Quick link: Nextgov, "the all-day information resource for federal technology decision makers"

I've been thinking more about interactive data exploration interfaces lately, and what might be needed to support people who do not have technical or mathematical backgrounds.  From time-to-time, I will share information related or somewhat related to this topic.


I came across a link to the Nextgov website in my FB newsfeed and thought I'd bookmark it for future reference. Although the Nextgov is geared for people who work as CIOs in government settings, it contains a lot of interesting food for thought if you happen to be a knowledge junkie or just want to be a a well-informed citizen.  


 Below is a quote from "About Nextgov" page of the website:
"Nextgov is the all-day information resource for federal technology decision makers. Through news, analysis and insights from our award-winning journalists and a nationwide community of expert voices, Nextgov provides the first word on technology and government." 


"Nextgov’s editorial mission is to lead the national discussion about how technology and innovation are transforming the way government agencies serve citizens and perform vital functions. Central to this mission is the exploration of emerging technologies and their potential impact on government. Nextgov contributors include influential thinkers across government, academia and the private sector providing fresh and provocative insights on key federal IT topics."


Nextgov is produced by Government Executive Media Group...."


For your convenience, below are links to various sections of the Nextgov website:
News
CIO Briefing
Emerging Tech
Cloud
Cybersecurity
Mobile
Health
Defense
Big Data


I was disappointed that there wasn't a section about education, so I've some related links below:

RELATED
Big Data - Avalanch? Flood? Tsunami?  What does big data mean for educators?
Evidence Framework for Innovation and Excellence in Education
Karen Cato, Director, Office of Educational Technology, U.S. Dept. of Education


The article contains a link to a draft of a related publication released for public comment:


Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics: an Issue Brief 
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology
April 10, 2012


FYI: The above document was prepared by Marie Bienkowski, Mingyou Feng, and Barbara Means, under the guidance of Karen Cator and Bernadette Adams. A number of experts were interviewed for the report, including Shelby Andrews, Linda Chaput, Michael Freed, Dror Oren, Dave Gutelius, Michael Jahrer, Andreas Toescher, Jeff Murphy, Peter Norvig, Sunil Noronha, Ken Rudin, Steve Ritter, Bror Saxberg, David Niemi, and Chuck Severence.  Others cited in the document include Ryan S.J. d. Baker, Gautam Biswas, John Campbell, Gredg Chung, Alfred Kobsa, Kenneth Koedinger, George Siemens, and Stephanie Teasly


SOMEWHAT RELATED
Nonprofit Data Visualization: a Gallery
Philanthropy:  Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas
Nicole Wallace, 3/4/12

Designing Culture: Investigating the Link Between Technology and Culture, an interactive transmedia project by Anne Balsamo

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I use it as an on-line filing cabinet. When I learned about Anne Balsamo's recently published book, part of a larger interactive transmedia project, I decided that it warranted more than a "plug" and a quick link.


It warranted a shrine.
For this reason, I've embedded a number of videos and presentations from the project's website, along with a host of links.  Prepare to spend some time exploring her work over time!  It is food for reflection.


DESIGNING CULTURE     "Investigating the link between technology and culture, this transmedia project is realized as a print book, a dvd, and this interactive flash website ." -Designing Culture


"Anne Balsamo is a Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is a co-founder of Onomy Labs, a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies. Previously, she was a member of RED (Research on Experimental Documents), a collaborative research group at Xerox PARC that created experimental reading devices and new media genres. She is the author of Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, also published by Duke University Press." -Designing Culture


Video Overview:

Designing Culture: the Technological Imagination at Work from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.


BOOK
Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work
Anne Balsamo, Duke University Press, 2011


BLOG: Designing Culture


DVD (packaged with the book)
Women of the World Talk Back: Gendering the Technological Imagination


PUBLIC INTERACTIVE WALLS: Designing Technological Literacies -Interactive Wall Books "Interactive Wall Books are large-scale dynamic mixed-media documents"
Here are a few links to online versions of the wall books for your convenience: Episodes in the History of Reading, Part 1     Episodes in the History of Reading, Part II  Episodes in the History of Reading, Part 3     Deslizate En El Tiempo: Epsodios en la Historia de la Communicacion (Developed for the Children's Museum of Mexico City)  Science for All Ages

XFR: EXPERIMENTS IN THE FUTURE OF READING  A museum exhibit.
(The above link will take you to the Onomy website's version of the exhibit. The project version can be found on the Designing Culture website.)


