The guest editors of the July-September 2010 issue of IEEE's Pervasive Computing magazine are John Canny, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jason Hong, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Their article provides an introduction to the publication's timely theme, Connected Youth. The editors find that the study of the current generation of children and teens provides useful information about the future of computing as in integrates more seamlessly into our daily lives, the way we learn, and our relationships and interaction with others across time, place, and generations.
I'm in the middle of reading this issue of Pervasive Computing. The articles that have caught my eye so far include "Story Time for the 21st Century", which describes the research an implementation of an interactive book-reading system designed to connect children, family members, and grandparents who live in distant locations. The system involves videoconferencing with paper books and interactive content, and enables grandparents to read with their grandchildren via the Internet.
Sorry for the delay in posting this. I've been more than busy lately!
Here is the plug for the mLearnCon conference, currently taking place, June 15-17 2010 in San Diego, CA:
"Join the mLearning vanguard as we explore the potentials (and pitfalls) for mobile learning! mLearnCon is where every aspect of mobile learning including management strategies, platforms (SmartPhones, PDAs, iPods, Tablets, etc), operating systems (Android, BlackBerry, iPhone OS X, Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc.), authoring tools and technologies, content design & development, and best practices will be explored. Whether you are working in an academic, corporate, government, or military setting ... mLearnCon will give you the ideas, information, and community you and your organization need to succeed."
I've been so busy writing reports* that this almost passed me by!
I found out about 6rounds because they use Twitter as a promotional platform. I happened to notice that this company was following me and clicked on the link.
6rounds started out as an outgrowth of a speed dating website, and the application was initially designed for people to use while waiting for speed dating sessions. According to the 6rounds website FAQ's, "6rounds is a live meeting point, offering users a variety of experiences that they enjoy together using a combination of webcams, real-time games, social activities and media engagements."
Since I'm a happily married middle-aged woman, I'm not sure 6rounds is up my alley. I think social singles, college students, and others who don't mind flashing their faces through a webcam would like it.
If I had time, I might like to play around with GixOO, the opensource API that underpins 6rounds. GixOO has the potential for developers to develop games and activities. The application allows the users to track each other as they move their mice, and also enables people to see the same things as their friends as they interact online.
6rounds looks like it might provide possibilities for collaborative projects in education, but I won't be sure until I give it a try.
So what is 6rounds?
FOR THE TECH-CURIOUS
The following information was quoted from the Openomics blog from Sun Microsystem's ISV Engineering:
"6rounds is the first product built on the GixOO live social platform, initially developped on the LAMP stack. As a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program, GixOO connected with Sun's ISV Engineering team to test the scalability of their platform on SAMP --the Solaris-based AMP stack, available in an integrated and optimized package from Sun, the Sun Glassfish Web Stack f.k.a. CoolStack. At the time, we ran the benchmark on a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server --featuring the 64-way CoolThreads processor UltraSPARC T2-- running Solaris 10 and CoolStack 1.3. GixOO loved the DTrace kernel instrumentation of Solaris 10 --DTrace gives unique insights into how the application performs, live on a production system-- and the Containers technology a.k.a. Zones --this light-weigth virtualization layer of Solaris allows multiple applications to run in isolation from each other on the same physical hardware--, and quickly adopted them for their internal use.
"At GixOO, we use Sun SPARC-based server, powered by Solaris 10 for our R&D environment. The system gives us the required flexibility and components isolation that we need. Thanks to SPARC's great SMP abilities, we achieve high performance for many development environments running on one single 1U server.
Solaris Zones are very comfortable and simple to configure, and allow the full utilization of the great power hidden in this small machine, which makes Solaris 10 an excellent choice for system administrators. We are using Sun MySQL Server which gives our application high speed data storage solution, and in the future we might migrate to the MySQL Cluster solution to get even faster results."
Dmitry Shestak, CTO, GixOO"
Somewhat Related
2/26/10: Oracle bought Sun in 2009. Here were the latest results when I did a search to get more information:
Not Really Related
*For those new to this blog, I'm a school psychologist who returned to her day job full time a year and 1/2 ago, when the economy was taking a nosedive. Before that, I was working part-time and taking computer and technology classes, initially to learn how to create interactive multimedia applications and games.
