University of Toronto student Anand Agarawala has reimagined the computer desktop in a way that reflects the "fuzzy" way we deal with information, taking its inspiration from the messy realities of the physical desktop but building in organizational aids we could only dream of doing with paper. Watch the video below to see how he brings these two worlds together in an enlightening experiment in the future of our visual interface.
From Information Aesthetics.
Designer and collector Dan Goodsell has posted original concept artwork from "Fantastic Frosties," a 1960s superheroed cereal that never got out of Post's marketing department, on his blog A Sampler of Things. The sketches are accompanied by pages ripped from Marvel Comics with poses circled for the artists' reference.
I can almost picture Frost-O wrestling Tony the Tiger to the ground while Quick Draw McGraw pulls out his piece...
QuikMaps is a new web app that allows users to annotate Google maps "by hand" using an editor that supports drawing and tagging. You can draw and attach various labels directly to the mapping space and they'll stick there, and the map itself has the basic zooming and grab-and-pan features of Google Maps. Here's an example of a map I created using QuikMaps.
(Your browser or blogging software's handling of iframe content may pose problems with embedding your maps on a website or blog. Posting in Blogger using the Firefox browser, I've found that the maps will post but that the post "breaks" the WYSIWYG editor and makes it impossible to edit a post that includes the QuikMaps code. This is definitely Blogger's problem, and only one of many bugs in their software; the iFrame content works fine in my wiki and no doubt elsewhere on the web as well, including on Tim Lauer's blog, where I learned about QuikMaps.)
This is an interesting approach to mapping that breaks out of the search model of most current mapping servers, where you type in search data that is correlated with data layers in the map (looking up addresses or suggesting travel routes, for example). Great benefits of Quikmaps' system include:
I will be posting periodic visual "daisy chains" with an invitation to blog readers to fill in gaps in a visual record. This first one was inspired by the final image.
What image or images should go in position 4? Post or find one or more photos somewhere online and drop me a link in the comments to this post, along with whatever commentary you deem necessary (I have tried to keep my own to a minimum, offering just enough to reveal my train of thought). I will create a final post in a week that summarizes the best submissions.
Take a few minutes to take a crack at this art-historical exercise.
A very effective visualization of the relative size of planets and stars that takes a "Powers of 10" approach, beginning with our solar system (above) and allowing us to watch our sun shift from the big bully of our galaxy to a tiny speck when compared to larger stars. An animated application is easy to imagine, but this is also surprisingly effective as a series of still photos. [Via Information Aesthetics]
An interesting article in the New York Times Monday discusses NYC's "renewed push" for funding and innovative thinking in arts integration in the schools based on the city's 2004 "Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts."
The story covers a lot of bases, but I wanted to highlight an interesting point that Edward Morgano, the regional arts supervisor for Region 5, made in the article. The article was describing Morgano's thinking regarding his priorities in disbursing funds.
"When a school in his region asked to take students to see a Broadway show, for example, he said: 'My initial response was, "No, that's not O.K." I need to know if this is a culminating experience. Have they studied theater? Do they know what downstage right and stage left means? For kids who are just going to get it as a one-shot, that's not acceptable.'"Could this guy do double-duty holding the purse strings for technology funding as well?
If artists like Yumiko Tankada had their way, the future might look something more like this:
Will Wright and Maxis have once again reinvented the open-ended educational video game.
Don't miss this video demonstration of Spore, which leads players through the development and evolution of life from bacterium through space exploration, with everything imaginable in between. I have watched the progress of educational games for a while from a distance, especially from the perspective of the brave teachers like Dave McDivitt who experiment with them in the classroom. Science and social studies teachers, get ready: This is the game you should let your students play from age 12 on to enhance their understanding of evolution, the study of cultures, and astronomy. Don't believe me; watch the gameplay video below from the Game Developers Conference 2006. Then play the game yourself and put yourself in your students' shoes. A game like this can't teach your kids these concepts, but it can bring them to life in ways only a video games can. Leave your worries at the doorstep (read Henry Jenkins' lucid "Fun vs. Engagement" post on his blog if you need help with this) and dive in.
Just yesterday I reviewed Chris Wahl's wonderful illustrating blog along with two other "inside the artist's studio" webspaces. After praising him for posting video of his computer screen during a sketching session, I mentioned that "someday" someone would be able to easily pair two camera images without any hassle so an artist could show us their hands at work on keyboard and tablet as well as the screen view. Today I came across Phil Piwonka's Mac-app Gawker, which does just that and much more - its primary purpose is to enable the easy creation of time-lapse video. [Addendum, 7/15/06: Piwonka has a Gawker-centric blog - which I somehow missed the first time around - and is now accepting donations via PayPal. Since I haven't had any takers for my own pay-it-forward project (see below), I hope he has better luck!]
