Eric Frank began the night with a detailed explanation about his mission to make online text books for university students free and affordable. Frank co-founded the company Flat World Knowledge which claims to offer “online books by leading experts, peer-reviewed and free.” He pointedly addressed the problem as one that reaches beyond the frugal student:

The textbook industry is supporting a disruptive business model in which the burden is not only put on students, but is just as equally felt by teachers. In order to turn a profit the publishers push out new editions of text books – almost annually. This forces teachers to restructure their lesson plans.

Flat World Knowledge offers their books under a freemium model: the online copy is free for everyone, a printed copy runs about $40 (and all the content is distributed under a CC license). The concept was loudly applauded by the audience, but during the Q&A there were many questions regarding the credibility of the authors and the quality of the peer-review.

One key element missing from the Flat World Knowledge library is that they will never be able to share books that are already under copyright (which is about 99% of all texts). And it’s here that Google Book Search – which brazenly vows “to organize all the [books in the worlds'] information and make it universally accessible and useful” – could potentially cut deep into the future of online textbooks. With only 20 text books available at the moment, Flat World Knowledge has an ambitious road ahead of them. But perhaps by focusing on one field (whether it’s economics, foreign languages or history) they would be able to focus and lead that particular segment.

Later in the evening Neeru Paharia presented her work in developing the free online university: Peer 2 Peer University. More info about P2PU is available at the site: http://p2pu.org/

Paharia was followed by a panel of K-12 technologists/educators: David Bill and Arvind Grover – who also happen to be organizers for this weekend’s TEDxNYED event – and Kerri Richardson Redding, Director of Academic Technology at the Brooklyn Friends School. One of the most fascinating parts of this conversation was the stories from the classroom. Grover explained,

Our kids were REALLY confused about citations. They don’t really know the difference between Google and the places that Google takes you. This girl had done a wonderful job on this poetry project, and at the end of this long paper she had one citation: ‘Google.com’.

Grover teaches lessons about Creative Commons and copyright in the classroom precisely because in a multi-modal, remix society, knowing how to propery attribute a creative work to it’s original author is essential with how we communicate and share ideas. Grover continued with a anecdote about when his students were asked to be the creators,

When my students began the project they’d say things like, “I want to be paid for my work”, and “We’re going to make a million dollars!” So in this situation, as the creator, they’re quick to opt for traditional copyright.

He introduced one example of a girl who took a picture of a lock (see photo) and continued, “but then we debated whether someone will really pay money… for THIS! (referring to the picture of the lock). In his classroom he didn’t force his students to adopt a Creative Commons license, but eventually he found that his students would rather share their work and be part of something. “The biggest thing for students is being part of something”, concluded Grover, “And they – more so than their parents – came to understand that there is value in sharing content under a Creative Commons license.”

Client: The Black Eyed Peas & Bacardi (launching in March 2010)
Agency: Maverick Digital
Responsibilities: Wordpress, CSS, PHP, Photoshop

Thanks to all the speakers and participants for their great contributions to this event! The videos will be online soon, and many of our reports are already online:

• Matthijs ten Berge, “Find ways that we can engage us with our public space”
• Martijn de Waal, Improving Cultural Public Space
• Gijs Gootjes & MediaLAB Amsterdam
• Cell Phone Disco @ Urban Screens

Below are five articles I contributed to the Society of the Query’s blog:

1) Siva Vaidhyanathan on Google Street View & Googlization
For Vaidhyanathan the biggest problem with Google is that as it expands into more parts of the world that are less proficient, and less digitally inclined, there will be more examples of friction and harm because more people are going to lack the awareness to cleanse their record. He asserted,”We in this room are not likely to be harmed by Google because all of us in this room are part of a techno-cosmopolitan elite. Only the elite and proficient get to opt out.” [read more]

2) Lev Manovich: Studying Culture With Search Algorithms
New media theorist Lev Manovich summarized his latest contribution to the field of software studies: cultural analytics. Whereas traditional cultural analysis relies on real-world resources (human interpretation and physical storage), cultural analytics relies on the computer and search algorithms in order to discern and interpret culture.  [read more]

