Are men better than women at navigating in virtual 3D spaces?

I have a PhD student Craig Allison who is looking at spatial understanding in maps and related 3D spaces.   He entered and won the faculty round of three minute thesis', a public speaking competition to see who could present their work best in three minutes with one powerpoint slide.  This is his talk at the final of the event competing with other PhD students from around the University.

Navigation in 3D Spaces: He covers the importance of designing 3D spaces well to assist users navigate them and the gender differences that he has found in his experiments.  It's especially relevant to anyone designing virtual field trips using tools such as streetview and/or Sketchup.





Sad that I couldn't make the talk to support him, great work Craig!

I've marked the location of the Psychology building he discusses if anyone wants a look.

What Features should a Teaching GIS have?

Sorry for the quiet on the blog, I'm only just surfacing after a lot of marking and teaching this semester.

In this post I'm going to explore the features needed to make a simple GIS for school level education. There are a lot of new services available that are excellent opportunities for educators (e.g. ArcGIS Online and the Google family of services [review]) so I think a consideration of what features a dream edu-GIS would have is a useful thought experiment.

How would we use a Teaching GIS?

My idea would be a simple introductory GIS that would be suitable to use outside of Geography, e.g. to support a biology project looking at the spread of trees in a forest.  The tool would be simple enough that students don't really need to understand they are using GIS at all, it would just work.  To teach students about GIScience itself, rather than just using it, you'd probably want another tool.  

Working with this constraint defines the general area of functionality we want to cover, we are not thinking about GIS analysis functions (e.g. calculate how many trees are within a particular polygon), we actually need GIS just to visualise the data.  

What Features do we need in a Teaching GIS? 

So now I've defined the scope of what I'd expect my edu-GIS to achieve, we can dive in and think up some functionality lists.  I've assumed there are various features common to all GIS already inherent in my all GISs such as layer control, data importation, navigation tools.  Beyond those needs I've come up with two lists:

Must Have:

1. Usability:  This isn't a feature but is listed as IMHO it's the prime consideration.  Whatever other features are available they must be robust, easy to understand and easy to use for students. 
2. Collection via Mobile devices:  The GIS must allow users of mobile devices with GPS's to go out and collect data via customisable forms and upload the data seamlessly to a shared map.  E.g. users go out in the forest with smart phones and log locations of different tree species which then uploads to a central map.
3. Photographs:  There should be a variety of ways of easily bringing photos into the map.  In Google Earth these are screen overlay, balloon pop up and ground overlay.
4. Symbology Styling:  The major groups of symbols (points, lines, polygons) should be available and it should be possible to change the style of a symbol depending on an entered variable.  E.g. a bigger icon for trees bigger than 10m.  There should be suggested colour palettes for shading but also the ability to customise colour completely e.g. illustrate tree species with shades of green but then highlight one particular tree species using a bright orange.  
5. Attribute Table:  Related to point [4], it should be possible to access the spatial data as a table and be able to edit it, e.g. for one tree change its height from 20 to 30m within the GIS.
6. Base Maps:  It's important to have an option to chage base maps for different purposes e.g. with lots of data you want to plot it on top of a subtle map that doesn't visually complicate the view.  In other situations you may want to use satellite data imagery as your base map.  
7. Map Overlays:  Images should be possible to import as map overlays, e.g. bring in an image of an old map of London and overlay it on the existing topography.  
8. Layout Tools:  It should be possible to add titles, a legend, a scale bar and annotations to a map in a simple way to allow it to be output as a well made static map.
9. Story or Tour Tools:  There should be tools for constructing 'video' like stories with an audio narrative.
10. Export:  The raw data and styling data (data about how the map is styled such as title size) should be exportable and be possible to import into a non-cloud service such as ArcGIS or QGIS.  This allows students to backup versions as they go along, if something goes badly wrong with the cloud file they are working on in the edu-GIS then they can use an older version elsewhere.