I'm out of town to present a teacher training workshop and am using a work-provided PC, so I haven't had a chance to play with this yet. But it looks like there are multiple replay speeds to choose from, making this an ideal (and free) application for science-class data collection. The last You Tube video I posted here seemed to precipitate a couple of early posts' untimely retirement into the archives, and the examples provided are far less interesting than what your students will think up.
If I had $70, I'd buy Chris Wahl a webcam so he could do this. In fact, I'd buy him the webcam at left, the Logitech Quick-Cam Pro 4000, highly rated by Epinions users.
What if we leveraged the Power Of The Internet to make this happen?
If you're a fan of Chris' work or of any young artist who benefits from people like him taking the time to make their skills available to aspiring illustrators, consider a donation today using the link below. I will personally buy Chris the webcam and have it shipped to his home in Sydney, Australia, and will refund anyone who donates after we've already reached our goal (did I mention I'm an optimist?). If we don't reach the price + shipping, I'll still pass on what readers have ponied up so he can start his own webcam fund, and if we get close I'll finish the job myself.
I've been wanting to post an update on the Picasa Web Albums image resizing bug I discovered during a beta test last week, for several reasons:
I came across three sites this week - all of which happen to point to the rapidly diminishing value of the term "website" - that can each offer students a different insight into the creative process. All are spaces that young artists will want to return to again and again.
First up is the Flickr-based daily sketchbook by designer and illustrator Rich Rawlyk, who, the blog Drawn! reports, started the daily discipline after speaking to some middle-school students about the importance of drawing every day. Rawlyk's daily posts blend computer and hand drawing with photography, collage, and vector-based design.
For more on technique, a young artist would do well to stop by Chris Wahl's blog, where the comic book artist has been producing how-to text, drawing samples, step-by-step snapshots, and now video to what started out as a way to showcase some of his unpublished "back catalogue" back in March. The blog focuses on software-based techniques and is a great site for tutorials and casual discussion with a working comic book artist. Here's one of Wahl's video tutorials, this demonstrating his black-and-white drawing technique. (Note: Wahl mentions in his blog that he frequently flips the canvas horizontally to catch errors and see the picture from a different perspective - sort of like reading an important piece of writing backwards to check the spelling in the days before spellcheck.)
It's interesting to see how the transition to computer-based illustration techniques has made it so easy to produce and distribute this kind of material, in which the viewer has as good a view as the artist. One simple improvement would be the addition of voice-over narration; another possibility, this one waiting for the right home video-editing software, would involve a split-screen with the rendering matched with a webcam shot of the artist working on their tablet and keyboard.
When it comes to the story behind the story, nothing beats Toronto-based comic book artist Bryan Lee O'Malley's Annotated Scott Pilgrim, in which he lovingly details all of the locations, story background, and character sources for his Scott Pilgrim series (pictured above). The exercise provides an invaluable look for young writers and artists to understand just how close to home inspiration might lie, and that one of the essential functions of art is to for the artist to "unlock" a private place and time for readers.
There are many more examples of this kind of "behind-the-scenes" work being produced by artists to develop or strengthen their fan base and give something to the next generation of creatives. A few carefully-selected sites could be just the boost a young artist or writer needs to take themselves seriously and dive into their craft. The best source for such materials is the Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, which alerted me to all three of these great resources [here, here, and here] in the past two days.
Colin Purrington, a professor of evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College, has a great photostream on Flickr in which he documents and comments on explanatory labels at zoo exhibits. His spot-on commentary brings issues of zoo audiences, effective communication strategies, and good design together for a great examination of information design. View his personal set of exhibit display photos or browse and contribute to the Flickr pool he started on the same topic.
The past few weeks have featured a lot of bad news for the public domain, but the clouds parted yesterday when Microsoft and Creative Commons announced that Microsoft would release an Add-In that allows users of Office software to assign Creative Commons licenses to documents, spreadsheets, and slideshows. Copyright issues can be a major stumbling block for educators, who face extensive freedoms in the classroom use of copyrighted materials but are prohibited from redistributing or sharing many of the resulting educational productions. This new Add-In offers a major boost to share-alike, noncommercial copyright options that allow for broader noncommercial use of original content.
The word first reached me through TechCrunch [link]; poster Marshall Kirkpatrick also did an interesting interview with Creative Commons CTO Mike Linksvayer in his own blog, Netsquared, back in April. I agree with Kirkpatrick that this development is interestingly timed with Microsoft CEO Bill Gates' announcement of his plans to step down. At this stage, however, it's a bit premature to call it a new chapter for Microsoft.