3) Yann Moulier Boutang asks, “Are we all just Google’s worker bees?”
What Google is selling is not an ordinary service, but a meta-service, one that depends on human contribution. He likens this human activity to that of the worker bee, and the economy of Google is dependent on the pollination of these bees. [read more]

4) Does privacy still exist in an environment of search?
What most people don’t know is that EU law grants users the right to access any personal data stored about them. Joris van Hoboken’s research investigates the impact of legal norms on the users’ freedom. [read more]

5) Matthew Fuller: Search Engine Alternatives
Matthew Fuller welcomed a cast of “alternative search engines” that offer some variety to the classic retrieval model of search. [read more]

All photos courtesy Anne Helmond and her wonderful Flickr photostream.

Original Paper (PDF): Google Maps & Google Earth In The Classroom

1. Literature

Google Lit Trips

Google Lit Trips is a site developed by English teacher Jerome Burg that experiments with teaching literature through maps. The site offers tips and tutorials for how teachers can integrate Google Earth into the curriculum of an English literature class.  In addition there is a small library of existing KML files that other teachers have uploaded to share with the community. One example is a KML of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath that overlays placemarkers on the map of the United States, each representing a moment in time on the epic journey that the Joad family takes from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression.  Additionally, the labels “Day 1, Day 2, etc.” provide a time based narrative of the trip and can be used to elicit discussion in the classroom. For example, “What events occurred between Day 2 and Day 3 and why did the family travel such a short distance?”

As the KML file is capable of storing questions and images, Google Lit Trips also sprinkles these types of questions and brief summaries from the book along the trail. Ultimately, Google Lit Trips engages the student through the use of simulation and critical thinking. Google Lit Trips, in line with a statement by communication professor Ian Bogost, provides students with a variety of different ways to observe and reconfigure the basic building blocks of the story.

Whirligig

Inspired by Google Lit Trips, sixth grade English teacher Tom Woodward used Google Maps to plot the novel Whirligig by Paul Fleischman. In the story the main character travels to the four corners of the U.S. The image below shows Woodward’s use of photography and narrative to capture the protagonist’s journey around the country. Students engage with the visualization by zooming in on certain placemarkers and revealing additional text and images that work to supplement the novel.

The Golden Compass Project

Juicy Geography is a site where educators can share ideas and resources that typically pertain to issues of geography, earth science or technology. One teacher featured on the site shared his 8^th grade lesson plan using Google Earth and the Phillip Pullman novel Northern Lights. Before the 2007 release of the film adaptation (aka. The Golden Compass) this teacher had his students imagine they were scouting locations for the movie. The students were asked to plot placemarkers in Google Earth – each representing the most suitable location for key scenes in the book. This cross-curricular project challenged the students to use literature, geography and technical skills in their visual narration of the novel. It provided a problem for which there was a multiple amount of solutions, thereby sparking creativity. In addition, this type of open-ended speculation allowed the students to be expressive without fear of being wrong.

2. Biology

In a case study on the Google Earth Outreach site, Adelia Barber (a Ph. D at the University of California, Santa Cruz) has used Google Earth in her introductory biology class. She instructs the class how to interact and play with Google Earth from the perspective of an ecologist and engages the class with questions like:

Judging by the characteristics of the trees, what time of year do you think the picture was taken over Central Park in Manhattan?

The Tigris River flows through central Baghdad. Is there any vegetation growing on the islands and sand berms in the middle and on the edges of this river?

3. Physics

High school freshman teacher Dale Basler has found a way to teach physics with Google Maps.

Using local bus schedules, he had students race to map out the bus route and calculate the average speed of the bus. This project provided a game-like element in support of learning. The use of games to motivate learning is at the core of ‘play’. Games create simulated worlds that allow the student a space for trial and error, as well as the motivation to move forward with the game and solve problems.

Reflecting on his idea Basler commented, “The class was full of discussions about things like: which bus goes by which landmark or which bus is always late. The project made my lesson plan for the following week much simpler since I now established an example that everyone had an understanding of.”

