This video is a news clip about interactive visitor kiosks in Kern County, California, designed to promote tourism in the region. Using a large touch-screen display, people have access to a wide range of information, displayed in a multi-media format. One of the featured displays is NextWindow's 2800 "Rugged Integrated Touch Panel", developed to withstand environmental wear and tear, with software developed by JupiterBay.
My HCI project prototype would be something fun to interact with on one of these kiosks!
I'd love to see interactive displays in parks, museums, libraries, malls, schools, hospitals, waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, cruise ships... Wouldn't it be great if these displays could interact with cell phones and PDA's?
"The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.
In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor."
It looks like PhotoSynth has the potential to be used in creative, engaging ways in educational settings, especially for visual learnings. Imagine what students could do if given the opportunity to interact with PhotoSynth content on large screen displays!
Simulations and games are interactive forms of multimedia that have become the focus of research and practice in education. A collection of articles and research reports regarding the use of simulations and video/computer games for teaching and learning can be found on the Simulations & Games in Education section of the SimSchool website. Authors include Mark Prensky, Kurt Squires, Chris Dede, and Chuck Aldrich.
Flickschool: "a quick way of learning how to produce flix, take pix, and share your mix"
Flickschool is the work of Marco Torres, a history teacher at a large high school in San Fernando who works with students in the area of digital storytelling and other creative endeavors. At the Flickschool site, numerous short "how-to" video clips are provided that contain mini lessons on topics such as script-writing, story-boarding, photography techniques, music technology, and film-making. A true gem!
Ewan McIntosh, an edu-blogger, has a nice blog post describing Marco's great work, if you'd like more information.
Marco Torres directed the video parody of a monster.com commercial, during the Apple Summer Institute at Lesley University. The video provides humerous examples NOT to do if you are a teacher, or are planning to become one someday.
"Innovation Awards will go to pioneers who are exploring new digital models of learning that build upon and enhance the informal, networked, and collaborative styles today, especially but not only among youth. These projects will demonstrate new modes of learning in many environments."
"Knowledge-Networking Awards will go to creative and dedicated communicators. Not every digital inventor/developer is a skillful knowledge-networker. How can good ideas be circulated widely, taking full advantage of the Web's potential for collaborative thinking, where many can contribute, shape, and share?"
EduSim is an application for use on interactive whiteboards and displays, created using Croquet.
According to Julian Lombardi, Duke University's Assistant Vice President of Academic Services and Technology Support and Senior Research Scholar with the Information Science + Information Studies, "Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications on multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, it features a peer-based network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation between multiple users on multiple devices. Using Croquet, software developers can create and link powerful and highly collaborative cross-platform multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations - making possible the distributed deployment of very large scale, richly featured and interlinked virtual environments."
Related Information The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, edited by Richard E. Mayer, provides a good framework to support the importance of learning and interacting with multimedia.
According to information from the book, "Multimedia learning is defined as learning from words (e.g., spoken or printed text) and pictures (e.g., illustrations, photos, maps, graphs, animation, or video)... Multimedia environments included on-line instructional presentations, interactive lessons, e-courses, simulation games, virtual reality, and computer-supported in-class presentations...The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning seeks to establish what works (i.e., to determine which features of a multimedia lesson affect learning), to explain how it works (i.e., to ground research in cognitive theory), and to consider when and where it works (i.e., to explore the implications of research for practice)".