I'm as surprised by the idea as anyone, but the nagging question remains: Why didn't anyone think of doing this as soon as Creative Commons came along? The most startling thing about this development is the realization that any programmer could have made this Add-In, but no one outside Redmond who speaks Microsoft's proprietary Visual Basic/.NET thought to do so. Add-Ins are often sold as proprietary software, so there certainly could be financial incentive, or it could have been developed and distributed freely, in the spirit of CC itself. Since Microsoft has no control over the use of viable Add-Ins designed to interact with Office applications, at any point in history prior to yesterday's announcement it would have seemed the perfect way to tweak the nose of a corporate giant, and could have made for great PR if timed with a particularly unflattering chess-move by Microsoft. Perhaps this partnership was born that way - someone came along to Microsoft and said, we can do this with or without you, and both parties recognized the strong incentives of working together on the project. But sometimes there's no point in looking a gift horse in the mouth - you're just begging somebody to file down their teeth.
(For help creating your own PowerPoint Add-In Toolbar, see my tutorial on Customizing PowerPoint Toolbars. While you're there you can download my free ToolbarCreator file, which contains the VBA script necessary to produce your own PowerPoint toolbar as well as step-by-step instructions in the form of a PowerPoint slide show.)
Three cheers to Microsoft for weighing in so dramatically for the viability and importance of CC licensing. The next step for the software giant is to shift the feature from an optional, downloadable Add-In - likely to reach only those already somewhat educated about the benefits of CC copyrights - to an out-of-the-box Office feature for the Office 2007 (2008?) rollout, a drop-down list in the file properties window, for example. (Call them at 1-800-MICROSOFT [642-7676] or click here for more ways to bug them to promise this.)
Then, if we could get copyright phreaks like Adobe to add technology to Photoshop and Illustrator that would allow users to tag images with Creative Commons licenses, enticing other software companies to follow suit, someone could write a copyright-scanning Add-In for Office that would alert you to "unverified" images before you publish and expose yourself to possible infringement. (Better not to make this a built-in feature for all of the pertinent Big Brother reasons!) As someone who works regularly in PowerPoint and creates materials for mass distribution, this would be particularly welcome.
For the time being, educators can protect themselves in their image-searches by using Yahoo's pioneering Creative Commons search or Google's Advanced Search, which now offers the option of filtering results based on licensing restrictions.
Every teacher should have a provocative warning sign to tell students they'll be challenging them to learn. Deep in the bowels of the Wooster Collective's Flickr photo pool I ran across Melvin Design's post on the fabulous Warning Label Generator.
The site consists of a form with a variety of labels and warning images to choose from, and form fields for you to write your own content in the lower right pane.
With the current settings, labels can be used as a provocative introductory slide to a PowerPoint presentation or group discussion. All we could ask for is a higher resolution image suitable for printing - it's 500 px wide and 72 dpi, and even the jpeg quality at the current resolution could be upped a bit. I'd like to see signs like this posted on classroom walls (click on the image to see it full-size):
Go make your own at this simple and elegant site.
A couple of helpful comments have helped clarify the problem. The problem, in turn, brings up a larger question regarding web apps like Picasa.
Readers observed that right-clicking an album image and selecting "View Image" (to load the image in the browser by itself, as with any webpage) loaded a properly-scaled image, and that the image was also downloaded at the correct size. I also noticed that the "Slideshow" also displays photos at the correct size, a fact I verified using an image-measuring browser mod of my own invention (open-source, of course):
But why resize images in the main view window at all? This is the first thing anyone sees when they visit your public albums, and depending on their purposes, they could easily do all their viewing without entering a mode in which the image was displayed at the proper size. (Personally, I avoid slide show modes in most cases; I like to browse thumbnails and select what I'd like to view at full size, especially if photos are provided in "snapshot" quantities.) For people sharing travel pics, this may not matter. But for a large segment of potential users who shoot casually but whose aesthetics and attention to craft push them into the realm of true amateur photography, this will matter a great deal.
The relative significance of this bug depends on what kind of photo-sharer you are, and on whether Google is more concerned about competing with many-to-many photo-sharing sites like Flickr or with one-to-many sites like Shutterfly. I'd put my bets on Flickr - it matches the low-overhead, drive-'em-to-the-ads strategy behind Google Spreadsheets and the rest of their recent labware. The Flickr users are the users who will care.
But Google doesn't have to chose. Sure, Google's beta software is more stable than most Microsoft official releases, and I understand we're taking this sucker for a test drive. But let's not call a bug a feature. Picasa can have the best of both worlds - all Google has to do is fix this bug.