4. History / Urban Development

The history icon allows anyone to browse satellite imagery from the past and make geographical comparisons. There is great potential to use these maps for teaching lesson about urban growth. The two images directly below show examples of urban development over a period of three years. The two images that follow show the World Trade Center in New York City on September 12^th 2001 juxtaposed with a shot from the site on October 31, 2006. In this project students are encouraged to make observations based on the historical imagery and then deduce reasons to support their claims.

Urban Development Lessons w/ Google Earth

World Trade Center in New York City w/ Google Earth

Additional Reading:
Essential Skills for The New Media Landscape

Every location on the earth can be identified using a set of two numbers: the geographic coordinates longitude and latitude. By themselves, these coordinates aren’t very interesting – they are just data. In 2009 the international non-profit New Media Consortium predicted the use of geographic data (commonly referred to as geodata) as one of the six technologies that are likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning and research. The organization cites affordability and accessibility as two of the main reasons for why geodata is a “technology to watch”. In addition, they provide a handful of educational examples that incorporate the use of geolocation, geotagging and location aware devices. In this blog post I focus specifically on the pedagogical relevance of using Google Maps and Google Earth in the classroom. My claim is that Google Maps/Earth are important educational tools because they have the potential to reinforce essential technological and social competencies.

With a similar philosophy as the New Media Consortium, a separate organization called the Project New Media Literacies also strives to improve the future of education. Since 2005 the Project New Media Literacies has been researching the effects of the Internet, as a global network, on how we learn and interact with each other. If technology and media are an extension of humanity, as Marshall McLuhan once claimed, then the Project New Media Literacies has recognized that as technology evolves we must also “upgrade” our minds. The project was founded by media scholar Henry Jenkins and is a part of the MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Project New Media Literacies is funded in part by a $50 million digital learning initiative launched by The MacArthur Foundation. Its goal has been to develop cultural competencies and social skills that are necessary for becoming fully involved in the ‘participatory culture’ of the 21^st century.

A few of the new skills include:

Visualization – the ability to interpret and create data representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and identifying trends

Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Networking – the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities.

Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Theoretical Framework:
New Media Literacies with Interactive Maps

According to the definition supported by Project New Media Literacies, every map is an example of a visualization and the better visualizations are capable of making us smarter. Professor of cognitive science and author Donald Norman would agree with this hypothesis. In his book Things That Make Us Smart he argues that the essence of intelligence comes from our ability to work with representations of the world. He explains,

“The ability to represent the representations of thoughts and concepts is the essence of reflection and of higher-order though. It is through metarepresentations that we generate new knowledge, finding consistencies and patterns in the representations that could not readily be noticed in the world.”

Representations in general, according to Norman, are at the heart of reasoning and help us discover higher-order relationships.

Information visualization researcher Stuart Card’s definition of visualization differs slightly from the Project New Media Literacies’ in that he affirms that a visualization is “computer-supported” and “interactive”. Combining geographic representations with interactivity thus offers a way to use and play with static information. According to Jean Piaget, interactivity helps students generate knowledge and meaning from their own experiences. Based on his constructivist model of learning Piaget has argued that knowledge is constructed by the learner.

The significance of Google Maps/Earth is that they allow students to interact with, and use the data: they combine Norman’s model of intelligence with Piaget’s, meanwhile fostering the Project New Media Literacies set of ‘new skills’. Consider as an example Martin Gilbert’s The Atlas of the Holocaust, a geographic visualization of genocide re-purposed with an educational agenda (see image below). In his book, Gilbert overlays symbols and graphics depicting the deaths and movements of families during the Holocaust in Europe between 1933 and 1945. These maps are wonderful in that they allow a narrative to emerge atop what may have originally been a static dataset. As Dorling and Fairbairn explain, The Atlas of the Holocaust “shows us a story of the tragedy” and “presents the evidence of an event, and puts the event in our faces – on the map”. While this type of mapping reinforces visualization, how might teachers add the skills of visualization and simulation so that they can effectively communicate this story in the classroom?

