EDAD660 (2008)

Hi everyone,

It’s almost time for me to teach EDAD660 again in Mallorca! If you’re interested in checking out this year’s content feel free to visit our new blog at http://edapps2009.globalblogs.org/.  I won’t be updating the Summer 2008 blog after this final posting.

Recently I’ve been researching “Augmented Reality” techniques and how they can be applied to support educational / instructional applications. For those of you who don’t know what Augmented Reality (AR) is, it’s a way in which we can “superimpose” a layer of additional information onto the “real world” through the use of various types of technologies. It’s actually easier to show than to describe! Here are a few demos of me showing off my newest AR creations:

Earth/Moon system:

Wind Power Relief Map:

In each of these demos you can see that I’m using my webcam to detect a special symbol – this symbol, when recognized, tells the computer to overlay the incoming video stream with a 3D object or animation. The orientation of the symbol gives the system the ability to determine its location in space as well as rotation and tilt.

I’m hoping that I will be able to expand my research into creating interactive tools that be used by teachers to explain difficult concepts to their students. I’m also working on developing a streamlined display system that may include head-mounted glasses that allows a person to walk freely around a space and experience any AR content that may be present. Stay tuned!

I just came across an article that talks about an innovative start-up that will be coming online early in 2009.  It’s called Flat World Knowledge, and they bill themselves as an online source for “Open Source Textbooks.”  The e-books that they plan on releasing will be authored and peer reviewed by experts in various fields, and will be made available online for free.  Books will even come packaged with lesson plans and study guides.

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/minisite/

Last year I worked with an occupational therapist in my educational technology authoring class who was interested in using technology to help teach handwriting.  She mainly wanted to explore how to create her own worksheets and handouts using a customized font that would help support letter correct formation.  I wish I had known about this site back then!

Fontifier (http://www.fontifier.com) is a site that allows you to create your own fonts using your own handwriting as a guide.  You can start by downloading and printing a PDF template that you fill out by hand.  The template contains spots for each letter, number and commonly used symbol in the alphabet.  Once you’ve filled out the form you can scan it and upload it back to fontifier’s website.  They will then create a font for you that you can download for a mere $9 US.  Pretty cool stuff!

Two things caught my eye this week, and I think that you may find them interesting too.  The first is a free software package called “Jing” that can be used to capture video and audio from your computer.  The quality is fantastic, and they have a one-click feature that allows you to post your video to the web along with an Embed link.  Here’s a quick video I just made about a project that I’m working on for a class at NYU:

If you want to see the full project feel free to visit it at http://itp.nyu.edu/~cmk380/pileup_04/applet/

The second item of note has to do with an article that CNN ran this week on Google’s plans to create vast floating offshore data centers.  These centers could be used to host Google’s various web services, such as it’s search engine, Gmail, Google Docs, etc.  The plan right now is to also take advantage of emerging energy production technologies, such as wave and tidal generation, to help power these floating computer centers.  Pretty cool stuff!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SPORT/09/18/computer.navy/index.html?eref=rss_latest

Hey everyone, I came across this video that really helps to illustrate why Google Docs is a superior alternative to e-mail for collaboration purposes.  Might be useful for those of you who are trying to get your teachers to embrace some of these new technologies in their own practice.

As I said in class, if you want to gently introduce your staff to Web 2.0 technologies, you get the most “bang for your buck” by starting them off with a Google account!

Oh, and if you’re interested, here’s a link to my new blog that I’ll be maintaining at NYU:

http://blog.craigkapp.com

Hope all is well in your corner of the world!

Just last month we were talking about the ‘browser war’ between Microsoft and pretty much the rest of the world.  Well, the list of competitors just got a little bigger.  Hot off the press, here is a link to an article that talks about Google’s super-secret new browser named ‘ Chrome’.

The announcement was leaked today along with a 38 page comic book written by Scott McCloud that describes the changes that Chrome will bring to a person’s browsing experience.  If you’re interested in seeing the whole comic book you can follow this link.  I posted the first page since it summarizes nicely the main issues at hand and how Chrome is planning on addressing them.

Saw this on digg this morning – though you guys would find it interesting as we talked about trans-oceanic cabling in class.  Hope your school year is off to a great start so far!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/28/google_undersea_cable_two/

I am cleaning out my office today as today (it’s my last official day working at TCNJ in my current position!) As I’m going through some yet-to-be-filed paperwork and found some interesting sites that may be of use to you in your schools.

1. Virtual Museum Canada: A really first-rate site that I first heard about at this year’s New Media Consortium conference. The site is sponsored by the Canadian Heritage foundation and boasts an impressive display of online exhibits and resources for teachers, including sample lesson plans and curriculum guides.
2. Toonboom.com: Toonboom creates desktop software packages that help you to create professional quality 2D animations. Their higher end software is quite sophisticated, but they have a great tool for kids called ‘Flip Boom‘ that looks very impressive. The software allows you to compose, draw, animate and publish your movies into a variety of formats (including Flash SWF which can easily be incorporated into your blogs).  The software is not free, but they do offer a generous “try before you buy” download option.

Finally, here’s a pretty mind blowing video from Youtube that details a paper that was co-written by researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft.  They are using geographically tagged photographs to create 3D “walkthroughs” of various locations around the world.  Pretty amazing stuff!

Just wanted to say “thank you” to everyone for a great summer!  I had a great time, and I’m very impressed with the amount of content that we were able to cover in such a short period of time!  Oh, and your grades have been posted to TESS as of this morning.

I’m not sure how many of you will continue to use your connectspace.org blog, but at Jamie & Heidi’s requests I’ve enabled a new plugin on all of your blogs called “subscribe2″ – this plugin instructs your blog to automatically e-mail any e-mail address(es) you want every time you write a new post.  You can turn it on by clicking on ‘Plugins’ and then ‘Activate’ the Subscribe2 plugin.  Once it’s set up you can click on ‘Manage’ and then on ‘Subscribers’ to set up the e-mail addresses that should be contacted when you release new content.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help you guys out – have a great 2008/2009 school year!

-Craig