Penrose Geoscience Education and Research Conference

So I've had some time to get over my jet lag and reflect on this conference held at the Googleplex last week, the conference website is now public.

I had a great time, the trouble with being an earth scientist/KML developer/educational expert as I am is that I never quite fit at any conferences I go to. This one was an exception, as an example: on the bus on the field day I had a conversation with the colleague sitting next to me about extractind DEM data from Google Earth, then switched to talking to the colleague behind me about the value of project based teaching in US schools. Then we hopped out of the bus and went and looked at rocks. Ace!

So cherry picking things that stood out for me:

Effective use of 3D: Barbara Tewksbury described how she used some stunning geological examples in arid regions to teach the introductory geology concepts strike and dip. (abstract here)

Avatars in GEarth: Steve Wild and Mladen Dordevic described the latest progress on getting communicating avatars into GEarth for the purpose of group teaching geology (disclosure: I'm a consultant to this project). Using JavaScript they can have avatars communicating and sharing locations with each other, its early days but I heard a lot of enthusiasm for the idea at the conference (no link yet but I think watch this space for news and to see other parts of the project)

Paper works so use Paper: In discussing getting students to understand the concept of the mid Atlantic ridge Heather Almquist described an activity where instead of getting students to use the new Cross section facility she got them instead to read off results and plot them on a piece of paper, 'they don't understand the concept of a cross section if you don't' (abstract). I've always advocated appropriate use of technology and this seemed a great example of not overusing technology.

Powers of 10: I've heard it said that an inspiration for Google Earth was the powers of 10 film

by Eames and Eames. I remember being mesmerised by it as a kid (blog post tribute), Ron Schott gave a keynote describing his use of Gigapan photography. I like gigapans but I was more impressed by a sequence where Ron presented a series of gigapan views each a subsection of the one before. It reminded me of the powers of 10 film and sparked an idea I might apply sometime in the future.

GEarth API Twins: Another of Ron's smart ideas was to put two instances of a GEarth API of the same view next to each other. This can be used to match geological strata as he showed or to render an overview of a region while the user flies into the second twin which he didn't. I can't find an example of showing geology but for an idea of what a 'twin' is this uses twins to show the antipodes of any location.

Into the Googleplex: Finally, it was fascinating to visit the Googleplex having heard so much about it (video tour). I expected to see the fun stuff but what hit you was the youth of almost everyone there, hardly a grey head to be seen and the perks of being a googler: fantastic free food, wifi enabled luxury buses taking you home and (the visual memory that is strongest for me) an infinity pool big enough for 2 googlers looked after by an attentive life guard under an umbrella in the early evening of a January day.

Penrose Conference Days 1 and 2

So I meant to blog about the conference as I went along but I've found myself busy meeting up with lots of contacts and writing/editing my talk so I haven't found the time.

Day 1 Personal Highlights:

Declan De Paor and John Bailey welcomed us all, they and the rest of the organising team have put a ton of work into organising the event - John reckons he's written an average of 3 emails a day over the last year just about the conference.

Mano Marks talked about lots of new Geo things, the bit that most interested me was fusion tables and maps, I confess I've never understood what they're about but the key points to me about them are:

1. Cloud based and free
2. Built to handle lots of data
3. Limited spatial functionality now but more being built in the future
4. Can import shape files and export KML
5. You can build a web based interface with them so you could build a custom web page to query a given data set and visualize results on a map

Thanks to Christiaan Adams for helping explain them to me too.

Tina Ornduff described Google's approach to education. I think they are getting much more serious about it which is a welcome development.

Barb Tewksbury described using geological outcrops in arid countries to teach geological 3D interpretation, very smart. Paul Karabinos outlined using sketchup to teach 3D geology too.

Day 2 Personal Highlights:

I did the keynote on 'User First all else follows'. I've put slides and links on prezi but they won't make much sense if you weren't there as I haven't posted the videos and its designed for people who saw the talk. People have been very kind about what I was saying after the talk.

John Bailey and Sean Askey talked about creating tours, I was persuaded that tours generated from lines can be worth trying out.

Unfortunately I missed out on a number of talks and posters on day 2 as I was talking to colleagues about current/future projects.

Penrose Education Conference at the Googleplex

Edit 5 Jan 11: removed link

I'm at a Google Earth in education conference at the Googleplex this week, my first time here (yes, the food is great). This is a Penrose conference so the emphasis is going to be on Geosciences rather than Geography.

