Use Google Maps to create your own custom map that includes photographs of places.
I’ve been playing with google maps and the google maps api for a while so was please t osee some familiar territory for this Assignment.
This afternoon Dorothy, my wife, and I took a walk round Ardinning Loch, we do this nearly every week often twice a week in the summer, It is a short walk that is always interesting. Ardinning is a SWT reserve.
I used Trails on my phone to record a kml and gps track. The kml file was imported int oa new google map. I uploaded the photos it was then just a matter of dropping on some pins, filling in a title and pasting in the url to the image file.
Over the last few year I’ve played with developing a workflow for creating maps like this using the GoogleMaps API. For this I use SuperCard, a mac scripting application. The project allows me to import a gpx file exported from Trails, get exif data for some pictures, iPhone photos have location data imbedded (It also lets me add locations to other pictures by comparing the time taken with the gps file). It then exports a gpx file which I upload to this website and a php file created a map.
Here is the Ardinning Walk map 120303 Ardinning and a whole set of Mapped Walks. In my opinion this has a few advantages over using google maps, you can embed audio & video, and the popup boxes link in sequence. It is also a faster to produce. Obviously it has the disadvantage of being a wee bit trickier to set up.
I’ve a fair number of blog posts going into this in a bit more detail: tagged googlemaps.
But what is it good for?
I think these sort of maps add another dimension to telling a story or presenting information. helping to tell a story in space as well as time. I can see this being incorporated into all sorts of class room projects, either for mapping learning experiences or creating fictional maps. This one The Kidnapped Trail – Google Maps is a great example of the possibilities.
Dropmark is a nice way to collect and share stuff, were stuff can be webpages, images, files, text, links etc. Each piece of stuff is thumb-nailed. Clicking on a thumbnail opens it on the screen and you can arrow-key through the collection. collections can be private, public or shared. You can collaborated with others.
You have 250 MB free storage space. There is a safari extension (and firefox add-on) that opens a side bar on a webpage and allows you to drag and drop urls (where the whole page is captured), images or blocks of text. You can drag files from your desktop too.
Clicking on the thumbnail above will take you to a quick example Gif Animation is a mix of images from the web, webpages and files from my desktop. EDUhack is a collection of links.
Video Test is a mix of Vimeo and Youtube videos, dragging the url dropmark thumbnails the videos and clicking on the thumb plays them browsers window size.
Using dropmarks is pretty intuitive, but there are plenty of written and video instructions on Dropmark®.
Finally each collection has an RSS feed which mean you could quickly put together a podcast of disparate materials. and there is an API in the works.
Create and share animated GIFs and 3D anaglyphs using more than 40,000 stereographs from The New York Public Library.
Since I’ve spent a fair bit of time animating gifs for DS106 of late this was interesting.
Stereoscopic photography recreates the illusion of depth by utilizing the binocularity of human vision. Because our two eyes are set apart, each eye sees the world from a slightly different angle. Our brains combine these two different eye-images into one, a phenomenon that enables us to “see,” ever so slightly, around the sides of objects, providing spatial depth and dimension. Stereoscopic views, or stereographs, consist of two nearly twin photographs — one for the left eye, one for the right. Viewing the side-by-side images though a special lens arrangement called a stereoscope helps our brains combine the two flat images and “see” the illusion of objects in spatial depth.
and
The Stereogranimator joins these latter-day adventures of the venerable GIF, mashing up an important early genre of internet folk art with a nearly forgotten species of folk photography.
You get to play with the creation of the gif, this creates a 2 frame animated gif and alternates between them.
Stephen Downes points to a episode of EdTechWeekly: EdTechWeekly#209 – What are the big themes in Edtech? I alway used to tell my class that blogging was like going on a school trip. Folk can forget that online life is a lot like real life.
One of the things I’ve really been enjoying about DS106 is riffing off the ideas of Alan Levine (CogDogBlog) like many edubloggers I’ve been following and being inspired by his blog for years. 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story is a standard teacher 2.0 text I’ve also, like many, used Feed2JS on several occasions. A while back I even tried to get a piratebox working after reading of the Storybox.