Since some of the kids and teens I work with have a range of abilities and disabilities, including autism, I developed an interest in accessibility. How can universal design principles be applied to games and emerging interactive technologies? I'm also fascinated by interactive displays and surfaces of all sizes, especially ubiquitous systems that support cognition, collaboration and communication.
One of my pet projects:
My vision? A collaborative multimedia, multi-modal interactive time-line might help us to understand complex, interrelated factors and events more effectively. It would provide an opportunity for the inquisitive to view things from a broad perspective, and also explore things in rich detail. Ideally, the time-line would support multi-touch, multi-user interaction on larger displays and interactive whiteboards, and allow for people who are remotely located to participate in the process.
Now that one of my schools will be getting a multi-touch SMARTTable, I'd like to experiment with time-line concepts and interactions on a table surface. I'd also like to figure out how this can work seamlessly with the existing SMARTBoard that is in the classroom. Of course, this would have to take place during after work hours!
Lamantia's article discusses the thoughts of Nicole Lazzaro, a games researcher and design consultant, who suggests that there are four kinds of fun, as outlined in the chart below: --XEO Design Inc.
(The references for Lamantia's article are worth taking a look.)
"Jeremy Yuille and Hugh Macdonald are interaction design researchers with ACID at RMIT University. They research the effects of social media on different industries, ranging from sport to finance."
The Future is Touchable "Jeroen van Geel is founder of Johnny Holland and a senior interaction designer. He works part-time for Fabrique Communication & Design and the other part for his own clients."
One of the projects I toyed with for a Ubiquitous Computing class three years ago was an application that would work nicely on a PDA that I could somehow strap to my wrist. I wanted to something that would allow me to keep my hands free and support some of my work functions as a school psychologist, such as observing and assessing students, counseling young people, and consulting with teachers and parents. The application would also be useful to my colleagues.
The second part of this application would support teens and young adults with more severe disabilities who participate in a community-based vocational training program. The application would provide a means of giving the students feedback during on-site work activities as well as in work adjustment simulation activities at school.
I abandoned the idea early on, due to frustrating BlueTooth issues and the lack of a suitable way to secure the PDA to various types of wrists.
It is 2010 and now we have the iPhone, iPad, touch-screen netbook/slates, e-readers, 3GS, consumer-ready RFID, low-cost portable GPS devices, and in some places, ubiquitous free Wi-Fi, low-cost digital cameras, and a range of devices that have the potential to play together in some way. Below are a few examples of how far things have come.
RIDGELINE W200 The water-resistant Ridgeline has many of the features I'd like, such as the touch screen interface, a blacklit keypad, an adjustable strap, and range of I/Os. I kind of liked the wearable scanner and imager feature. The scanner/imager can be rotated. If the imager also included a video camera, it would be a plus, since I use video quite a bit to develop video social stories for some of the students I work with who have autism spectrum disorders.
The Ridgeline W200 is too ugly and clunky for me to consider wearing! I'm sure price of the Ridgeline would be out of the question for public school employees and community mental health workers who work with young people with special needs.
"Everybody had them or at least seen ‘em. Slap bracelets were usually made of thin piece of aluminum wrapped in fabric. Using the same form, Chocolate Agency came up with a mini multimedia device that snaps on with a slap. The entire surface is E-Paper and possesses all its thin, high contrast, power efficient qualities. The length can be adjusted by adding magnetic snaps to the ends. Best part is there’s no recharging needed. It gets all the power it needs via kinetic energy so go ahead, go slap happy." -Yanko Design
The Porcupine This morning I devoted about 45 minutes skimming over the Proceedings for the Fourth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, TEI '10, held January 25-27 in Cambridge, MA. A paper related to the Porcupine, a wearable sensing device, caught my eye: Coming to Grips with the Objects We Grasp: Detecting Interactions with Efficient Wrist-Worn Sensors (Eugin Berlin, Jun Liu, Kristof van Laerhoven, Bernt Schield, TEI 2010) From what I can tell, the features of the Porcupine, if embedded in a wearable iPhone-type device, would be extremely useful in a variety of fields, including special education, rehabilitation/habilitation, health care, mental health, vocational training for people with more complex disabilities, and so on.
