Two topics: Visualizing Unemployment by County over Time; Kurt Squire's Recent Work on ( Video) Game-Based Learning

Below is a screen shot of a web page that shows the increase in the number of unemployed people, by county, in the U.S. from January 2007 until November 2009. According to information from the web site, the data is from the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From what I can tell from the URL, this visualization was a multimedia final project of Latoya Egwuekwe. Here is the link to the webpage: Unemployment Rates by County, January 2007 through November 2009

Here is the YouTube version:



Thanks to Kurt Squire for the link!

About Kurt Squire:
Kurt is an assistant professor of educational communications and technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is associated with the Academic ADL Co-lab.   He previously was the research manager of the Games-to-Teach Project at MIT and co-director of the Education Arcade.  He also was a Montessori and primary school teacher.

I encourage you to take a look at Kurt Squire's recent research and work.  I reviewed some of his earlier work for a paper I wrote back in 2004, when he was  It is exciting to see how far his research in the area of game-based learning environments has come since then.

Here are links to a few of Kurt Squire's publications:
Video game-based learning: An emerging paradigm for Instruction
Open-Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age
From Information to Experience: Place-Based Augmented Reality Games as a Model for Learning in a Globally Networked Society
Video Games and Education: Designing learning systems for an interactive age
Video-Game Literacy: A Literacy of Expertise (To appear in J. Coiro, M. Knobel, D. Leu, & C. Lankshear, Handbook of research on new media literacies. New York: MacMillan.)


More about the Academic ADL Co-Lab:
Local Games Lab
"Many kinds of games can be made about local environments. At the moment we are most engaged with augmented reality (AR) games in which players use digital technologies to enhance their immediate experience of walking around in real-life locations. We are also interested, among other possibilities, in classroom simulations, board games, virtual tours, and desktop video games."


CivWorld!

"This is a site for people interested in using Sid Meier's Civilization for learning academic content, including history, geography, or even game design. We have custom-designed game scenarios, curricula, case studies, and experts on using Civ for learning. Our goal is to help players, students, parents, and even teachers use the game at home, in after school centers and maybe even classrooms."

Teach Paperless Blog "Seeking social solutions to the mysteries of 21st century teaching" -Quick Links

Here is a good blog for educators interested in using technology to transform education:

Teach Paperless "Seeking social solutions to the mysteries of 21st century teaching"
(Shelly Blake-Plock, author)

I especially liked this post:
Top Eleven Things All Teachers Must Know About Technology

About:
"The objective of TeachPaperless is to help classroom teachers merge Green Thinking and Interactive Technology into their everyday classroom experience. The result is a classroom that not only only uses zero paper, but that recognizes and utilizes the best features of the growing Internet to extend learning opportunities to students. Furthermore, we want to see students benefit from and gain experience in real-life problem solving, task determination, and creative thinking through total immersion in an authentic 21st century digital workspace."


RELATED
SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION LESSON PLAN WIKI

Darkstar, I Never Got To Know Ye: Oracle squashed Sun's open-source application server for 3D multi-player online games!

 I never had a chance to explore Darkstar, and I'm sad to share the news that Oracle squashed it before I had a chance to explore it.  The Darkstar project was on my long list of "future" topics for this blog.  

What is Project Darkstar?

"Project Darkstar is a software platform that simplifies the development of horizontally scalable servers for online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications. Its revolutionary design will eliminate serious problems like zone overloading, data corruption, and inefficient server utilization, while enabling new dimensions of play such as evolvable virtual worlds and very large scale battlefields."

Why am I disappointed?
Darkstar interested me because it could be a good tool for creating collaborative multi-player educational games that students could play at school and at home.  It was up my alley, given my background as a school psychologist and fairly recent coursework (VR for education & training, online learning & communication tools, game design/development, AI for games, information visualization/communication, HCI, etc.).  It was designed to help people like me "avoid the complexities of multi-threaded and distributed systems programming".


