Eric Sailers is a speech/language pathologist who has an extensive amount of experience using "apps" in educational settings. He's compiled a great list of apps and related resources on his blog: http://slpsharing.com/app-resources/
Eric spends some of his time giving presentations about the use of Apple's mobile devices in education. He's co-created a few apps, too!
Well before the iPad entered the market, researchers such as Dr. Juan Hourcade at the University of Iowa, began to develop multi-touch software to support young people with autism spectrum disorders and other disabilities. I've been following this research for a while, and was happy to discover that Dr. Hourcade's work was recently featured in a recent Wall Street Journal article and video.
If you are a parent or work with a young person with special needs, you might be interested in learning more about Windows-7 based touch-screen software. The software shown in the video below, as well as related resources, are available for free on the Open Autism Software website.
I work with young people with a range of disabilities, including autism, as a school psychologist. One of my schools is a program that is technology-rich. Although we don't have iPads, there is a SMARTBoard in every classroom and in other rooms around the school. We have a Wii, a few multi-touch all-in-one PC's, and recently received two Dell multi-touch tablet PCs.
I noticed that Dr. Hourcade is looking for people who'd like to create similar apps for the iPad. I'd be interested in knowing anyone who might be working on this. I'd like to help in some way, but I don't have a lot of free time to do this on my own.
I have a new iPad2, and after playing around with a ton of apps, I was inspired to downloaded XCode4 and think about what I could create. I'm a Mac person at heart, but I learned to program within a Windows environment (C#). I need a way to maintain my programming skills and gradually learn a few new ones. This sort of project would be useful to me in my "day job", too!
SOMEWHAT RELATED 3D Interactive Heart, by 22Miles, on a Dell Latitude Xt2
"Kinect sound machines become prettier and easier with each development! The Kinect SoundWall is a drum beat music machine controlled by gestures and voice commands. This video by vertigosoftwaredisplays this digital music machine at work and how through various gesture and voice commands, users can create awesome beats to dance to. In the video, the user gestures to to certain blocks in the screen in order to create a beat there or render the beats void. Through various voice commands, the beat can start, increase tempo, stop etc. Through the proper integration of both voice and gesture commands, the Kinect SoundWall sets the standard for a great and efficient sound machine of the Kinect!"
"For more information about the Kinect SoundWall visit the project’s website."
"Computer-based interactive exhibits are undergoing a major transformation. The lone, single-user kiosk is now being replaced by multitouch tables and walls, motion-capture spaces, networked installations, and RFID-based exhibits. Advances in augmented reality, voice recognition, eye tracking, and other technologies promise even more radical change for exhibits in the near future."
I've been following Jim's journey with Ideum, a multimedia design firm that collaborates with museums and related non-profits, for many years, and I am impressed with the work of this company. In addition to his work at Ideum, Jim serves as the Principal Investigator of a National-Science Foundation sponsored open-source exhibit software project, Open Exhibits, which provides a free software development kit that supports the creation of multi-touch and multi-user software applications for museums and educational settings.
I'm happy to put in a plug for Ideum's latest product, the MT55 Platform Multi-Touch Table. It incorporates a range of features that I'm sure will meet the needs of museum visitors. In my opinion, this table would be a fantastic resource for all types of libraries, including those in K-12 settings.
The MT55 Platform Multi-touch Table, from Ideum
The MT55 Platform Multitouch Table from Ideum on Vimeo. (Note: This video features music by Moby, the track "Sevastopol" on his current album, Destroyed. The music was used with the artists' permission. Learn more at: moby.com") - Ideum
"The thinnest, largest, most powerful multitouch table available.The MT55 Platform multitouch table houses a powerful computer and a 55-inch interactive LCD display that responds to 32 touch-points, inside a rugged aluminum body."
"The bright 55″ 1920×1080 HD display has a 5,000,000:1 contrast ratio. A wide 178-degree viewing angle accommodates multiple users around the table. The optical multitouch system supports 32 simultaneous touch points for collaborative interaction. The system is multitouch-enabled from start-up, and runs Windows 7 64-bit professional edition."
"The integrated computer is packed with power. It contains an Intel® Hyper-Threaded DualCore i5® which runs at 2.66 GHz, 8GB of RAM, and a 128 GB solid-state drive (upgradeable to an i7®)."
"The table comes complete with WIFI, Bluetooth, and Ethernet connectivity. It also has multiple HDMI outputs that allow you to easily mirror the table's display, extend the desktop, or connect to and display from another computer or HDMI device."
"Convenient, but secure ports: CAT5, HDMI, and USB 2.0 are available on both the side on bottom the table."
"The MT55 Platform includes blue LED under-lights to illuminate the area beneath the interactive surface (custom LED colors are available). Every MT table includes a sophisticated internal cooling cell to maintain operating conditions that exceed the optimum environmental specifications for the internal components."
"The interactive surface of the MT55 Platform protected by a sheet of hardened, crystal clear, low-iron 5mm tempered glass surface...As an option, we offer Sevasa HapticGlas®, produced exclusively for Ideum. Micro-etched HapticGlas® provides tactile feedback, reduces fingerprints, increases scratch resistance, and directs user focus." -Ideum RELATED High-res photos of the MT55 Platform GestureWorks Software Open Exhibits Ideum Open Exhibits Tuio Kinect
For all of the knowledge junkies out there, here are a few things that might fuel your passion for interactive information exploration and consumption. Although the tools below were adopted by people in journalism/news related fields, I think that they have potential for use in education and other fields. I'm interested in learning more about how people from different disciplines currently use these tools, and I'd also like more to this list.
CALAIS: "We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais. Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application." CALAIS is published by Thomson Reuters MORE ABOUT CALAIS PR Video for CALAIS:
"Jer Thorp is a software artist, writer, and educator. He is a contributing editor for Wired UK. He is currently Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times."
DOCUMENTCLOUD "DocumentCloud runs every document you upload through OpenCalais, giving you access to extensive information about the people, places and organizations mentioned in each."
LINKED DATA -linkeddata.org "Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.""
Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide
"....Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together."At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up."-TED
