Google Earth in Award Winning Course

Screen shot of the Frozen Planet interactive map (Google Earth) showing permafrost layer

On Tuesday I went to a talk by Mark Brandon of the Open University (OU) about how they produced courses linked to the BBC ‘Frozen Planet’ TV series which was a joint OU/BBC production.  He had some great stories about what it was like to be involved with fiiming with the BBC at the poles with David Attenborough.

He described two courses:

• A free online course (think MOOC if you don’t recognise the acronym, don’t worry) on the OpenLearn site (link from here but broken at present)
• A short course

These are courses the OU produced, both of which he was involved in.  They were very sucessful in terms of student numbers breaking OU records and Mark explained how students completed tasks in Google Earth (API) as part of their assessments and also how it was used as a content platform. I was pleased to hear that for his work on the courses he won the ‘innovative teacher of the year’ award from the Times Higher.

Talking to him afterwards we agreed that the only real barrier to use by more university teachers was that they didn’t know about its capabilities, rather than it being too complex to use.  

Google Earth Tours in Education: 19 Best Practices

I'm pleased to say that John Bailey and I have a paper out in "Google Earth and Virtual Visualizations in Education and Research" on 19 best practices on how to design Google Earth tours for education.

The paper isn't free to download but to give you a taster I've taken a table from a draft of the paper  which summarizes the best practices discussed (note GET = Google Earth Tour).  I've discussed many of these best practices on this blog so I've added links to posts within the table (some posts also discuss other topics).

	Subject Area
No.	Major	Minor	Best Practice Description	Evidence
1	Producing Process	Iteration and testing	GETs should be generated in an iterative process that incorporates user testing.	Scholarly
2		Student focus	Production of GETs should be student-focused; in particular educational value should be promoted above flashy presentation.	Scholarly
3	GET Slides	Narration, Annotations and Labels	Within a GET slide, narration should be delivered by audio narration alone.	Empirical
4			Audio narration should relate to what is on screen at the time.	Empirical
5			Labels and annotations should be close in space and time to the map elements they are describing.	Empirical
6			Labels and annotations should be used often but without impacting visual clarity.	Empirical
7		Chart Junk	In formal educational contexts, graphical and audio elements not directly connected with the educational message should be removed.	Empirical
8		Personalization	Within a GET narration should use less formal language	Empirical
9		Using Animations	Within a GET rates of change of variables such as population growth are better depicted on a graph than on a map as a changing color or symbol.	Scholarly
10			The visual complexity of GETs should be made simpler than comparative   static maps where possible.	Scholarly
11	GET Virtual Flights	Speed of Flight	Speed in flights should be slower with rising complexity on screen and be in the range 0.5 to 8 scales per second.	Scholarly
12		Camera Angles	The camera in a GET should be kept orientated northwards and vertically downwards, unless the subject of the GET requires viewing from an angle.	Empirical
13		Looped Paths and Overviews	In GET flights between two low altitude slides GET flight paths should always pass through a high loop which encompasses both locations in the same view.	Empirical
14			If possible a GET should start and end at high altitude capturing the important points, lines or areas the GET describes in one view.	Empirical
15		Acceleration and Deceleration	GET flights between waypoints should accelerate at the start and decelerate at the end.	Scholarly
16	CombinedGET Slides and Virtual Flights	Grids for Navigation and Scale	In a landscape, which has few strong natural landmarks such as roads or coastlines, a static, north-south oriented grid should be added unless it  creates a cluttered view.	Scholarly
17			The grid should have a line separation of a suitable round figure to give a sense of scale.  If a grid is not applicable, scale can be included as a line on the ground representing some round figure.	Scholarly
18	Embedding GETs in Earth Science Teaching	Topics that are Effective when presented as GE Tours	The use of a GETs should be particularly considered when illustrating 3D topography, data over a range of scales/locations, and/or introducing a GE map collection.	Logical
19		Creating Activities for GE tours	GETs should be used to support activity-based teaching	Empirical

1,2 or 3 Map Dimensions?

The question of how many dimensions to use on a map has been knocking around my head since going to the excellent W3G conference in October (thanks to all the organizers).

Screen shot of Recce with items turned on to show
visual clutter

3D is too much:  The last Keynote of the day was by Rian Liebenberg about Recce (reviewed here).  It's an iPhone/iPad app that shows cities in cartoonlike 3D but also adds moving planes/trains/cars.  I think this a fun app to play around with on the iPad and the rendering and speed of delivery is to die for.  However, I was surprised to hear it has real time tube data added and is also designed to  to be a navigation tool for cities.

Cartography 101 defines map making as the 'art of taking away' and that principle applies here.  I just can't imagine users' having a great experience trying to navigate using a 3D map on the small iPhone screen with planes buzzing across the screen.  I've discussed the problem of map 3D in earlier posts in more detail.