Information from the Project Darkstar website:
2/2/10:
Today is a difficult day for all of us associated with Project Darkstar. Regretfully, we must inform our community members that Sun Labs engineering effort is no longer being applied to Darkstar development. You will hear from the individual engineers about what this means for them, but the organized lab project will not be moving forward...
 (More on the Darkstar Community Forums) Jim Waldo 




Here are links to examples how Darkstar has been used to develop 3D multi-user applications, from the Darkstar application list page:

• 1 MilMo
• 2 Leelh
• 3 Sorpresas Mágicas

"Sorpresas Mágicas is an online educational video game developed by Proyecto Metáforas at the Universidad de Chile. Sorpresas Mágicas is a turn based game, each team (composed by 12 players) have to make a bet tryiing to guess what is inside a box.What is inside a box depends on the the properties of the box (color, width, height and length). So the users have to use statistics to discover the surprise inside the box.

Twice in a year we are running in Chile a national tournament, the last was on October 23, with more than 5000 childrens playing this game. You could get more information about our game onSorpresas Mágicas, if you want a credential to access the game feel free to ask one to the email at the bottom.

Visit us at Proyecto Metaforas.For more information, please contact (Lead Programmer) at manuel [at] metaforas cl"

• 4 TRZZ Online
• 5 Spirits of Gaia
• 6 Aktalita
• 7 X-Shift Online
• 8 Modern Society: Online
• 9 Dark Frontiers
• 10 Project Wonderland - Toolkit for Building Virtual 3D Worlds
• 11 6thSpace
• 12 Call of the Kings - The Mirror Black
• 13 The Aceituna Project (Game Name suggestions accepted)
• 14 CampFU
• 
  'The Monkey Wrench platform delivers unprecedented levels of real-time interactivity for casual gamers as well as persistent in-game and in-world avatars, badges and achievements, and a robust virtual goods management system.'
  
  
  RELATED
  Oracle: destroyer of virtual worlds
  Austin Modin, The Register, 2/4/10
  
  
  
  Oracle kills Project Darkstar; adios to virtual worlds
  Dean Takahashi, Venture Beat, 2/4/10
  Scalable Data Storage in Project Darkstar
  Tim Blackman, Jim Waldo Oracle News, 10/8/09
  Sun's Project Darkstar aims for gaming services
  Stephen Shankland, CNET News, 3/27/06
  
  
  Darkstar's sister, Project Wonderland, will also be unsupported by Oracle:
  
  Good News and Bad News
  Project Wonderland Virtual World Toolkit Blog, 2/30/2010
  
  
  Oracle cuts off Project Wonderland
  Maria Korolov

More Multi-Touch: DISPLAX on thin polymer film fits all sorts of surfaces, can interact by blowing on it, too!

The photos below are from a recent article on the Physorg.com website about DISPLAX Systems multi-touch polymer film, Multi-touch "Skin" Transforms Surfaces Into Interactive Screens:




DISPLAX™ Optimus Concept Store - Casa da Música (Porto - Portugal) from Displax on Vimeo.

From the DISPLAX press kit materials:
"DISPLAX™ Multitouch Technology turns any non-conductive material into an interactive multi-touch surface. Based on projected capacitive technology, DISPLAX™ Multitouch Technology has been developed using a transparent thinner-than-paper polymer film which can be applied to a variety of flat and curved surfaces including glass, plastic and wood."

"DISPLAX™ Multitouch Technology was primarily developed to enable touch screen integration for LCD and projection displays. Application of the technology ranges from converting entire store windows into a touch surface, creating information screens, or developing innovative user interfaces. Potential customers are found in retail and diverse industries such as telecoms, museums, property, broadcast, pharma or finance. The technology will also be available for LCD manufacturers, audiovisual integrators or gaming platforms."