Google Maps/Earth can be a promising solution because it encourages students to learn through a simulated experience. A more recent example of genocide mapping can be seen in Google Earth’s Crisis in Darfur. Not only can students immerse themselves in a constantly updated simulation of the atrocities taking place in Darfur, but they can layer multimedia content over the satellite imagery. As the Project New Media Literacies’ has expressed in their latest paper, “students learn more through direct observation and experimentation than from reading about something in a textbook or listening to a lecture”. In this comparison of genocide maps, Google Maps provides a more dynamic presentation than The Atlas of the Holocaust thereby motivating students to make discoveries and generate opinions of their own.

Much like a parent in awe of how quickly children tend to grow, Berners-Lee celebrated the 20^th birthday of the WWW this year with a bit of pride, but mostly astonishment as to how much it has matured on its own. He reflected on the early years when he thought the Web would always be WYSIWYG and was surprised that so many people these days, even children, have learned to use HTML.

Berners-Lee likened the consistency of the Web to “something you pull out of the kitchen sink”, noting that “the Web has everything all tangled up together: lots of small things that fit tightly and connect to the big things.” Then in order to illustrate the size of the Web he continued, “There are more Web pages than neurons in my brain. The only difference is that while the neurons in my brain are going down, the amount of Web pages continue to go up.” He asserted that we have an extra responsibility to the Web because, unlike the brain, it was created by humans.

The questions that Berners-Lee received during the Q&A were certainly the same questions that he was being asked during the mid-90s when “cyberspace” went mainstream. Perhaps while in the midst of the creator they hoped to find more definitive answers to such worn-out questions…

• As an Internet user, how do I know what is the truth on the Internet?
• Is the Internet safe for kids, and what can I do to teach my kids?
• Do you feel the Internet is invading our private lives?

In line with Berners-Lee’s call for “extra responsibility”, Steve Bratt and Stephane Boyera followed-up with a brief introduction to the newly created World Wide Web Foundation – set to launch later this year – which is “the next phase of fulfilling Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision: the Web as humanity connected by technology.” The Foundation’s mission is to advance the Web and to fill the gap that impedes 1 billion+ people around the world from authoring and accessing content.

Within this context the audience viewed a trailer for the upcoming documentary about Yacouba Sawadogo entitled The Man Who Stopped the Desert (Sawadogo was present on-stage, but due to a language barrier choose to “let the trailer speak for him”). The Man Who Stopped the Desert highlights Sawadogo’s triumph in restoring food and life to many areas around the Sahara desert that were once abandoned due to draught.

At the time Sawadogo began using traditional communication to spread his innovate agricultural techniques. But the important idea that emerged here at the symposium is: as more Africans can connect, author, communicate and share these types of innovation and technology – then others can learn, and all together they can help lift Africa out of poverty.

Just got word that I’ll be giving a talk on ‘Free’ as a business strategy. I’ll post more info about the time/location shortly. But here is some info on my presentation…

Title: Sell What Can’t Be Copied
Talk Description: The concepts of ‘free’ and ‘freemium’ are excellent business strategies for getting people to use your stuff. Yet too often these ideas are misunderstood or poorly executed without a plan to monetize. How do we recognize the difference between what should be free and what should be sold?

Most business owners in this situation suffer from a marked inability to comprehend the underlying logic of the Internet when analyzing digital distribution. Digital products (digital music, videos, images and other content) live within the framework of the Internet, therefore they are subject to the logics of that context. By analyzing this context and looking closely at the influence that the Internet and blogging culture are having on online distribution, Chris Castiglione provides a definition for what should and shouldn’t be given away for free.

All cars manufactured today contain at least one computer. My idea is two fold: to develop sensors that connect the automobile’s meta-data to the Internet; and to allow developers to create online applications using this data. Conceptually, it is like Google Analytics, but for cars. Added feature may include networking this data to the local mechanic, friends, or other drivers. My theory is that this information will get degenerate parts changed more quickly, make the road safer, save the owner some cash and ultimately help the environment. In the future, car designers should think more like computer designers.

I will post more info when I find out. Looks like in the meantime I’ll have to get started on the second round proposal.

More info: http://www.aachallenge.nl/