Embedding Google Expeditions in teaching

tl;dr summary  

• Interface and technology:  Excellent
• Content: Very good
• Educational design: Could do better.
• Worth investigating: Yes

Introduction

Google launched expeditions for iOS this week (announcement of release).  This is important as previously expeditions was only available for Android devices and, being made available for both of the main platforms, removes a serious hurdle for schools in using it.  In the UK, they have also promised to produce lesson plans which goes some way to answering a criticism I raised previously, that they are passive ‘Cook’s tours’ and need to be more active.  So while my dearly beloved watched some TV last night I geeked out looking at the expeditions currently available.  I concentrated on the biology models, the natural history museums and the geography expeditions.  Here are some thoughts on those expeditions:

Wow!

Just like street view before it (my post on educational ideas on how to use streetview in teaching) there is some fantastic content available for teachers to use in teaching Earth sciences.  It's totally free.  You don't even need the cardboard, you could plug a tablet into a projector to show students the content.

Slick interface and no problems combining platforms:

I experimented using two devices, one following (student), one leading (teacher).  No problems mixing iPhone, iPad and Android devices in all sorts of combinations.  The ‘show and tell’ interface worked slickly and intuitively, you can direct student's attention to where they should be looking and see where students are looking to check they're keeping up.  Nice work.

I'm told that it throws up some errors being used on schools' wifi systems.  Having your own WLAN (about £30) gets around this.

Offline:

You can download the data to the teacher's device and then from there, over a WLAN (wireless local area network, think wifi not necessarily connected to internet) it streams to all the student's devices - no need to download the same data to everyone's device.  It also means if you have the technical chops you could set up a WLAN in a study centre in the middle of nowhere without access to the internet and run expeditions with students.  I'm thinking this will also be very useful in schools with dodgy internet.

Not the right media for the Biology Models

There are a number of human biology expeditions including the heart, the skeleton etc.  I'm not convinced they work because they consist of a static, 360 degree view of a the model where you can only see one side.  With this type of media you can't see the context e.g, considering the heart:

• Where is it in relation to the lungs/ribs/diaphragm?  
• How does the heart fit in with the circulation system?

IMHO a much better media to use in this context is what I call a 'build animation': video with audio where layers of graphic information are revealed one by one.  See Khan Academy's content and compare it with the heart expedition:



One of the photospheres in the ear model expedition is particularly poor:  it shows a model of an ear from the outside.  Much better to get students to look at the real thing, and, you know what?   There are lots of great examples attached to other students' heads all around them.

Museum Expeditions - hmmmm.

I also think the museum expeditions are pushing the format too far.  A museum is intrinsically designed around a 'skim view' and 'zoom in' viewing model* - you walk around the hall looking about you generally (skimming), you then see something that interests you so you zoom in: you walk towards it and read the information at the kiosk or exhibit.  Presenting materials formatted in this way in an expedition is preventing the zooming in part - you are 'stuck' to one point on the floor without the ability to walk up to an exhibit and access the detail.  

However, when the museum is impressing us with scale, e.g. discussing the dinosaur skeleton in the Natural History museum (see image), then an expedition becomes more effective because the museum experience is all about staying at the 'zoomed out' view.

Scale in Geography Expeditions:

If there are no familiar items in view (people, houses, etc. etc.) it's impossible to tell the scale of the view: 

Any idea how big those icebergs are?  A scale comparison needs to be provided, this could be the human drone operator as a Point of Interest (POI) or providing a POI showing a 100m line.

Geography Expeditions need maps:

I also think that the Geography expeditions really need to use maps.  Combining what I call the 'avatar view' (human scale view, as in expeditions) with the map view (views from altitude setting the place in context geographically) is a very powerful narrative tool and I haven't seen any examples of this being done in the expeditions.  I'll tackle that in a separate blog post.

Teaching tool:

Google are going to publish lesson plans about how to use expeditions in teaching.  Good, but I don't think that's enough.  IMHO expeditions need to be more customisable, in effect becoming a simple content creation tool.  Teachers need to be able to easily:

- Add polls with their own questions.

- Add their own POIs - there are many teaching reasons you may want to show students a jungle in an expedition, e.g. environmental science, biology, geography or tourism.  Having only one set of POIs available per expedition is limiting.

- Add traditional PowerPoint slides between the photospheres, e.g. maps putting the location in geographical context (see 'expeditions need maps' above) or showing a zoomed in view of a dinosaur tooth with annotations in the dinosaur example discussed earlier. 

Conclusion:

Watch the journey into a glacier expedition, its done by Jamie Buchan-Dunlop (of Digital Explorer fame) and, as usual, he does it really well.  My favourite was the Mt Everest expedition, lovely example of taking students to a place that they will never probably go. 

*I'm sure there's some literature about this, do comment and let me know if there are some proper terms I should be using.

Virtual Reality: iPhone or Microwave?

It's fair to say that the iPhone, and all the smart phones that followed, have revolutionized our lives.  Microwaves haven't.  I remember when these ovens first became common, my Mum cooked a microwave cake using a temperature probe following a complex recipe involving a temperature probe.  The cake was a flaccid, pale disappointment.  Everyone soon learnt that microwaves weren't going to replace ovens or hobs - they were good for heating up last nights stir fry, doing baked potatoes quickly and pretty much nothing else.