"DISPLAX works with partners and directly with customers to deliver multi-touch rich-media  

applications, enabling people to take full advantage of the latest developments. DISPLAX  

Multitouch Technology will be available in the market with several embedded business  

applications at no extra cost, designed especially for the kind of installations that interactive  

technology companies work on. This Apps Pack will allow customers to display photo and 

video streams, provide users access to Google Maps and social networks, integrate news  

streams via RSS and play multitouch games. More applications will be available later in 2010 

directly from DISPLAX and other developers."

DISPLAX SHOWREEL

DISPLAX™ Interactive Projects Showreel from Displax on Vimeo.

DISPLAX is a company of the EDIGMA GROUP.

Touchco, Ken Perlin & Ilya Rosenburg's Multitouch Company, Bought By Amazon

Here is the scoop:
Amazon buys touchscreen startup Touchco, merging with Kindle division
Ross Miller, Engadget, 2/3/2010

Amazon Said to Buy Touch Start-Up
Nick Bilton and Brad Stone, New York Times, 2/3/2010


Is Amazon Building a SuperKindle?
Nick Bilton, NYT, 2/3/2010
"Unlike traditional capacitive sensors, our patent-pending system can detect any object — not just a finger — and can determine how much pressure is being applied to every point on a sensor simultaneously. IFSR sensors are natively multitouch, use less power than capacitive sensors, and are much less expensive to produce, making them a highly disruptive technology with widespread market applications."

RELATED
Here is my Aug. 29 post:
Natural User Interface Surfaces:  TouchCo - IFSR Technology company, founded by NYU Media Research Lab's Ken Perlin and Ilya Rosenburg


TOUCHCO GUI:

Touchco GUI example from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

A Touch of Ingenuity:  Inexpensive pressure-sensitive pad could make surfaces smarter
Kate Green, MIT Technology Review, Sept-Oct


Multitouch Screens Could Enliven New Devices
Nick Bilton, NYT, 12/20/09


TouchCo was an outgrowth of the UnMousePad research at NYU.


Photo from the UnMousePad website:



Photo from NYT:

Photo from NYT:

Photo from NYT:



Ken Perlin

Bluebell Jeans' Interactive Website: Toss the guy around your screen, zip his jacket up and down, and download the vid, pics, and music.

I came across the Bluebell Jeans' interactive website today after following a link for something else...

On the website, you can manipulate the model with your mouse (or finger on a touch-screen). You can go straight to the website and get started by unzipping the guy's jacket and spinning him about, or take a look at the video below. Better yet, do both!



You can download the video, pictures, and music from the Wrangler Blue Bell website!

The link to the Bluebell Jeans interactive website was found on Richard Leggett's On New Media blog post.  The post has a few great links and is worth reading: The World is Moving to HTML 5 and Other Flights of Fancy

Apps with Geographic Data Can Make You Healthy: Bill Davenhall's TED Talk

Bill Davenhall is the health and human services marketing head at ESRI, a geographic information systems (GIS) software development company. In this recent TED Talk, he shows how geographic applications and mobile devices can help provide patients and doctors with useful information for health care planning and informed decision-making by harnessing the power of existing data maps.

The presentation includes a variety of interesting map, representing a "place history", something that is central to the field of geographic medicine. The video is about 9 minutes long, but worth viewing, especially if you care about your health!



Thanks to RealVision for the link.

For more information about this topic, see the International Journal of Health Geographics website.

Interactive website links: Featuring Moodstream, Getty Images' site is great for whiteboards or touch-screen PC

I'm always on the look-out for high-quality interactive content on the web.  I can share this with the teachers I work with at one of my schools. This particular school now has an interactive whiteboard in every classroom, as a number of SMARTBoards, were recently installed.  Good interactive websites that are are great for interactive whiteboards are also great for use on touch-screen PCs and displays.

The interactive website I'm featuring today is called MoodStream.  I came across it a while ago, and thought it would provide creative way to provide a stressed-out student a productive way to "chill". Moodstream was created by the Barbarian Group for Getty Images in 2008.