MAPS: Mapping the Technological Imagination Spatial Documents.
Learning to Love The Questions - an interactive semantac map, for the online journal VECTORS
Where is the Museum? Mapping the Distributed Museum -presentation at Museums and the Web 2011
Ways of the Hand: Tinkering in the Digital Age -presentation at DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media conference, 2010
Working the Paradigm Shift: The Cultural Work of the Digital Humanities - presentation at the Digital Arts Conference, 2008


VIDEOS
Tools for the Asking

Anne Balsamo HASTAC Presentation 4_16_2010 from IML @ USC on Vimeo.


Gendering the Technological How a Robot Got its Groove


Cool Fusion: Designing Culture - Working the Paradigm Shift



RELATED
Reviews of Designing Culture by Lawrence Grossberg, Cathy N. Davidson, and John Seely Brown (Amazon.com site for the book)
Balsamo's New Book Details Technological Imagination at Work
Annenberg News, 8/10/11
HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advance Collaboratory


Anne Balsamo worked on the following project:
Tangible Interface for Viewing the Aids Quilt

"This project will develop an application that enables collaborative browsing of a database of images of panels of The AIDS Memorial Quilt that have been “virtually stitched together.”  The application will be used with Onomy Lab’s Tilty Table, a tangible interactive device that serves as a display surface for large-scaled images." -(info from Anne Balsamo's blog)

CNN's Interactive Map and Timeline of Iraq and Afghanistan Casualties "Home and Away"

Via Flowing Data and CNN

Nathan Yau, of Flowing Data, posted information and a link to CNN's interactive Casualties: Home and Away website. This website allows you to visually explore the casualty statistics of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, beginning with the first of the fallen in 2001. You can zoom into a region and see pictures and names of people.  The website provides a way for friends and family to share memories about their loved ones.

Home and Away also provides a "list view" option, shown in one of the pictures below.  Visitors to the site can sort by name or year of death.  Sliders on the map view provide a way of looking at the pattern of deaths over time.  It is sad, but this website makes us remember that war is real.  Deaths are not simply statistics.

CNN Afghanistan Crossroads Blog

Flowing Data
Home and Away

Jumpintotomorrow website/blog

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."

I wish I was at the Consumer Electronics Show! (Links to CES info and updates, also MacWorld)

There are plenty of people reporting and blogging about CES 2009, and I won't have time to digest it all for a while. I've embeded the CNET overview video below, which includes a demonstration of some interesting interactive technologies and applications.

If you want the latest scoop, your first stop should be CNET's CES 2009 website. It is almost as good as being there, and you won't have to deal with the crowds.



Here is the overview video from the site:

Lots of cool stuff, like 3DVU's Way2Go 3D mobile mapping and GPS system:



3DVU's Way2Go Website

(By the way, if you are interested, here is a link to CNET's MacWorld site.)

Natural User Interface new website shares information about the company's innovative multi-touch solutions...

Frequent visitors to this blog know that I've been following the development of the NUI multi-touch system since it was in the gestational stage, a university project of Harry van der Veen. I'd like to mention that as the NUI multi-touch table has evolved, so has the NUI website.

Take a look at the user-friendly, visually appealing website that showcases the Natural User Interface company's accomplishments, new products, and services. Here is some information from the site:

• "Natural User Interface (NUI) is an innovative emerging technology company specializing in advanced multi-touch software and service solutions. NUI's solutions can convert an ordinary surface into an interactive, appealing and intelligent display that creates a stunning user experience."

• "NUI provides both standardized as well as customized horizontal, vertical and angled multi-touch hardware solutions. With the wide variety of market leading suppliers and partner, NUI gives warranty on all our products."

For those of you who can't wait to dive into programming multi-touch, collaborative applications, take a look at NUI's Snowflake 1.0 software for OEM partners:

• "NUI Suite 1.0 Snowflake is an easy to use, robust, fast and reliable gesture recognition, computer vision, image processing, motion sensing multi-touch software package.It has been tested and developed for over 1,5 year and valued as best in the industry by our global hardware partners."

Phoenix Mars Mission Website

The following is part of a related post from the TechPsych blog about the Phoenix Mars Mission:

If you are an educator with access to an interactive whiteboard and can integrate a visit to Mars into your lesson plans during the last days of the school year, a trip to the Phoenix Mars Mission website is a must! The website is well designed and user-friendly.

Renderings of the Phoenix Mars Lander

Here are few places to start:

Phoenix Mars Mission News
Web Exhibit -Mars: The Search for Water, the Search for Life
Flash Video Stream (the video has relaxing ambient music, by the way)
Images
Videos and Animations
Just for Kids - this site was designed with content by kids to share with others.

From Mars to Earth: An Interactive Timeline

Enjoy!