What worked well in this project:
1- clear and concise program requirements
2- small teams: 3-6 students per team
3- ease of scheduling videoconferences and technology support with Lance and Mike
4- projects aligned with school subject matter and standards
5- incoprorated 21st century student outcomes: information ,media, and technology skills, authentic audience

Limitations and possible needed changes:
1- perhaps make two categories: middle school (6-8) and a high school (9-12)
2- would love to add international students and add that element of cross-cultural exchange
3- provide helps/tips on using/incorporating various technologies

Outcomes
- hands down it was the student ownership and excitement of sharing with a group in another geographic area
- students repeatedly said that they learned the contnt at a much deeper level because they wanted to be prepared for questions from the remote audiences
- relationships formed which are leading to additional plans for more projects this year

Questions: Ask –
- jan [dot] zanetis [at] tandberg [dot] com
- mcougan [at] cilc [at] org
- bmattocks [at] cilc [dot] org

KC3 website: http://kc3.cilc.org

Permissions:
- we didn’t think about this on the front end
- I just share these videos now except during PD sessions

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