Moving the sliders will change the music and pictures to match your choices.  As you listen to music, you'll see videos and picture montages from Getty Images. As you view the images, you can select your favorites, and they are ported into a "Moodboard", shown below, along with the corresponding music.  To save your creation, you have to register for the free service.  You can play back your board and create additional boards.

What I like about Moodstream is that it gives students the opportunity to identify their feelings, choose different feeling experiences, and create something related to their experiences.  They can later share their creations with others if they wish.   I think that this activity might work well with pairs or small groups of students as well.


Below are screenshots of Moodstream. The first shot is of the screen with the controls hidden from view. The second shot shows the slider control to the left, and the Moodboard chart where the selections are stored. The selections can also be viewed in a text format.

"Moodstream is a powerful brainstorming tool designed to help take you in inspiring, unexpected directions. Whether you want images, footage, or audio, or just need a stream of fresh ideas, tweak the Moodstream sliders to bring a whole new creative palette straight to you."

-Getty Images

OTHER INTERACTIVE WHITEBOARD RESOURCES


Here are a few:

How to Download and Insert a You Tube Video Into SMART Notebook

Interactive Whiteboard Games by PBS Kids

SMARTBoard Goodies Blog, by Mrs. Coggin (A wealth of great activities.)


Teachers Love SMARTBoards

Scholastic's Interactive Whiteboard Resources and Activities (Lots of information for integrating interactive whiteboard activities into lesson plans.)

SMART Board Bubble Wrap (You can save this to your computer and pop the bubble wrap without being connected to the web.)

Flexible Interfaces & Useful Wearables for All - Combining Good Concepts: Slap Bracelet, flexible ePaper, Morph, Asus Waveface, the Porcupine, Sixth Sense, and the iPhone/iPad. (How about an iCuff?!)

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.   

EXAMPLES

True Wearable, by Propeller (This was a prototype introduced in 2007, I think.)

(Belkin Sports Armband for iPhone;  Trueband, by Grantwood Technology; MarewareSportShell)

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.  


(Ridgeline W200 Wearable Touch-Screen Computer)

E-Paper Slap Bracelets: Like the 80's... Except Different -Gizmodo

"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

Video: e-Paper Slap Bracelet, Designed by Chocolate Agency

Nokia Morph (Concept)
The Nokia Morph is a concept project that integrates nanotechnology into mobile devices. I posted about the Morph last year:  Last Night I Dreamt About Haptic Touch-Screen Overlays




Asus Waveface Smartphone (Video from CES 2010)


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.

Porcupine 

Porcupine Project Documents
(The code for Porcupine is available on Sourceforge.net.)

Sixth Sense

I posted about Sixth Sense earlier in 2009:

Pattie Maes TED Talk: Sixth Sense - Mobile Wearable Interface and Gesture Interaction (for the price of a cell phone?!)  Sixth sense allows you to use ANY surface for interaction, and can provide you relevant information about whatever is in front of you.   This would be a great feature for people with disabilities and in the future might also function as a cognitive prosthesis. 


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)

Accessibility and the iPad: First Impressions (Ricky Buchanan, ATMac)

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!

iPad Alternatives, Anyone?

-Lenovo

Taking a break from report-writing, I had the urge to find out more about iPad alternatives. Many reviewers aren't happy that the iPad has fewer features than expected. So what are the alternatives?

Here is a video about Lenovo's hybrid tablet/laptop. It's a little fancier than the iPad, has more features, and most likely will be more expensive:

IdeaPad U1 Hybrid Notebook


The IdeaPad gives you a tablet and a PC/laptop, it is 3G and Wi-Fi enabled, and is basically two systems in one.  When the tablet is connected to the laptop base, it provides the full power of a PC. The touch screen is resistive touch, not capacitive touch, but apparently it acts as if it is a capacitive touch system, if the reviewers are correct.


The HP SLATE
Brief Intro


Interview


RELATED
Pixel Qi might function like an e-reader, but is rumored to be touch-enabled in future versions.