Anyway it is great to watch Alan teach his ds106 sub group and to follow his hyper activity on his blog. The other day, playing with the current #ds106 audio section he blogged: CogDogCodeAcademy: A Random Freesound Generator – CogDogBlog, this struck a cord as I recently posted #edtechcc Assignment 2 The Sight of Sound using the wonderful Freesound site. Revisiting it and looking at Alan’s code I notice that Freesound has an API. This looked interesting. I’ve now managed to create what I hope may be a ds106 Assignment flickrSounds.
flickrSounds
flickrSounds is a simple mashup that searches Freesounsd and flickr for the same word. It then display the sound and picture. You can reload either until you get an image and sound you like. This can be added to a list, and the exercise repeated. Once you have a set of picture/sounds you can grab an embed code to put hem on a blog. A set of pictures/sounds could create a story, illustrate a quote, saying or slogan.
Example
This is for searching for ds106 4 Life. I clicked through a few images and sounds for each word.
ds106 by electrovert Attribution-NonCommercial License
I’ve built in a Jim Groom busy widget into the webpage, the default search is dog, my example plays off the ds106 4life meme. Stephen Downes suggested in a comment that ds106 might be being over-branded I love ds106 but I think it’s being over-branded, this didn’t go down too well, but has inspired a lot of interesting stuff:, Martha Burtis’ The Cult of 4LIFE a graphic jokey one and I’m Still Chewing on that Over-Branding of DS106 Comment | mbransons and the comments on that post stand out for me.
It was an interesting idea, as someone just joining in I can see what Stephen Downes means. A lot of the DS106 rhetoric is fairly full on, there is a lot of self reference and pride/ego involved. I also could be put off by not sharing a culture with many of the other participants, being much older, having different frames of reference etc. Looking across the Atlantic it there is a very USA vibe. Lots of other folk with different backgrounds would have different reasons, I can see how DS106 could seem a bit hard to penetrate when looked in on. I thought a wee bit before joining in. but…
There are a couple of things that point the other way, DS106 is incredibly welcoming, the instructors are obviously giving a huge amount of time to the course and still have time to engage with the drive-by participants. They even made an effort to include my rather non standard blog RSS feed in the ds106 site. This seems to me to more than compensate for any exclusivity that ds106 might project.
The over-branding can be seen as glue, very important when you are trying to get participants to work together, and is more over more often than not obviously jokey, mocking the course and the organisers. #jimgroomart (eg: Blue Jump Suit #JimGroomArt #ds106:) is just an example, mock the teacher is one way to strengthen the connection, personalise the course, have fun and in weird way honour the amount of effort Jim makes to comment and make folk feel welcome in DS106.
I am also blown away 1 by the delight ds106 participants take in someone else grabbing what they have created and playing with it. The flickrSounds page is an example of this, without Alan’s positive reaction to my first tests I would not have carried on with this and had so much fun learnig a wee bit more JavaScript.
Code Thoughts
The root of this bit of fun was Alan’s post, in it he compares ds106 style learning with the new badges style learning:
Heck, I would rather do my own code challenges than someone else’s monkey see, monkey do. Thats the rub with this stuff, the motivation changes completely when it is something you need/want, versus someone else’s rote exercise for badges.
I commented to the effect that I found codeyear quite useful. I’ve been trying to keep up with the weekly JavaScript lessons there (just 3 weeks behind at the moment), as an afterthought I noted that Freesound have an API. This got me started on flickrSounds. In a way this proves Alan’s point, I’ve spent much much longer playing with this than I have in several weeks of codeyear. Partly because of the intrinsic interest of the task and partly due to Alan’s encouragement (blog comments and twitter).
But… I have messed about with javascript a few times now, but this is much neater code than usual (still horrible but relatively better). some of the improvements came from my experience of another CogDog/ds106 inspired piece Visualize That Quote but partly due to codeyear, where for the first time I’ve had the beginnings of an understanding of the basics of JavaScript.
There is a way to go with FlickrSounds, I need to add the ability to remove sound/pics from a ‘saved’ set and I need to test in IE, I’ve never manages to write any JavaScript that worked in IE first time.
Spirit of DS106
This has not been a ds106 assignment, I’ve not done any this week. I’ve only done one daily create, but I feel pretty much in the ds106 zone this weekend.
Footnotes:
1. blown away is the nearest I can get to the DS106 comment style. This is much less reserved that my usual nice ↩
The assignment is to reduce a movie, story, or event into its basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons, four of them. Write your blog post up but do not give away the answer, let people guess! The challenge is to find the icons that suggest the story, but do not make it so easy.
