*On Gmail invitations: “The invite model wasn’t a marketing idea, we were just afraid that it wouldn’t scale it. It’s interesting that now this model is being used by other companies as a marketing strategy.”

*On project management: “One thing we do to make the projects fun is give it nick names. Like, for one project it was called “taco town”!  Having nick names like this gave us a sense of community through laughter: it made it fun to say things like, “Let’s take a look at ‘spicy chilli chese’”.

*On criticism: After hearing danah boyd’s criticism of Google Buzz and Privacy at yesterday’s SXSW keynote (i.e. “google assumed that people wanted their social network in their email”) the GMAIL team admitted to their mistakes and has decided to invite her to speak at the Googleplex in the near future.

*On the power of visual persuasion: “People thought that Gmail got faster when we changed the color.”

*On the speed of Gmail: The team discussed at length their strategy to improve latency issues within Gmail. Essentially speed is always top priority: all new features go through testing to make sure latency isn’t added along with the feature. Added latency can kill a new feature. Latency (along with debugging) is one of the critical reasons they deployed Google Labs (allowing users to add/test new features).

*On technology: “We have this amazing technology called ‘work really, really hard’”.

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.

The Basic Concept

I. The Anatomical Analytics interface is a personal report detailing up-to-date information about an individual’s body condition. Anatomical Analytics offers a wide-range of services that help prevent illness and diagnose ailments.

II. The Anatomical Analytics Trends interface is an aggregator of the data collected from the personal edition of Anatomical Analytics shown above. The interface below details potential influenza outbreaks in the United States.

Full Description and Theoretical Framework

Ubiquitous computing is a model of human-computer interaction in which small, inexpensive chips are embedded into everyday objects.  In contrast to popular futuristic visions of cyberspace where we immerse our bodies inside a virtual reality system, ubiquitous computing extends technology beyond the borders of our screen and works like reverse virtual reality. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are commonly used in ubiquitous computing applications. RFID tags are already all around us: they are woven into our passports where they store bits of data about our identity, they connect products on the shelf to a database which instantly aggregates an inventory status, and they are used in certain libraries to map a book’s exact location within the library. My idea for a technology in the year 2020 is to embed RFID chips inside our body in order to monitor health. Connecting these chips across a global network will allow us to manage health trends and lead to new developments in what I will refer to as Anatomical Analytics.

The first step in this technology would be attaching microscopic RFID tags near a few vital organs. Perhaps this is best achieved by placing small RFID chips at locations closest to the organ and just beneath the skin; or the RFID could be administered as an annual pill that over time would organically disintegrate inside the body and be re-administered each year. The chips don’t store data, they communicate data. Each tag is a listener that transmits the current condition of the respective body organ to which it monitors. The data is then collected by a server and illustrated graphically by an online software application. The software interface would resemble something like Google Analytics, but for your body. A few examples of how this type analysis would be extremely helpful in the prevention and the detection of illness include:

• The analytics would display signs of high blood pressure putting a strain on the kidney and therefore warn of kidney damage.
• If you are consuming inordinate amounts alcohol the analytics could map out a projection to see if you are in jeopardy of developing liver disease.
• In the case of someone suddenly falling unconscious, before the patient arrives at the hospital the doctors could receive a Twitter-esque status alert and preparing for “A man in his late 50’s suffering from heart failure.”

On a macro-sociological level the data is aggregated by Anatomical Analytics Trends in order to predict local, national and global health trends. Once the RFID chips are in place it would be fairly easy to monitor an individual’s location by using RFID readers that could be installed in schools, the workplace and stores. Combining locative data we could potentially link an outbreak of E.Coli to a particular fast-food chain; visually segment the population based on nutritional intake data; or detect and track influenza activity in The United States.

Of course there are many ethical issues surrounding anatomical analytics, but I don’t think it is too difficult to imagine developments into this type of technology over the next 10 or 20 years. Consider other examples of placing technology in our body:

• It has been over 50 years ago that the first pacemaker was implanted into a human.
• Recently it has become popular to place RFID technology under the skin of pets.
• Filmmaker Rob Spence has begun plans to install a camera into his eye socket.

Furthermore, issues of privacy and Orwellian surveillance would be of concern to many. Yet again any intrusion of privacy made by Anatomical Analytics is not all that far off from many present-day scenarios. A notable example of a surveillance tool commonly used in our cars is the electronic toll RFID tags that, in addition to charging our credit card, transmit locative data each time we use a toll. The other – perhaps less obvious but more pervasive – example of a locative surveillance tool is the Internet. As Lawrence Lessig has shown through his research of “code as law” the Internet is actually one of the most controlling mediums that has ever existed. And despite the fact that we never know who or when someone might be looking at the data we leave on the Internet, we sacrifice privacy for efficiency in our lives.

Kevin Kelly in speaking about the future of ubiquitous computing has remarked, “Ten years ago the notion that all doors in a building should contain a computer chip seemed ludicrous, but now there is hardly a hotel door in the U.S. without a blinking, beeping chip in its lock. These microscopic chips will be so cheap we’ll throw them away.”  My theory is that in the future, the idea of monitoring human vital organs with RFID chips won’t seem so ludicrous. The definition of ubiquitous computing will eventually have to be expanded beyond ‘a network that connects everything’ as it will truly be ‘a network that connects everything inside everyone’.

Anatomical Analytics Brief Description
Anatomical Analytics Full Description