1 Dimension Anyone?  Which brings me to 1D maps.  One of the speakers (can't find the name, comment anyone?) talked about 1D 'strip maps' which happen to have a long history.

Old Stip Map of Directions to Bury St Edmunds
 http://imageofempire.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/ogilby-map-bury-st-eds.jpg

The basic idea is that if you are following a route and you want to know where you are, 1D is fine.  A  key point he made was that strip maps have great potential on smart phones as you don't have to bother doing pinch zoom and drag to find your way around, you can just scroll up and down which allows you to operate your phone map one handed.  This relates back to 'taking out the right things' idea.

The immediate problem with this idea is that a 1D map assumes you don't get lost, it's not much use if you miss that turning as you'll disappear off the screen.  However, I think a nice compromise would be a location aware strip map.  If your smart phone noticed you had wandered off route it would revert to a traditional 2D map until you had found your way back to the path.

Tom Steinberg Sums it Up:  The best keynote of the W3G day IMHO was from Tom Steinberg on open data. I checked out his blog later and discovered that by chance he's recently blogged on the 1, 2 or 3 dimensions idea .  The link takes you to a post where he discusses the advantages of strip maps for a journey across London (from www.tfl.gov.uk) rather than using the tube map.  He also comments that most digital map visualisations look 'hot' but concentrate on 'whooshing' animations which actually get in the way of understanding.

I'll give him the last word:

 The paper Tube map is still more fundamentally useful than 99% of hot web visualisations, even though it was crafted on an infinitely more limited technology. Why aren't more visualisations simply better, given the power at our fingertips? 

amen to that.

Simple Mapping tools: Google Earth, Gemma and Digimap

I'm giving a lecture on Thursday to first year geographers on tools for simple mapping suitable for geography assignments.  My choices?

• Google Earth (well, obviously)
• Gemma (my review on my other blog)
• Digimap

If you step through this prezi presentation to the end you can see:

• My bullet points for the lecture
• To the right of the bullet points for each one I've added some commentary that you have to zoom into to read
• below the bullet points is a YouTube video walkthrough (links Gemma, Digimap) for each one except Google Earth which has a link to an earlier tutorial of mine.  Note that the digimap one assumes you're a Southampton Uni student so can sign into the service.

Prezi maps: You might also like to follow the prezi through, I link to some of my favourite maps and there's commentary on most of them (in the form of the same small scale writing to the right) too.  

Maps and Mapping at University on Prezi

Eye-Tracking Zoomable Maps

This post was joint authored by Paolo Battino and Rich Treves.

One of the evaluation techniques we said we would employ in our Google Research Project (links to search query) is eye-tracking.  Eye-tracking software is usually designed to record the position of your gaze on the screen, assuming the content of the screen only changes in a predictable manner. This means that current eye-tracking software is good for understanding actions on a web page e.g. did the user spend more time looking at side menu, header or main content?  This is because the screen is divided into static areas and the time spent looking at each area can be easily calculated.

Problem with Eye-Tracking: Unfortunately, this does not work with a map (or a virtual globe) and you want to keep track of the geographic location observed by the user.  In this situation, XY coordinates on screen recorded by the eye-tracker do not directly map onto Lat Long coordinates because the user can zoom, pan and tilt the map ‘camera’. 

Solution:  We have developed a solution entirely based on software developed for this project.  See example below:  

    

Heat maps showing density of eye fixations on a Google Earth map.  

Reading down, the screen shots represent zooming in.  

Red = High density, Blue = Low

Subjects were tested in a mock up of an educational situation.  They were shown (in a Google Earth tour) how to identify a special type of valley and then asked to find one in a given area.  The heat-maps show where on the surface of Google Earth the user was looking at during the experiment independent of zoom level/tilt/pan position. 

Heat Map Script: The heat-map script, developed by Patrick Wied, is particularly efficient in showing “the big picture” (top) but also shows dynamic rendering when the user zooms in.  The screen shots themselves are from a Google Map mashup with all the usual zoom and pan controls.

HowTo:  The solution we describe here only works with Google Earth as it requires the Google Earth API.  

Summary of the Process:

1)   During the experiment, the eye-tracker records each fixation in terms of X,Y tuple together with a very accurate timestamp (this is important).

2)   During the experiment, a custom script records the position of the Google Earth ‘camera’ which is producing the view  on screen.  It polls the Google Earth API every 200 milliseconds or so and every entry is timestamped.

3)   After the experiment, on a webpage using the Google Earth API we reproduce exactly the same view displayed during the exercise by feeding Google Earth the logs from  [2].

4)   Using the timestamp of each log entry, we look up the eye-tracking logs to find out if there was a fixation recorded at exactly that time.

5)   We then use the X,Y screen coordinates to poll Google Earth and transform those coordinates into latlongs. In effect we ‘cast’ a ray from a specific location on screen onto the virtual globe.

6)   Using the API we record the lat long from the end of the cast ray and put it into a database (see diagram below)

7)   This data is processed to render the heat-map.