Below is a TED Talk video of Pranav Mistry, the Ph.D student who invented Sixth Sense, discussing open-source Sixth Sense and related applications:
So now what? After the iPad was unveiled, several people who blog about assistive technology and augmentative communication were curious to see if the new device had the potential for use with people who have disabilities.
It does.
Here are a few links:
iPad for Our Rooms(Kate Ahern, Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs)
From what I understand, the iPad will work with Proloquo2Go, an alternative/ augmentative communication program for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. Proloquo2Go is priced at a level much lower than other PDA-based systems, and can be purchased at the iTunes App Store. It can be downloaded for use on the iPad once the iPad is available to consumers.
This is great news.
Now someone just needs to get on the convergence train and develop a flexible, mobile device that incorporates the best features of the devices and applications that currently exist!
I thought I'd share a few interesting resources from Adobe. The company is focused on the future, and I plan to watch what unfolds. Adobe believes that the next generation of the company's products will move us forward to a world of seamless access to content, across screens of all sizes, everywhere we go.
I'm hoping that this will not lead to an environment where we have difficulty escaping "skip intro" ads everywhere we turn. Hopefully it won't be too bad!
I found a few gems of wisdom in the Adobe white paper, Designing Contextual Solutions and Applications. The paper provides a conceptual framework that I think would be helpful to web designers/developers who are interested in off-the-desktop application development.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction of the white paper: "With its platforms and products that are inherently multichannel and multidevice, Adobe envisions a new class of “contextual solutions” taking hold in the marketplace. These solutions are broader in scope than a device, a campaign, or a single service; rather, they encapsulate the various contexts in which the end user exists, interacts, thinks, consumes, and purchases. And when content owners understand the different types of users and how they differ in their contexts, they are in a much better position to design experiences that are compelling and sticky. At the heart of every contextual solution is at least one or more contextual applications—an emerging type of application that spans multiple devices and uses system, user, and network contexts to provide an optimized user experience and deliver improved business results.
This white paper provides an overview of the types of contexts that compose a contextual solution and application. With examples given along the way, it culminates with a framework for considering all appropriate contexts while designing and developing a new contextual solution or an application that is part of an existing solution."
I've been too busy this year to attend conferences, so sadly, I missed the IEEE VisWeek 2009 conference that was held in October in Atlantic City, NJ. The VisWeek programincluded members of three related IEEE groups, IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis), IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), and IEEE Visualization (Vis).
I was hoping to include a range of videos and graphics in this post, but decided that it would be best if I devoted a few future posts to information visualization when I had time to select the best digital representations of this vibrant and exciting field.
I've organized this post by presenting descriptions of the three IEEE groups that participated in the VisWeek conference, and then highlighting the various panels, workshops, tutorials, and paper presentations that I would have attended. There were many more topics that caught my attention than I have time to share in this post. I promise to dig deeper and include stories about about the people behind the data and information, along with their work, in future posts The descriptions below were taken from the Vis 09 website: IEEE InfoVis "Computer-based information visualization centers around helping people explore or explain abstract data through interactive software that exploits the capabilities of the human perceptual system. A key challenge in information visualization is designing cognitively useful spatial mappings of abstract datasets that are not inherently spatial, and accompanying the mappings with interaction techniques that allow people to intuitively explore the data. Information visualization draws on the intellectual history of several traditions, including computer graphics, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, graphic design, statistical graphics, cartography, and art. The synthesis of relevant ideas from these fields with new methodologies and techniques made possible by interactive computation are critical for helping people keep pace with the torrents of information confronting them."
"IEEE VAST is the science of analytical reasoning supported by highly interactive visual interfaces. People use visual analytics tools and techniques to synthesize information into knowledge; derive insight from massive, dynamic, and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments; and communicate assessments effectively for action." "Visual Analytics requires interdisciplinary science, going beyond traditional scientific and information visualization to include statistics, mathematics, knowledge representation, management and discovery technologies, cognitive and perceptual sciences, decision sciences, and more. Your submission should help develop and/or apply the science of Visual Analytics, clearly showing an interdisciplinary approach." "IEEE Vis is the premier forum for visualization advances in science and engineering for academia, government, and industry. This event brings together researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in techniques, tools, and technology. The year 2009 marks the20th anniversary of IEEE Vis and it will celebrate the maturation of visualization into an established scientific discipline."
