Last week, I attended the Scientific Applications with Google Earth Conference at the University of Michigan. Here are some things I either learned or learned that I need to learn:
Basic Technical Tips & Info:
- Gigapan stuff is cheap and looks easy to do. I’ll order the unit.
- You can copy a Google Earth placemark into a text editor and pasting it will yield all the code which you can manipulate and paste back in to Google Earth. This also works with polygons, paths and overlays.
- You can use Google My Maps to create placemarks with rich text, embedded youtube videos and pictures easily then download the placemarks into Google Earth. (I already knew about the ability to upload pictures into Picassa, geotag them and download them as a Google Earth file).
- GPS cameras are coming in more and more options. This Ricoh camera looks dreamy.
Things to ponder/explore further:
- Making phylogenetic trees in Google Earth is cool. the link takes you to a project where Avian Flu’s mutation and movement is being tracked. The ‘About’ page has a quick introductory video.
- Google Earth Pro licenses appear to be given away relatively easily to non-profits.
- It’s possible to make bar graphs in Google Earth where countries (or other regions) can stick out as bars on a spherical base (the Earth). These can pull data from the web and change with the data. See: http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/02/world_oil_consupmtio.html, for example.
- I need to follow-up with the guy from Wisconsin who does this stuff: http://aqua.wisc.edu/glct/maps/Panoramas/258.html (which didn’t work for me in Firefox, but did in Safari).
- Education was oddly represented – Steve, Roberta and myself were nearly the only folks who had any obvious grounding in K-12, though there were some other folks who did some professional development. There were others who wanted to do things but were perhaps naïve – i.e., “I wanted to work with kids to do _____, but NSF wouldn’t fund me because I don’t speak Educationese.” The odd (thin) representation of education at a Google-sponsored conference where education was a strand represents opportunity.
- Most of the people who were vocal in the sessions were interested in doing tremendously cool but typically very content specific things that took a long time to create (things that required substantial technological skills). What our project needs is the power to create things that are pretty cool, local to the teacher and can be created very quickly. Google Earth has great power to serve both kinds of projects.
Things to do soon:
- I need to investigate Google Base; Google’s database program.
- I need to make a template for a Powers of Ten lesson in Google Earth. This would be a good starting place for teachers who are Google Earth novices — based on Eames’s Powers of Ten, but with a local center. As I relearned last year, a shocking number of high school kids can’t locate themselves, their city or their state on a map. Starting out the school house door and zooming to maps of progressively larger area can yield epiphanies — I could see the light bulbs come on for several kids.
Other things that don’t fit under the above headings:
- The virtual fieldwork poster was well received. I had good conversations with about ten people and all feedback was positive. One strong suggestion was to make the keywords in the database “True keywords.” I understood this to mean a system that recognizes typos and suggests corrections.