No one will have difficulty guessing this one I love the noun project. The workflow suggested in the task is, I think, screenshots, I downloaded the illustrator files, copied the icons to fireworks.
This was the first of the EDUtalk Conversations which are part of EDUtalk. You can read about the plan on the EDUtalk Conversations page. There were half a dozen or so folk signed up to come along but it ended up with just 3 of us: David @parslad, Olivia @owexelstein and myself.
Although we were initially surprised at the low turnout we ended up EDUtalking for four hours. I, for one, had a great time. learnt a lot and came away with some food for thought.
The event was held at the Chaplaincy of Strathclyde University which was a great space. There were sets of couches and easy chairs and given a bigger number it would have been easy to split into sub groups an d use the space flexibly.
I felt there were subtle differences meeting in a neutral space: not some ones school and early in the day: not a pub. I felt that this, and the fact the event was due t run for a couple of hours with expansion time available, made the conversation open ended and relaxed.
This conversation ranged over a lot of topics, circling, ict, glow and challenging behaviour a few times. We were each invited to bring some topic to the table, I am not too sure if we covered Olivia’s or David’s but mine was talked about and I saw linked ideas pop up in other discussions.
I was thinking about the way good teaching or classroom ideas bubble up, spread a little and go away again. My example was blogging which I think we are now on the third or fourth wave or bubble. I wonder why something that seems to be a great idea fades and then is rediscovered. Olivia delighted me by recounting using a BBC computer game embedded in her topic work back in 1992 (I was surprised she was old enough to be teaching way back then). I got the picture of the BBC being used as one part of a rich topic. Obviously Olivia’s practice continues to be enriched by here experience (check out here blog) but the question remains why this is not now standard practice? It can’t be lack of hardware as Olivia (I presume) would only have had one BBC for her class.
We also talked about the possibility of other EDUtalk Conversations and wondered if it might be better badging these TeachMeet 365 as well. THe idea share a lot of common ground, especially the idea of avoiding sponsorship. David has collected a few free locations that could be used and we could see all sorts of possibilities.
I certainly hope to see more of these events and am kean the idea spreads.
I am still trying to play along with the spring DS106 course. for the first couple of weeks I was keeping up this week I’ve let it slip, I don’t think I posted a Daily Create once. It seems much easier to do them all than to pick and choose, once you miss a couple it is easy to keep on missing them. The previous week I had managed to do a wee bit of commenting but this week I’ve only made a couple. Lots of other things kept getting in the way. The fact I am involved in Ed Tech Creative Collective and trying to keep up with Code Year(only 2 or 3 weeks behind) is a fair excuse.
The other thing is that this poster took a lot longer than I expected. If I had figured out the layer logic first it would have been a lot quicker.
I’ve also noticed that my feed, as this is not a wordpress blog, has not being playing nicely with ds106, the posts show up on the home page but assignments and tutorials are not being pulled to the assignment pages. @mburtisis going to try my feedburner feed instead, so hopefully this post will show up in the right place.
I’ve been thinking a fair bit of about the similarities and differences of ds106 edtechcc & codeyear but I think I’ll podcast those later this week.
I wanted to speed up my workflowplayflow for messing about in this way and though of SuperCard, my favourite mac application. I’ve used SuperCard to create a simple application (mac only) that will, load a Quicktime compatible movie, grab a short selection of frames, and create an animated gif with a few mouse clicks. The SuperCard bit grabs the frames and then used the gifsicle app (which it contains) to create animated gifs.
I’ve tested the application only briefly on a few different macs (10.4, 10.5 & 10.6 or tiger, Leopard and mostly Snow Leopard) and it seem to work. On the old G4 10.4 machine there is a wee bit of lag grabbing the frames, but it works out ok. Update I’ve made a new build that works on Lion (2012-02-14).
There are very few features, the application will grab 10 frames and you can choose to grab them every 1-20 frames. It will export a selection of these 10 frames and allows you to do some simple colour reduction.
Here is a screencast:
You can download Movie2Gif from my dropbox, it is a rainy afternoon project miles away from a polished bit of software but might be useful/fun for someone.
I’ve found the odd .mov file that will not play in my application, opening it in QuickTime and exporting to iphone format seems to fix these.
If you Movie2Gif and give it a try, let me know how you get on, if it gets any positive feedback I’ll do a bit to improve it. Please send any suggestions, bugs etc to me.