-Thomas Ricker, Engadget 12/7/09

Pixel Qi:  The LCD Screen That Could Finally Kill Paper for Good
-Lauren Anderson, Popular Science, 1/12/10


How Pixel QI works:

-Popular Science, Graham Murdoch


Previous post:
Mary Lou Jepsen, Inventor of Pixel Qi Technology, Discusses Screen Technologies & Multi-touch Tablets

Know HTML & JavaScript? Open source PhoneGap lets you easily create apps for the iPhone and other platforms. (Update: Including the iPad.)

I found what I plan to use to develop my first iPhone app, and since I know HTML and JavaScript, it won't be a chore to get up and running. I'm not sure if it plays well with Apple's iPad.

Update:  PhoneGap CAN be used to develop for the iPad, if the information in the following article from O'Reilly Radar is true!  
Web developers can rule the iPad

PhoneGap. Overview:


 Information from the PhoneGap website:

"PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you."

"As simple as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Software development is hard work. Device integration should be simple so you can focus on the application you are building instead of authoring complex compatibility layers. PhoneGap aims to solve device integration by web enabling devices native functionality with open standards."

Comment: Why does the video give me the impression that development is still a boy's club?  It looks like no women were involved in the PhoneGap code camp.  This is 2010, not 1985, and I'd expect to see more young women involved in this sort of development.

The Importance of Storytelling and Multimedia Content (UPDATED)

Storytelling has been an important part of human culture for centuries and remains important, even thought it has been transformed by advances in technology.

It is transforming how young children think, communicate, and learn.

The following video from the University of Southern California's Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML). In October of 2009, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting released a report that said that four and five year old children who had access to media tools had increased literacy levels as they entered kindergarten. A group of four-year-old preschool students were provided the opportunity to participate in the IML's workshop, Digital Storytelling and Recombinant Narrative, a workshop that is usually geared for adults.  Of course, the workshop was revised to meet the needs of a much younger group.

Here is the clip:

Digital Storytelling With 4-year-olds from IML @ USC on Vimeo.

Summative Evaluation of the Ready to Learn Initiative 
"The study, which was conducted by researchers at the Education Development Center, Inc. and SRI International, evaluated educational video content and associated interactive games from Super Why!, Between the Lions and Sesame Street, which are produced as part of the Ready To Learn (RTL) initiative. RTL aims to increase literacy skills for children aged 2-8 living in high poverty communities, by utilizing multiplatform content"

"The researchers examined the impact of the curriculum which included public media content in a randomized controlled trial with 398 low-income four and five-year olds from 80 preschool classes in New York City and San Francisco. The children who had public media content in their classes developed significantly more early literacy skills -- the ability to name letters, know the sounds associated with those letters and understand the basic concepts about stories and printed words -- than children who did not have public media content in the classroom."


Below is a collection of articles and links about issues related to storytelling in our digital age, from various perspectives.  The game is changing for everyone, especially for traditional teachers and journalists.

Better User Experience With Storytelling, Part One
Francisco Inchauste, Smashing Magazine, 1/29/10    (also read the comments to the article)


The Art of Storytelling
Christian Saylor, O'Reilly InsideRIA 3/23/09

Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment - A Syllabus
Henry Jenkins, 8/11/09 
 Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending the past decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. 

Henry Jenkin's syllabus includes the reading list for his class at USC of the same name, aong with great links to on-line publications related to the course. If you are pressed for time, take a look at Transmedia Storytelling 101.

Here is a link to a post I wrote in 2008 that provides a few good links related to storytelling:
Digital Storytelling, Multimodal Writing, Multiliteracies 

RELATED

Video from USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy:


IML: Background and Philosophy from IML @ USC on Vimeo.

The Center for Digital Storytelling  


Multiliteracies

Interactive Narratives

Innovative Interactivity's Top 50 Multimedia Sites of 2009

USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy

Knight Digital Media Center Presentations  Example: Old Journalists in New Media:  Collaborating with Writers


O'Reilly Digital Media Blogs