Here are the workshops, panels, and paper presentations I would have attended if I was at the VisWeek conference:
"With large amounts of data becoming available, and being accessible more easily, visualization has to step in to provide means to explore and understand that data. How can we enable people to explore the data that is of importance to them? how can we present data in a way that is not detached, but rather prompts a reaction (but yet does not distort the data)? How can visualization change the world (and what good is it if it cannot)? And how do we do all that so it still has academic value?"
(Note: Robert Kosara was my Info Visualization and Visual Communication professor at UNC-Charlotte. He is the author of the Eager Eyes website and blog. He has great links related to his passions.)
Putting Visualization on the Web
Organizers:Robert Kosara, Nathan Yau, Andrew Van de Moere
"The World Wide Web is a primary source of information for many people, but not everything that can be found online when searching for "visualization" would be recognized as such by VisWeek attendees. there is clearly a place for data art, information graphics, mash-ups, etc. -- but what is generally considered the core for visualization research (or visual analytics, for that matter) seems underrepresented. And while it is not difficult to find images of many techniques, there is little material that explains, demonstrates, compares, and critiques them. All this is even more true for scientific visualization than for information visualization. To reach more people in the real world, we need to understand the mechanisms for disseminating knowledge outside of the conference or journal paper. A few examples exist where academic visualization research has become successfully poipularized, e.g., TreeMaps, ThemeRiver (used in last.fm), StreamGraphs (a well-received New York Times chart of box office revenues). More examples like these are clearly needed, as is more open and accessible information from the people in the field. A blog or website is not just a place for dispensing wisdom, it can provide a platform for experiments and interaction. It also makes it possible to get feedback from readers about real-world problems that might be tackled in research projects. And it can even become the subject of research; Many Eyes is a wonderful example of this. The proposed workshop will give participants the opportunity to learn about experiences, get hints, and discuss issues. Such issues include academic blogging (talk about research before it is published?), finding an audience, promoting a site, etc. The goal of the workshop is to collect ideas and best practices, and to come up with useful solutions to problems posed." Comment: The topics covered in the two workshop listed above interest me, since I get so much information from the web, and I particularly enjoy taking in information visually, especially if it conveys meaning in an efficient, elegant way. In my opinion, web-based information "social" information visualization has the potential to embed the human story behind the numbers, trends, and factoids that bombard us every day. This is not simply "information overload". It is information numbness. As consequence, it is sometimes difficult for us to tell the difference between what is important or essential, what is true, and what is not. VisWeek Workshop: Video Analytics
"The workshop will focus on tools for analyzing videos whose content ranges from persuasive videos (ads, propaganda, news) to YouTube videos. The purpose of video analysis is to gain insight into the contents of large collections of video and to focus detailed analysis on a smaller set of videos out of that collection. The capability to explore, categorize, and annotate videos is required by multiple types of analysts. User interfaces and techniques that support these activities including techniques in image processing are all central concerns of this workshop. However, the workshop goes beyond retrieval of images to interacting with a large video collection that one may have received from a query."