Also Could Have:

1. Streetview:  A great bonus for education is the ability to be able to snap in and out of 'real world view'
2. 3D:  Having true 3D rendering as per Google Earth can be very powerful e.g. in looking at conditions on mount Everest but for most applications, 3D is actually not necessary.
3. Cross Section Tool:  A very useful addition in lots of applications but not core.
4. Group working:  This is natural advantage of all cloud applications.  Being able to collect data to make a map is a core function number [2] but beyond that, IMHO group working on a map is not really core unless you are in a distance learning situation.
5. Models:  Having 3D rendering of buildings can be very useful but, as with the point about 3D, it's not core.  For Geologists 3D models are much more important but I wonder if it would not just be better to build a separate program for making these sorts of models, do they have to be within a GIS?
6. Historical Imagery:  A great resource for an edu-GIS but the patchiness of good data limits its use much as the fact that streetview is mostly consigned to public roads at the moment.  
7. Time animation Features:  Very powerful but on the edge of what is possible within a school teaching situation, its quite abstract to get students to put these together.
8. KML:  To explain this point I'll consider the Google Earth situation:  for power users, it is endlessly useful to be able to access the code that controls the data itself (KML) and manipulate it outside of Google Earth to go beyond the core functionaility.  For example, I have spreadsheets that I can use to produce KML outside of Google Earth and import it in, for example, creating custom Google Earth tour flight paths and speeds.  This extends the power of the GIS beyond the functions that are built in.

This is a quick, from the hip, set of thoughts.  It would be interesting to hear what other's agreed/disagreed with on my lists.

San Francisco Earthquake Exercise Part II

Two years ago I posted some enhancements to an earthquake exercise by Noel Jenkins of Juicy Geography.  Since then, I've worked the practical up further

• Practical Doc (self assessment questions and answers, explicit instructions)
• KMZ file (it says it's on Blackboard in the documentation)
• Google Earth Tour Builder tour of earthquakes in San Francisco

It was part of a recent first level course for Geographers here at Southampton University.


New Features:

• Teaches students about earthquake amplification and liquefaction using YouTube videos
• Uses Google Earth Tour Builder
• Uses a 'clipping' technique for just showing a sub section of a YouTube video (howto)
• Gets students to create 3 locations and then choose one of the three and justify it in the description box.

It's published under a CC edit but share alike license so please go ahead and use it. 

Will educators miss Google Earth?

Over at Google Earth Blog Frank Taylor nails an issue I've noticed too:  support for Google Earth and development of the product seems to have dropped off Google's todo list.  Frank interprets this as being a bad sign for the future of Google Earth and I think he's right.  Its been clear for a long while that the client (Google Earth the program as compared to Google Earth in the browser) had a limited shelf life, it simply makes more sense to have things in the cloud for Google.  What is worrying is more that when the transition comes educators are going to lose out because important functionality may not be maintained in the brave new 'cloud maps' world.

Stuff educators would miss:  Firstly, and possibly most importantly, school teachers use and know Google Earth.  They are pretty averse to change in my experience, mostly they're not over excited by the newest functionality available, GE does what they need it to and learning to get that done through a cloud mapping service is going to annoy them.  If its considerably different from Google Earth I suspect people won't bother learning it or may even go elsewhere.

Save KML: Secondly, being able to whack 'earthquake Haiti KMZ' into Google and finding some useful resources to be able to mashup something for a lesson was endlessly useful.  And while we're talking about KML, its a really useful language for the semi computer literate - you could bash some ugly spreadsheet concatenate functions together and build a simple model to make maps.  Will KML make it through the 'cloudification'?

All under one roof:  Finally, part of its strength lies in the range of functionalities available.  Being able to bang an overlay map in, mix in some streetview visits, pull up a cross section and also explore all the great things in the Layers column in one software package is very powerful.  I've just set our first years a locate a task about locating a hospital, they were straight in there going beyond my instructions exploring hospitals in the area concerned by pulling data in from the layers column.  Will all that be maintained?

And:  I'll have to get myself a new blog name of course.... :)

Google Presenter/Google Earth Tour Builder mash up

About three years ago I wrote a post about the value of mashing up Google Earth with Google Presentations.  With the appearance of Google Earth Tour Builder I thought I'd look at the idea again.