There are obvious far more technical details that this but for the moment we thought we'd just get the idea out.

Problems with Eye-Tracking Maps:  There are a couple of inherent issues to do with eye-tracking virtual globe maps that have already occurred to us:

• High Altitude Zooms:  At both high and low altitude the fixation is captured as a point, at a high zoom the user may be looking at a larger feature.  A circle polygon would better represent the fixation at altitude.
• Tilt inaccuracy: In a situation where the user is highly tilted, the inherent inaccuracies of the eye-tracking kit get amplified - a small change in eye position can represent a large variation in distance on the ground. 

In the particular case study we've discussed today we don't think either of these are a particular issue but they need to borne in mind in other situations.

Cross Section Generator for Google Earth

Today I report on a nifty new tool from Mladen Dordevic of Declan de Paor's team at Old Dominion University for creating cross sections in Google Earth.  Cross sections have many applications from geology, geomorphology, archaeology and even meteorology.  However, putting them in Google Earth has always been a hassle requiring the messy creation of a sketchup model (if, like me, you're not well practiced using that tool) and export into Google Earth.

Screen shot of the tool in action in Hawaii

cross section image taken from here 

The tool:  What Mlarden has created is a tool for taking two images (one for the front, one for the back of a virtual billboard) and putting them back to back.  You get the ability to control yaw, pitch, orientation, height and width of your model (yaw and pitch are really difficult with a sketchup model).  The great thing about putting a cross section in Google Earth is that its in context - users can get a sense of location and scale of the cross section without even having to think about it.  The final step of creation is to generate a .kmz file that can be loaded into Google Earth outside of the API.

But there's more!  That would be more than enough but Mlarden's also cooked in a 'rising block' slider.  This allows for the cross section to be conjoured out of the ground by use of the tour controller once you've published your creation to .kmz.  It's my guess that a significant number of student users never quite grasp that a cross section is from below the ground, by providing a animation slider bottom left of the screen users get reminded of this.

Technical Info and the cloud:  This tool is produced by using the Google Earth API embedded into a web page.  Its a nice example of the power of the API to enable functionality not already in the Google Earth client but it's also 'in the cloud' in the sense that you upload your images and these can be shared with other users.

Bigger Teaching Picture  We could really do with more of these little tools making it easy to create sophisticated, often used elements in Google Earth.  Declan's team has been plugging away at this and when I get some time, I'll be reviewing some more of their work.

UPDATE 4 Nov 2012:  Apologies to both Declan and Mladen for not spelling their names right, now corrected.  

The Power of Street View in Teaching

Streetview is one of the Jewels in the Crown of Google Geo and its a fantastic resource for teaching.  I've just delivered a 'Google Earth as GIS in teaching' session to PGCE students at Southampton University and took the opportunity to polish up my teaching materials, including having another look at what Streetview can do.  I thought I'd share some thoughts on it with you.

Views Beyond the Street: Firstly, it used to just be roads, now they've gone off piste with the streetview trike


and backpack

producing a range of resources including panoramas from the South pole, inside museums and on footpaths.  See the full Gallery.

HowTo:  But before I get carried away with the fun stuff, here's some basic instructions on how to use it in Google Earth looking at a classic Physical Geography field site:  Lulworth Cove.

1] Using the search panel, find Lulworth Cove, UK.

2] Zoom out so you can see the town immediately to the West and the cove in the same view. 

Rollover the controls in the top right of the screen > Click and drag the orange man > Drop him close to the cliff on the blue path between town and cove.   You will be transported into ‘streetview mode’.

3] Look all the way around you and vertically down at the ground by click and dragging the screen

Now ‘walk’ along the road/path by rolling the mouse wheel up and down.  Note that your view stays in one direction

4]  Select a good view, Create a placemark and call it ‘Street View’, click OK.

5]  Now exit streetview by clicking ‘exit streetview’ button, top right.

6]  Double click your new streetview placemark in the places column to fly back into streetview.  

This is handy as you don't have to do all the dragging and dropping of the orange man. 

Teaching Tips - the Cove:  If you're due to go to Lulworth cove, using streetview has obvious uses - you can introduce the site to students and explain where they'll go on the day.  After the trip you can use it to revise what they did and saw, helping them to link the parts of the day to the geography of the site.

The 'constant view' direction that you get with rolling the mouse wheel is particularly useful as you can show them what they will see on the walk out to the edge of the cove.  The direction should be set towards the cove - they shouldn't really be looking elsewhere!

Other Teaching Tips:  I think streetview is very useful not only for physical geography but also for human geography.  I've used it for schools outreach when looking at different neighborhoods, judging income levels depending on how smart the cars and the front doors look.  

You can use it in Google Maps without bothering to use it in Google Earth but I think the advantage of being able to 'tag' locations in streetview with a placemark and return to them at the double click of a mouse is highly useful.