(Note: Dr. Ribarsky is the director of the Charlotte Visualization Center. "The VisCenter leads the latter effort through the development of the Renaissance Situation Room, located in the VisCenter, which includes a multi-touch table, tiled display, immersive stereoscopic environment, and integrated interaction for all these tools. New interactive visualizations of the urban growth model and related models are displayed and used within this environment." RENCI at UNCC )
Comment I thought this would be an interesting workshop, because as a school psychologist, I use digital video in my work with students who have special needs, including severe autism. As a consequence, I have an assortment of digital video files to analyse, organize, and retrieve. I need some tools to help me do this in an efficient and meaningful way. I work with a team of people, and making this information easy for my colleagues to access and share would be important to me. Collaborative Visualization on Interactive Surfaces (CoVIS) Organizers: Petra Isenberg, Michael Sedlmair, Dominikus Baur, Tobias Isenberg, Andreas Butz "It is common for small groups of people to gather around visual displays of information to discuss or interpret the information to form decisions. Groups can share the task load of exploring large and complex datasets and can share various interpretations of a dataset when working together. However, tools to support synchronous collaboration between several people in their data analysis are still relatively scarce. Traditionally, visualization and visual analytics tools have been designed from a single-user perspective and for desktop computers. While hardware such as multi-touch displays and network capabilities have emerged that lend themselves especially well to collaboration, software support for collaboration around visualizations is still relatively scarce. One of the reasons is that single user systems do not necessarily translate well to collaborative scenarios or interactive surfaces and require specific re-design. The design of digital systems, therefore, poses additional challenges: we need to understand (a) how people collaboratively work with visual representations of data and which methods they use to solve information analysis tasks as a team, and (b) what the exact design requirements are for collaborative visual analysis scenarios. In this workshop we would like to discuss these challenges and discuss the role of interactive surfaces as an emerging technology for supporting collaborative visualization and visual analytics settings." Comment If I was at VisWeek, I'd attend this workshop because I've been thinking about topic for a while. One idea I've been toying with is the concept of sharable data widgets that people could use at the table to do real-time data analysis, as well as capture real-time data from external sources (such as information from outdoor videocams, motion sensors, etc.), and data sent from colleagues who are remotely located. This would allow people to work collaboratively as a group, but also provide a means to distribute some of the data analysis tasks during the session. VizWeek Tutorial: Exploring Design Decisions for Effective Information Visualization Organizers: Jo Wood, Jason Dykes, Aldan Slingsby
"This tutorial provides an opportunity for participants to design their own information visualization of some sample datasets. Using interactive software and data provided by the instructors, issues of color, layout, symbolization and animation are explored. Results from participants’ visualizations are compared along with those from the presenters allowing insights into the data and good practice in information visualization design to be gained. Participants should be equipped with their own laptop capable of running Java applications. Prior to the session participants are strongly encouraged to download the free software and data that will be used in the tutorial. The tutorial is suitable for anyone working with complex datasets who wishes to improve their data visualization design skills, in particular designing visualization solutions that match the research questions asked and the data to be analyzed."
Comment
This workshop caught my eye because it provides an opportunity to participate in hands-on visualization activities. There are plenty of free educational, mental health, and public health data sets that I'd like to play around with, if I had the time and the tools!
VAST Capstone Panel: How Interactive Visualization Can Assist Investigative Analysis: Views and Perspectives from Domain Experts Organizer: John Stasko Panelists: Sarah Cohen, Lawrence Hunter, Joe Parry "Interactive visualization could become an essential tool in the work of investigative analysts. Visualization could help analysts to explore large collections of data and documents, supporting the analysts' investigative sense-making processes. This panel gathers recognized leaders from three important domains, investigative reporting, biosciences (genomics), and intelligence analysis, all that include a fundamental investigative analysis component. The panelists will provide a glimpse into their worlds, describing and illustrating the data they examine, the goals and methods of their analysts, and the culture of their respective professions. In particular, the panelists will explore how visualization could potentially benefit investigators from their domain and they will provide guidance for visualization researchers seeking to collaborate with their colleagues." Comment: I think that the topics covered by this panel are important. Much of the important work that needs to be done by computer scientists and related technologists is interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. More disciplines rely on technology than ever before, and this is not limited to academia. In my opinion, I think the research and statistics courses that are mandatory for most graduate students should also include content related to information and data visualization related to the domain. Often these research and statistics courses are taught by domain experts who also specialize in research and statistics. Why not take it to the next level?! The IEEE Visualization & Graphics Community website has links to most of the VisWeek 2009 conference abstracts. There are some videos and slides available on-line. Here are a few more topics that I thought were interesting: FinVis: Applied Visual Analytics for Personal Financial Planning (pdf)
Stephen Rudolph, Anya C. Savikhin, David S. Ebert, Purdue University Connecting the Dots in Visual Analysis (pdf) Yedendra B. Shrinivasan, Eindhoven University of Technology; David Goetz, Jie Lu, IBM Research
Tarik Crnovrsanin, Chris Muelder, Carlos Correa, Kwan-Liu Ma, University of California, Davis Visual Analysis of Graphs with Multiple Connected Components (pdf) T. von Landesberger, M.Gorner, T. Schreck, Technische Universitat Darmstadt I'm marking my calendar and hoping I'll have the opportunity to attend the 2010 conference: IEEE VisWeek 2010 Salt Lake City, Utah October 24-29, 2010
UPDATE: Video of Hard Rock Cafe's Memorabilia Multi-touch Wall
I came across the updated Hard Rock Cafe website and found that it provides an awesome interactive experience! Visitors can explore the extensive Memorabilia collection in detail. This site is almost ready for inclusion in my UX/Interactive Hall of Fame!