It's clear that there is a lot of media noise about VR at the moment driven by the release of Oculus Rift and the lower spec Google Cardboard.   Column inches are no guarantee of success, so we should be asking will VR be a Microwave or an iPhone technology?  Will it rocket in popularity or fail to impress for the second time?  My vote is for 'meh' rather than 'yay!' and I'll try and persuade you of my point of view by a bit of deconstruction:

Tunnel Vision: To understand what VR does and doesn't offer I need to digress into explaining a bit about your visual system.  Look slightly to the right of the text on whatever device you're reading this on.  Despite being able to see paragraphs and lines you'll find you can no longer read the words.   That's because your vision is made up of a very sensitive zone (the fovea) which takes up half of the nerves that link your eye to your brain.  Around this sensitive centre is a less responsive zone.  You couldn't read the text when not looking at it because of the lack of visual processing power in this outer zone.  Although this part of the eye is less sensitive, it is good at detecting movement; you can prove this by another little experiment - pick something moving in your visual field like a tree in the wind, look away by 60 degrees or so.  In your peripheral vision you should notice the moving branches but will not really 'see' the trunk of the tree.  So your eye really does work like it has a low level of tunnel vision.

The final part of the visual system I want to describe to you is eye movements.  To keep track of what is going on around us (is this lion I see stalking through the grass about to eat us?) our eyes flit around moving the fovea rapidly from place to place in order to track the important things (lion) whilst ignoring other less important objects (grass).  These movements are known as saccades and your brain is so good at processing the patches of high density information that you gain from them that you are largely unaware of your eye movements.  As a result, you have the sense that you are looking everywhere at once despite the fact that you aren't - you're actually sampling the space in high resolution patch by patch and tracking movement everywhere.  This video is a lovely illustration of that fact:




What does VR add?  When we use VR the goggles cover our whole visual field,  not just part of it.  However, when we go on a virtual field trip or watch a film on a non-VR device our eyes direct our fovea to what is being shown on the tablet.  A video of our eyes would show them flicking from place to place in rapid saccades scanning the screen for the most important thing to look at.  The fact that our peripheral vision is looking at the bedroom, bus or library that surrounds the tablet doesn't really matter because we are processing the information we need in our fovea just fine.  So I'm suspicious that VR doesn't really add that much to the information we can gather from a virtual field trip when compared to the same content delivered on, say, a laptop screen.

Immersion:  But gathering information isn't the only benefit that VR is said to produce, it's also said to be immersive.  By this people mean that it produces the feeling that you are actually in the place depicted.  In a recent radio 4 program an example was given where VR goggles were used in a lab to show a full vision simulation of the same lab.  Then the VR floor opens up before the viewer and they are asked to step into the hole - a challenge to the part of their brain that knows what they are seeing is not real to overcome the part that really thinks the Goggles are showing the truth.  Users explained just how compelling they found the illusion and that they were convinced of the power of VR as a result.

I'd raise the question, what about when they get used to seeing 180 surround vision?  Will they still be fooled the 10th time they are asked to step into the hole?  I'd predict that they won't just as they weren't compelled by the magic of the 10th place they'd looked at in Google Earth as much as they were by the first (which was, of course, the roof of their house).  So I'd argue that immersion is the novelty of a new medium that is closer to reality than the media you're used to and that the novelty wears thin quickly.  Lasting impressions are due to quality content rather than the media: reading the words that make up Hamlet is an immersive experience.

So what is VR good for?  I've clearly argued that VR isn't going to be an iPhone technology that dramatically changes the way we live.  However, predicting how a technology is going to develop is clearly foolish - crystal balls don't work.  I tend to think it is more like the microwave, important without being key but, having said that, its impact could be somewhere between the two.  I do predict its going to revolutionize gaming - immersion is such a strong draw in this case.  I also think there are some educational applications for VR in situations where you have to see the wide picture before homing in on detail; examples would be paramedics presented with a crash scene having to triage which patients to treat first and geologists being presented with a cliff section having to find a certain small scale geological feature.  There could be a 'killer app' use we haven't foreseen but I'm not convinced: as a technology it doesn't add to the content because we 'see' mostly through our fovea not the outer zone of our retinas and the immersion effect will only last as long as the novelty does.

iPhone vs Magic Map

Back from my global wanderings, I'll kick off the proper posts this year with some copy I had meant to release as a semi humorous post in the run up to Christmas but which I never got around to posting:

Maps on iPhone: I have been the proud owner of a 3G iPhone for a couple of months now and, of course, have been interested in the maps capability. It has the potential, if someone produced the app, for being the first mainstream mobile device which can be used to see where your contacts are in real time (if they also have iPhones too). This obviously has huge potential for game playing, picking up kids for school, arranging a meeting at a conference etc. Like many technologies, it has been in existence in fiction for a while before making it into reality, the best example of which I know of is the 'Marauder's Map':



Although the software to enable this kind of use is only just appearing I thought it would be fun to review the Marauder's map (MM hereafter) and the iPhone map (IP hereafter) which is linked to the iPhone's GPS :

• User interface: IP wins, in terms of usability, having to say a spell to turn on the screen is very annoying.
• Screen size and portability: MM wins hands down, larger screen, paper thin and much lighter.
• Battery: Again MM wins, it seems to have no power needs at all.
• Readability: A draw, while MM is a reflective screen which is easier to read in bright sunlight, IP is transmissive so it can be read in the dark without need for another light. However, if you are already armed with a handy wand and you know a light producing spell this wouldn't seem much of a problem.
• Tracking: MM wins, no need for your contacts to have a GPS enabled device to follow them.
• Screen Design and look: IP wins as the display is in color and the MM looks, well..., SO dated.

iPhone vs a normal paper map: More seriously, I had an interesting conversation with a psychologist contact of mine who has been involved with a navigational test involving an iPhone-like device compared with a paper map. People tend to think the iPhone map is always better but in fact he showed that when testing speed of navigating over small trips the paper map won because people wasted time working out how to use the iPhone, turning it on, waiting for it to get a GPS fix etc. etc.

More posts coming soon, I had a lot of time for thinking about the GeoWeb whilst I was away.