Archive for the 'Tools' Category

Time Travel Anyone?

Published
by
Tom
on December 5, 2008
in Pedagogy, Technology and Tools
. 0 Comments

The Lost Museum is a pretty creepy place to go to.  Going to the site at night alone while everyone is sleeping freaked me out …  Who made the site so freaky?

Those are the words of one of my students in an urban history course at Baruch College after completing a (late night) assignment at a virtualized version of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, located at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street between 1841 and 1865.  The student seems to have meant the comment as criticism, but I believe it is in fact a high compliment to the makers of the Lost Museum website.  If you haven’t visited before, I recommend that you check out the site.

A team at the American Social History Project and the Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center developed the project between 1996 and 2004, programming with Flash and Softimage animation software to offer online visitors a deeply interactive experience.  User participation is heightened while navigating through the empty museum (in a first-person, role-playing video game format) as visitors seek clues to determine which of Barnum’s many enemies may have burned down the museum in 1865.  Along the way, they encounter historical information about the museum, the city, and the nation during the mid-nineteenth century.  So, the fact that my student expressed fear in virtually wandering through an empty, dark, 100-year-old museum filled with items ranging from fantastical creatures to war memorabilia means that the site designers succeeded at temporarily transporting him to another place and another time.

Earlier this week, Luke did some virtual transport of his own, leaping 600 miles and many years back to the site of his childhood memories in Michigan, crafting a media-rich tour of the locale.  As his title suggests, he did all this through story telling, a technique that does not require a high speed internet connection and new age video processing, but can demonstrably be enhanced by it.

While teaching with the Lost Museum, I noticed that my students questioned the material they encountered on the site far more meticulously than that of their textbook and navigated through it with greater confidence.  Some commented boldly about the political turmoil in New York City over slavery evident in the antebellum museum.  Others drew accurate conclusions about Barnum’s pioneering role in shaping 19th century entertainment: “Barnum must have been very good at manipulating the audiences to buy the load of nonsense he exhibited at his museum.”  A third group zeroed in on minute details: “As for the cage with a bunch of different species of animals that can eat each other, how many times did Barnum have to restock the cage?”

I found a similar tendency by students to raise probing questions when studying tenement living on the Lower East Side with the aid of a virtual tour constructed by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.  One of the apartments is empty, but the rest are restored with period furnishings.  Unfortunately, you have to go to the museum in person to interact with role-playing actors and get a more visceral feel of the claustrophobic conditions.  Next time around, I will plan to add a street-level tour of the surrounding neighborhood, as imagined by Luke.  Maybe by then, someone will have invented a simulation of the hustle and bustle of Hester Street so my students can push through the crowds to visit their favorite street peddler (and Luke can restore the cast of characters that roamed North Genesee Drive).


One question I wish to raise here is: what are the risks and rewards of utilizing tools such as the Lost Museum in the classroom?  My examples in the last two paragraphs touch on a benefit of such a tool.  As for disadvantages, I wonder whether virtual tours of the past can “flatten” the past by making it seem too easy to visit.  Many of my students reflected on the process by which the site was constructed, and they tended to demonstrate a firmer grasp on the insurmountable distance between life in 2008 and 1865; but others struggled to contextualize the sites they encountered, even when prompted by the site to do so.

I am curious to hear from folks in other disciplines about the prospects for using computer simulations to enhance teaching your subject.  If the historical-minded among us wish to debate the merits of computer-mediated teaching of the history curriculum, I am of course also up for that, but I will wait for comments before getting into that discussion.

An Experiment in Digital Storytelling

Published
by
Luke
on December 2, 2008
in Tools and Web 2.0
. 4 Comments

I was recently inspired, no surprise, by a post on Jim Groom’s Bavatuesdays: “A Childhood Without Proof.” This was about as close to schmaltz as the right Rev. Groom comes, and being a sap myself, I appreciated both the content and the tone.

Jim, the 6th of 7th children, was aware of only one photograph of himself as a baby. One. But last week a Facebook friend from his old neighborhood tagged an image of him at 3. Jim’s post praises Facebook for being good at connecting people with the past, and at making the sharing of memories so much easier than it was just a few years ago. This would have been possible without Facebook; but it would have been more difficult, perhaps to such an extent that it wouldn’t have happened at all. There’s a powerful argument in there that connectivity tools don’t just impact the way that we relate to one another, but also can impact the way we relate to our individual and collective pasts.

This post was on my mind when I began playing with Google Street View, a component of Google Maps that offers street level views of particular locales. This isn’t a new tool, but Google has been steadily adding images as its van tours and shoots different localities (here’s a list of what’s been added). I was surprised to see that the neighborhood in which I grew up has been photographed. North Genesee Drive is of no great consequence — beyond being sandwiched between the neighborhoods that produced Magic Johnson and Malcolm X — but there it is, ready for your virtual tour.