According an article posted on the Hospitality Technology website, ""Tech, Love, and Rock 'n' Roll, the website was built using Silverlight, and is part of an initiative to expand the reach of the Hard Rock Cafe's extensive memorabilia collection.
"It all started last year with what we call 'Memo 2.0,'" [for memorabilia 2.0] and the rollout of Microsoft's new Silverlight (www.silverlight.net) technology, explains Joe Tenczar, senior director of technology and CIO for Hard Rock International. Silverlight is a web application framework, similar in scope to Adobe flash, that lets companies build custom apps. Hard Rock partnered with its brand agency Duncan/Channon (www.duncanchannon.com) and software developer Vertigo (www.vertigo.com) to create a custom Silverlight application for www.hardrock.com."
Below is a video of the website when it was still under development, unveiled during a MIX08 keynote:
The website is a companion project that is part of a bigger vision that includes an 18-foot interactive multi-touch wall that mirrors the Memorabilia website. The article goes on to mention that the "Rock Wall can be used by one person to blow up a piece of memorabilia as large as the screen, or optimized for six different user experiences at one time, though the technology has been tested for responsiveness to hundreds of simultaneous touches. "Imagine seeing Bob Dylan's Harley at more than life size; big impact," says Tenczar....Rock Wall uses a single piece of Stewart projection glass, custom-made at the factory for Hard Rock, along with three Christie projectors, numerous lasers, and multiple IR cameras to create a unified projection and touch experience. "The graphics are driven by a Nvidia Quadro Plex and there are two other dedicated servers for localized content and physics. I have seen a lot of cool technology, but this still makes my jaw drop whenever I see it in person." And the technology is smart. "If I walk up to the screen, it will blow up where I am."
According to information from the Hard Rock Cafe's press release, the interactive wall was created by Obscura Digital, a company located in San Francisco, along with Technomedia Systems was also involved in this project. Here's a quote from the press release:
"We were excited to work with Hard Rock on this revolutionary project," said Obscura Digital CEO Patrick Connolly. "This is the longest, largest and most technologically sophisticated multi-touch wall we’ve built. It utilizes our newest Fireframe technology, and the result is the highest resolution, seamless multi-touch display we have ever seen. We are delivering a 6000 x 1000 pixel display, so that multiple users at a time can enjoy the vast Hard Rock Memorabilia collection in stunningly high resolution. With this display, customers can literally zoom so deep into the images, that things like a scratch on Buddy Holly's glasses can be seen 3 feet wide. The graphic quality of this system is something the public has never seen, and the impact on the customers is something they will not soon forget." Hard Rock Cafe Multi-Touch
In addition to the website and Rock Wall, booths at the Hard Rock Cafe provide customers with access to music videos from a video distribution server, or VDS, created by Coleman Technologies. Each booth's touch screen display terminal has its own computer, and this allows guest control over the music videos that are played at the cafe. Content from the memorabilia system can be explored by customers right from the booth, from what I understand.
Microsoft's Surface tables were installed in the cafe, running a custom application created by Vertigo. that allows customers to interact with a spinning globe to locate and explore other Hard Rock Cafe's around the world.
Memorabilia Website UX:
Unfortunately, I am not in Las Vegas, so I haven't had a chance to interact with the Hard Rock Cafe's Rock Wall or any of the Microsoft Surface installations, which are the centerpiece of this project.
Not to worry. The companion Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia website, experienced from the comfort of my home on an HP TouchSmart PC, provides a great user experience, even thought it is not fully optimized for touch navigation.
One of the things that I like about the site is that it uses Microsoft's Deep Zoom feature. When you zoom in, you can explore each photo without sacrificing resolution, and explore everything in minute detail.
If you want to try your hand at touch navigation, you will be pleasantly surprised, even though you will have to rely on your mouse at times. To zoom in, tap the initial presentation screen, and use your fingertips to pan around. What you touch and release won't go flying about the screen, which is a good thing.