I've already caught up with a lot of friends and we're about to kick off with Declan De Paor introducing the conference - sorry, the link I added is a closed site at the moment.

VGI in Education Talk

I've done a talk discussing a project using VGI in teaching a first level Earth Science course:

I got students to use Google Earth but I explain how you could use Google My Maps as well. The feedback from the course was excellent so I thought it worth discussing how to set one up yourself.

Streetview now Captured by Tours

I was away when GEarth v6 was released but I was excited to see the pegman make it into GEarth bringing the smooth usability of streetview in GMaps into GEarth.

Others have documented the feature well but no one in the blogosphere appears to have noticed (and isn't mentioned in the above clip) that you can now record streetview in tours too: tour of the walk from Waterloo Station to the London Eye. All you do is;

1. record a tour in the normal way,
2. drag and drop the pegman (orange man icon on the main screen controls) half way through to enter streetview
3. navigate around in streetview
4. click 'Exit Street View' button top left of your screen to exit street view
5. stop the tour.

to quote a famous meerkat: 'simples'

This has a ton of applications:

• What better way to direct your friends to the pub?
• Real estate (relators in US speak) adverts showing the town amenities close to their property
• Teaching human geography

Well done Google, a smart feature all round.

Techy KML Details: GEarth 6 has spawned a new gx KML element: "gx:ViewerOptions", this element inserted into a FlyTo parent with"gx:option name="streetview"" tells GEarth to changes from normal to Streeview in the middle of a tour. ViewerOptions also allows historical imagery and sunlight conditions to be captured as well.

Blog Break and Infographics in the Media

After slogging my way through the summer while all my colleagues took leave I'm about to take 3 weeks off myself to sort some things at home and holiday abroad. I haven't been posting much because of trying to kick a few projects into shape before leaving them for a while. I'll be back 2nd week of December.

I'll leave you with a fascinating set of videos I've found by Geoff McGee for a fellowship he completed at Stanford University. Its about data visualisation as a story telling medium and focusses on graphics in the media. What's interesting about it is the same problems I've noticed in using neo-geo tools in education and outreach come up in their topic area. Points that particularly resonate with me:

• Martini Glass Presentation: The importance of an introduction, context setting and explanation of what you can 'do' with an interactive web graphic or complex print graphic (section III: Telling Data Stories). Without this, your creation is just a set of pretty colours to the user. The Martini glass stem represents the video clip slide presentation introduction and the triangular glass represents the freedom of the user to explore the graphic on their own.
• Attractive Does Not = Effective: A beautiful looking stream graphic showing box office results for movies with time is discussed in part IV, various commentators point out that it grabs attention wonderfully but then is difficult to interpret what it shows.

Timelines and Tours outside Google Earth

I've come across a couple of examples of GEarth features implemented elsewhere which were worth a mention:

Timeline Example: I thought this timeline from a New York Times graphic is much better than the timeline in Google Earth:

• Easier to grab and move the jaws, in GEarth the jaws are too small
• The play button only allows the jaws to move together, in GEarth you can press play and the far side of the jaws will move which is too complex for users to understand and utilise IMHO
• The time labels are simple and clear whereas in GEarth the labels are more fussy
• The blue shading communicates 'this is the time range' in a clear way and its semi transparent so you can see the graph below it.

The GEarth timeline remains high on my list of things Google should really fix in GEarth.

Tour Example: I think the tour feature of GEarth is one of its strongest features allowing user in presentations or promotional film clips. I came across a film sequence in a TED talk which has a form remarkably like a tour:

(BTW the clip is fascinating and well worth watching in full)

The clip 'zooms' down from large to small scale and at the destination scale the camera moves around a 3D object which is then manipulated in various ways to illustrate the relationships of neurons. Compare it with this GEarth tour:

The building clip has a poor frame rate and the building isn't manipulated in some way (like showing the inside rooms) but otherwise, the format is exactly the same. I'm in the middle of researching to best design tours at the moment and the Seung clip is a lovely illustration of how the results of my studies will not just apply to GEarth and other Virtual Globes but to any 3D visualisation system where zooming across scales in a film clip is important.

With the Seung clip I defined where it should start, see how to get a YouTube video to start where you want it.