I haven’t been back to my old neighborhood in years, and was pleased that I was able to recreate the bike rides and explorations of my youth, even if through a somehwat antiseptic, Googleized filter. There was no cutting through yards, lemonade sales, or bullies to run from. My memory can fill those things in. Mostly, it was pleasant to visit from my desk in New York.

Here’s a gallery of screen captures; click through for captions.



I recognize that this particular application of the tool appeals to me on a nostalgic level, and while that’s fine for personal blogging and Facebooking and all that, it’s hardly a pedagogical argument. The images above affect me and the kids I grew up with more than they’ll affect you.

But it’s also pretty easy to see how tools like this, free tools available from your desktop, can be integrated into college curricula. Studying the Lower East Side at the turn of the century? Compare the built environment of Hester Street from Jacob Riis’s photographs to images of the area on Google Maps. Use Google Maps to explore planning and architecture in urban, suburban, and exurban neighborhoods. What can we learn about Barack Obama from a virtual tour of Hyde Park? Find images of parks in three different European cities; how does their location and construction reflect their usage? Locate five “Chinatowns.” How are they alike or similar in organization? Writing a term paper on the Atlantic Yards? Use Google Maps to show how construction will restrict traffic. The possibilities are endless. Google Maps won’t tell us everything we need to know about any of these topics; but then, no single source will. A virtual tour of a street or a neighborhood can impart a sense of location and feeling that can augment other information on the path to knowledge.  (I should also note that Jim is also ahead of the curve on this).

In the movie below, I use Google Maps to recreate the walk from my home to Verlinden Elementary School. Yes, again, I know, the nostalgia trap; but I was struck by the sheer number of possible jumping off points for discussion, reflection, and investigation produced just by reliving that two block walk. There’s something exciting about an exploratory process that encourages one to explore even more.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

Seniors and Communication Technology

Published
by
Lauren
on October 27, 2008
in Cross-Cultural Communication, E-mail, Interpersonal Communication, Technology and Tools
. 2 Comments

A few weekends ago I schlepped to Florida to celebrate my grandmother’s 99th birthday.  Being almost a century old, her vision and hearing is just not what it used to be, which makes communicating with others quite difficult for her.  However, I was amazed by how much technology is available for her and other seniors (and other visually- and hearing-impaired folks).  She had a hearing aid, which is pretty standard, but also a special phone with large numbers and a light that flashes when someone calls in case she doesn’t hear it ring.

The two pieces of technology that really blew me away, however, were a printing device called Presto, and an enlarger.  The enlarger looks like a combination TV/overhead projector.  If there is something my grandmother wants to read, she places it on the machine, and it appears enlarged on the screen.  This enables her to read everything from the directions on prescription bottles, to her favorite philosophical texts, to emails from her grandchildren.

That’s right–my 99 year old grandmother loves email!  My grandmother is unable to use a computer, but we can send her emails through the Presto machine, which looks like a regular HP printer.  Over the weekend that I visited, daily horoscopes arrived, and several birthday wishes.  After the emails are printed, all she has to do is walk them over to her enlarger and boom–she is able to remain connected with friends, family, and the outside world.

The best communication I have with my grandmother, however, is decidedly low-tech.  It is face-to-face, looking her directly in the eyes, squeezing her hands, and telling her that I love her.  However, because we live a thousand miles away from each other, and the phone has become an impossible barrier, email has to suffice.  As soon as I got home from my trip, I sent her an email filled with photographs of our visit.

reCAPTCHA: The Essence of a Distributed Knowledge Network

Published
by
Luke
on October 22, 2008
in Media, Process, Resources, Technology, Tools and Writing Instruction
. 10 Comments

We’ve all come across a CAPTCHA, a challenge response test that web sites give viewers who are trying to register for an account, leave a comment, or perform some other task that might be vulnerable to spammers or bots.  They are useful because they can differentiate human from machine (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart… don’t ask me how “turing” became a “P” in that acronym).

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks.  According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”

What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes?  Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.

Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition).  If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project.  For details on how the technology works, click here.

This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network.  reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process.  All of us together are smarter than we are added up.

Brilliant work.

(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)

x Minutes of Freedom

Published
by
Mikhail
on August 11, 2008
in Resources, Technology and Tools
. 0 Comments

From the Dept. of We Stole It From Lifehacker: Here’s a great idea for those of us needing to focus for chunks of time. An application for Mac OS X called Freedom helps keep your nose to the grindstone and away from Facebook, email, LOLCATZ, or whatever by disabling your internet connectivity for a designated period of time up to 6 hours. The developers have yet to figure out how to make an allowance for online library catalogs, the ability to IM your friend who knows everything, and the Olympics medal count.

Now that’s American ingenuity.