If you lightly tap an item of interest, you will get a translucent information box on the right side of the screen. The information box might include video clip of an interview with a musician, a story, and a means to share the experience through embedding a widget on your website or blog, posting a link, or emailing a link.
After poking around the site using Firefox, I switched to Internet Explorer, turned the zoom setting to 125%, and had no difficulty using my right index finger to navigate through the information box. (It was more difficult to do this using Firefox.)
The directions for traditional navigation are simple:
"Turn on, zoom in, zoom out. Use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. You can also zoom in by clicking and zoom out by shift-clicking. To pan, click and drag."
Featured artists on the Memorabilia site include The Who, The Beatles, James Brown, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Guns N'Roses, Buddy Holly, Madonna, Motley Crue, Elvis Presley, Queen, and The Rolling Stones. You can sort the main presentation page by artist or year, and explore the collection by artist, type of item, genre of music, decade, and location.
This website provides an interactive, user-friendly means of exploring the history of rock music. (It would be cool if the site offered some form of interactive sound track.)
I'm impressed.
I embedded the widgets below from the Memorabilia site. I wasn't sure exactly what might turn up. The interactive widgets, created with Silverlight, went beyond my expectations. You can explore the content right from this post, if you have Silverlight installed:
I shot some HD video of my touch interaction of the website and will post the videos as soon as I can. For now, take a look at some of the screen shots:
Main portal:
Eric Clapton's Guitar and Backstory:
Screen shot of memorabilia sorted by type - instruments:
Someone sent me an email about the jumpintotomorrow blog and I thought I'd share the link here.
I haven't had much time to really explore the site, but it looks like it has quite a bit of information about new and interesting technologies.
"jumpintotomorrow is a site that lists, features and promotes technology from all the corners of the world, provided by the product creators themselves – and it’s updated every single day...We’re technology aficionados, technology professionals, enthusiasts, academics and people who believe in and recognize the power of truly innovative ideas. The kinds of ideas that make us stop and say “you gotta see this.” Those are the ideas that have a way of reaching out and inspiring other breakthrough thinking. By listing, collecting and celebrating this kind of work, we hope it will reach out to others the way it reached out to us."
"Here’s a dilemma: The guy (”Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to us earlier today. The zip file contained 310 documents, ranging from executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs of various Twitter employee".
I think issues related to privacy, security, ethics, and emerging/social technologies need to be discussed more extensively among academicians, industry leaders, students, and the general public. We don't know what we don't know.
CITEd (Center for Implementing Technology in Education) will be at NECC at the end of this month, where CITEd staffers will be keeping in touch via Twitter and Facebook.
The following information about virtual worlds and learning is from CITEd-e-News:
"Follow CITEd as we attend NECC 2009, the largest educational computing conference of the year. If you're attending this year, check out the agenda to see where we'll be; if you can't make it, we'll be Twittering the conference at TechnologyinEd. New to Twitter? Check out The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter or Twitter in Plain English. "
Virtual worlds, particularly Second Life and Teen Second Life, are a hot topic in education as schools and universities around the world begin to make use of virtual learning environments. With a wide variety of educational projects, Second Life is home to virtual conferences, professional development workshops, "field trips" to exotic locales, in-world classrooms and collaborative learning activities. In this issue of eNews, we take a look at some of the wayseducators are using Second Life to enhance learning and teaching. Learn more at www.cited.org.
Read about how one health teacher used avatars (alter egos) in Second Life to teach students about body image issues, media representations of beauty, and self-image.
If you've ever wondered about using virtual worlds with your students, but don't know where to start, check out this short video highlighting several schools as they explore using Second Life in their teaching.
Suffern Middle School in Suffern, NY has maintained a virtual presence in Teen Second Life since 2006, with a focus on standards-based curriculum. Based on their experiences, teachers have created an in-depth guide for moving your school or classroom into the virtual world.
Thinking about using virtual worlds in your school? Global Kids has used Second Life to work with urban youth since 2006 and offers free sample curriculum materials and professional development opportunities. Be sure to visit the blog written by teens in the project!
Whatever your technology need, CITEd's web site offers unbiased, reliable and timely resources and information for implementing technology in the classroom, school, and district. Want to know more? Visit our home page!
--XEO Design Inc.