Idea:  If you use a GET for a presentation its really useful to mashup presentation slides with maps and virtual flights in Google Earth.  What I tend to do is flick between the two while I present which isn't ideal and takes a bit of skill.  Much better if you could combine the two.

Old Solution:  My previous experiment involved putting Google Presentation slides into the client.  It was kind of useful but clunky to put together.

New Solution:  Links are possible in GE tour builder.  They've changed Google Presentations so that its less easy to link to an individual slide in a presentation but its still possible.

Example using Google Earth Tour Builder

HowTo:

1] Create a Google Earth tour with the builder tool

2] Create a presentation using Google Presenter.

3] Within your presentation, in edit mode, go to the slide you wish to use

4] Within your tour, choose the place slide you wish to link from.  In the 'TELL THE STORY' box, create a link to your presentation slide.

5] repeat 3 and 4 as many times as you wish

6] Click done editing

MUCH easier than my first experiment to put together!  You can now navigate to different places and click the links to get to the slide.  If you right click > "open in new tab" on the link the presentation will open and you can just close that tab when done and go back to the tour.  However, it takes some time for the slide to load up as you are actually loading all the slides at once.  If you just open the link, you'll lose your place in the tour when you come back as you will get bumped back to the start of the tour.

Also you don't have the ability to have the bullets appear one by one, you just get a static slide.

In conclusion, easy to put together but GETB needs be developed so it play's nicely with Google Presenter to make it a really powerful tool.

The Google Geo Family

Summary of a long post:  For an average Geography school teacher, Google Earth Engine time lapse and Google Maps Engine Lite (video tutorials) are useful tools to look at but don't replace Google Earth as the educators favourite yet. 

So I was at the AGU conference in San Francisco just before Christmas.  I went to a Google Event where they showcased their new stuff and hung around with the Googlers on the Google stand a lot.  As a result, I've finally got my head around their new set of tools.  I thought I'd lay it out in this post, thinking primarly of school teachers as an audience.  Lets start by meeting the ancestors:

Geo Ancestors:  

Google Maps were road maps which developers soon started 'mashing up' i.e. putting their own data on top of using code (wikipedia on mashups).   Google My Maps was a service where users could build there own simple map, share with others or group create a map.  Google Maps got a major revamp this year, but as a tool for navigating and searching for places I'm guessing it isn't much interest to educators.  Google Earth used the same satellite data set as Google Maps but overlaid it on topography meaning we got 3D maps.  wooo!  We all got very excited about this when it came out in 2005....

....and had mostly got over ourselves by 2007.  Google Earth Client is a stand alone program but there is also the Google Earth plugin - this allows Google Earth to be accessed in a browser either as a separate web page or embedded within a web page.

Google Earth in Education:  Up to now, Google Earth client has been more commonly used by school educators in the UK than any other mapping or GIS tool (survey).  There are a few reasons for this (opinion only now):

1. Free
2. Simple and Usable to use
3. Fantastic imagery available
4. Streetview
5. Allowed students and teachers to create maps to show to each other.

with 1 and 2 being the killer reasons.  On a wobbly version 7, the Google Earth client seems destined to disappear at some point in the future as it isn't a cloud based tool.  Whether all the advantages I've listed above for Google Earth will be maintained in the Google Earth plugin remains to be seen.  

Current Family:  

As an overview, the general thrust of the new family of tools seems to move into new areas where Google feels it can be a player with an emphasis on cloud computing.  No surprises there as that is a general move in software everywhere.  For the moment, Google Earth client and Google Earth plugin are still available.

Google Earth Engine Group:  This consist of Google Earth Engine, Google Earth Engine Lite and Google Earth Engine Pro.  NASA released Landsat data as free to download and use instead of charging for it.  Google love organizing the world's data of course so they've processed it and given everyone access.  Google Earth Engine also comes with a set of remote sensing analysis tools (remote sensing = processing satellite raster images rather than GIS which is more about vector data).  The processing tools are too specialist for to school teachers, but the ability to access time lapse images from the whole world 1984 - 2012 has some lovely uses (watch glaciers retreat, river meanders develop and the Aral sea dry up).