If you're looking for a general description of features, the quick and dirty is: Albums can be public or unlisted (address must be typed in); it's easy to upload lots of pics at once, and to rearrange within and between albums; at least for now, there's a 250 MB storage cap; and it has a built-in email announcement function. If you like more words with your facts, see the friendly folks at Ziff-Davis Media.
I've been testing the beta (or "Test") version of Google's Picasa photo-sharing software, which is much-anticipated because it allows web photo sharing a la the Yahoo-owned Flickr. So far, the web interface is great and communication between the desktop app and the website is almost seamless. There's no tagging option, but Google may just expect users to put that in the "caption" field.
But Picasa's web albums have one big problem, and a killer one at that: the image resolution is abominable. I have uploaded identical photos to Flickr and a Picasa Web Album; take a look at each, then compare the quality with that of the website they were taken from. The Flickr upload looks great, as good as the original; Picasa increases the display size by about 10%, creating significant distortion and lots of junky jpeg image ghosting. This may be a simple browser-resizing problem, but this is not a setting that can be modified in your website account, and it looks just plain bad.
The uploading settings available from Picasa 2.5 suggest there may be a bigger problem here:
If you can't read them, they are:
Several months ago, when preparing for a series of advanced PowerPoint training sessions, I designed an introductory slide that attempted to map out where we were headed in the training session. I had broken my advanced PowerPoint training down into ten "rules" I felt (and feel) should govern PowerPoint useage from an educational perspective. My goal was to fire a shot off the bow at the opening of the session so the antsy people who want everything to be hands-on would relax for the first half of the training, which had a largely theoretical emphasis, and that those who feared being asked to apply new skills would know they didn't have to do anything right away. I came up with a visually satisfying but completely unscientific "timeline" that mapped the level of "theory" and "practice" that would be covered in each of my ten subsections, which were titled and clearly delineated in the presentation. What I created was one slide, but it is shown in stages below. Each of the blue blocks appears by wiping from left to right, and the blue bar wipes in two segments because, at the time, the training was divided into two sessions.
On the chart above, the Happiness line is purple, the Engagement line is pink, the Adaptation line is orange, and the Fulfillment line is green. Color-coding of the plot area is meant to offer some guidance as to major life changes, which correspond with school changes (elementary/middle/high/college) followed by additional life changes (long-term location changes, marriage, and life with a child).
Programmer Kyle Scholz has released a web-based visual thesaurus along the lines of Thinkmap's slick, Java-based mapper of word relationships. Unlike the prototype, Kyle's "Visual Wordnet," which draws on the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory's "Wordnet" database, is built using only Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets, and - drum roll, please - is free to all.
The Poynter Institute's 2004 "Eyetrack III" report, which summarized results from the news industry nonprofit's "heatmapped" usability study of news websites, has achieved canonical status in webdesign for its direct implications for usability and page layout. I have recently reviewed the report data from the perspective of a multimediator, and believe that unlike the study's implications for webdesign, which are applicable to any text-based site, its attempts to quantify the relative value of multimedia content are anything but proscriptive.
In brief, the Eyetrack study uses sophisticated videorecording equipment to track users' eye movements and documents where website visitors tend to look and linger, and the study led researchers to a set of guidelines regarding the placement of certain elements of a web page. An additional component of the study attempted to measure the relative effectiveness of text-based stories and "multimedia" stories (video + text), and published findings largely in favor of text-only content. The study authors wrote that:
As a designer and editor of multimedia educational materials, I have followed several excellent blogs centered on technology integration in education and on the ways web technologies can help facilitate student-directed learning. I am a latecomer to educational theory; my background is in journalism, design, and history, and my interests have always centered on on aspects or artefacts of human communication.
I am personally interested in the read/write web, in the use of blogs, podcasts, and the rest of the Web 2.0 to facilitate student-directed learning. But to the extent that teachers (or students) must still present some information in a structured, one-to-many format, I think something has been lost in the educational technology conversation. My interest in creating this blog is to discuss the ways in which one-to-many communication can be facilitated through the use of multimedia, and the way visually-oriented multimedia can assist educators in planning a teaching space in which discussion, participatory meaning-making, and understanding flourish. In pursuit of that topic, I am sure to touch on many others, from educational theory and research to experience-based observations, and from technical tips in multimedia production to discussions of contemporary art or cultural events that bring these issues into clearer focus. My overall goal is to maintain an emphasis on "the visual" in all things so as to offer a blog that suggests that "visualization" is at the heart of what we do as educators, and that there is a benefit to centering one's thinking along those lines.
To get a sense of where I'm coming from, take a look at my PowerPointers wiki, which offers research- and design-based guidance on the use of PowerPoint as a "visual medium."