Google Maps Engine, Lite and Pro compared as a table.

Google Maps Engine:  Whereas GMELite and GMEPro could be used really usefully in a schools setting, this tool is quite a high powered GIS tool.  It allows people who know about GIS to bring large amounts of mapping data together and publish it using Google's infrastructure.  If you know what you're doing, this could be a useful way of bringing your data together and publishing it.  Related Tutorial.

Google Maps Engine Lite:  This is a replacement for Google My maps.  However, not only can you still create your own map, you also use attribute tables.  This is a simple but powerful part of GIS - for all cafes in a town, produce a spreadsheet with cafe vs number of seats and number of floors.  All cafes are represented on a map and you can change their icons automatically.  So all cafes with 2 floors could be red, then you decide you want to change it and with a few clicks, all cafes with 1 floor become pink.  You can even upload a spreadsheet table from elsewhere to the map as a CSV file (CSV is an export function of spreadsheets).

GMEL is really nice combination of good usability whist allowing some powerful map control.  Where it comes apart for me is the symbology, there simply aren't enough icons or blends of colors available and the default Google map icons aren't 2D (more detail on my problems with Google Map symbols).  The palette controls in Fusion tables (see below) are much better IMHO as you can customize the colors more.

Google Maps Engine Pro:  Pretty much Lite but allows you to store and visualize more data.

UPDATE 14th Jan 14:  Ron Schott pointed out I'd left out Google Fusion Tables and I take his point. Fusion Tables can be used to make maps, I've successfully used it to collect data from groups of students previously, essentially making a crowd sourced map (write up - bit out of date on specific instructions now but generalities still apply).  However, Googlers have told me that the use of Fusion Tables for maps was always a bit of a clutchy solution, it did some neat things but they got fed up with fixing it as it wasn't really structured to do maps well.  Google Maps Engine is the tool they'll be developing to do all the things that Fusion Tables used to do so it's fairly certain that fusion tables is not going to develop further as a simple GIS tool.

I also missed out Google Earth Tour Builder which I've reviewed and for which I've also produced a tutorial.  This is designed for producing a tour of places with features such as adding images and youtube clips.  Lots of educational potential getting students to produce tours but early in its development cycle and still in beta.  Note that it isn't actually hosted on Google's domain (its on 'withgoogle' instead), its not clear what that implies.


Closing Thoughts:  

There's a lot to love with

• Google Maps Engine Lite, 
• Google Earth Tour Builder and 
• Google Earth Engine (timelapse) 

for educational purposes.  However, good old Google Earth still allows all the basic map stuff we've been using for years so I expect educators will still go on using it.

A few thoughts for the future:

• Google have a serious naming issue, what a mess of confusing terms!  Six different names for the new family that I reckon could be boiled down to two.  It would make better sense if they had 'Google Maps Engine' which wrapped up all the features of GME, Lite, Pro, and Tour Builder together.  Google Earth Engine still could be separate but I'd rename it to be something like 'Satellite Engine', its not really got a whole lot in common with Google Earth, it isn't even a virtual globe.
• There is value in maintaining the layout of Google Earth in the future, this is what educators are mostly using so they'll be annoyed if they have to relearn a new Geo interface.  I predict cross teachers if Google decide to pull Google Earth and the services available are as they are today.
• The great thing about Google Earth is its simplicity.  To attract users (not just educators) to a 'simpler than Arc' geo service you should have the simple stuff readily available in the interface (GMEL) and the complex stuff (like Google Maps Engine) in there but hidden away on a menu bar you have to deliberately pull up.

UPDATE 15th Jan 14:  I added bits about tour builder and heavily edited for grammar and structure.  I first published this post while I had a cold and I don't think I was thinking straight!

Google Earth Tour Builder HowTo

Following my recent review of Google Earth Tour Builder I showcased it at the AGU conference before Christmas.  Google have published some text instructions but I thought a video tutorial would be worthwhile.


Richard Byrne also has a video tutorial, he discusses using multiple photos/videos for each place (functionality which I'm a bit 'meh' about) but doesn't go into the detail about tilted or plan locations.