Vassar's Talk Tech Podcast on Geospatial Technologies at Vassar

I was recently interviewed for a fledgling podcast produced by my colleagues, Baynard Bailey Chad Fust, and Media Cloisters student Madison Silverstein. In the interview I talk about geospatial technologies at Vassar, my 2009-2010 Fulbright to the University of the West Indies working with the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies, how Google Earth and web maps make my life as an instructional technologist a little bit easier, how tablet PCs have helped bring the computer lab to the data and opened the classroom doors, and how the Geoweb is a lot like the Web web in that we all have access to free data on easy-to-use web-based applications, right away, right now. Chad talked about geocaching, Madison talked about her dad’s GPS in the car and Baynard mentioned a web map page that shows you where you can volunteer your time at any given moment or place.

Here's a link to the iTunes podcast location. It's podcast number 4.

Talk Tech podcasts focus on technologies for teaching and learning at Vassar College. This interview was the fourth pocast but Baynard and Chad plan to do more. Check it out sometime on iTunes (search on Vassar College, it’s in iTunesU).

Some of the sites mentioned in this podcast include:
Panoramio
U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum Darfur Project
David Rumsey Map Collection
Yelp
The 2009 Horizon Report
Zumbox
Facebook iPhone app
Vimeo
Posterous

Thanks, Chad, Baynard and Madison for having me on!

You can follow the action on Twitter with their Talk Tech podcast feed: http://twitter.com/vassartalktech

Turtle Race Map

Found this cute Leatherback Turtle Watch web site from National Geographic with a fun map, updated daily (or more) with the progress of some tagged Leatherback Turtles. Here's the Turtle Race Map page (shown below).

"The turtles are tagged with state-of-the-art satellite tracking devices that allow us to follow their incredible 3,700-mile (6,000-kilometer) journey." Check back regularly. Listen to the audio.

Thanks for the tweet, BarbadosTravel.

U.S. Unemployment Map in Slate

Maps in the news always get my attention. This interactive map at Slate, showing employment numbers in the U.S., by county changing since the start of the recession, is quite illuminating. Play the map animation to see the blue dots (job gains) change over time to large red dots (job losses). It's difficult to ignore the economic crisis at hand.

Thanks, NITLE's Sean Connin for the link.

Tablet PCs in Education Make the News

"Students say they don't even know how they lived without them!"

Seen on a post at GottaBeMobile and Loren Heiny's Incremental Blogger, a tablet PC pilot project at Penn State makes it to newsworthiness. Cool!

Sharing Google Earth Tours with Friends and Family

Google has made it easier to share location information with those folks who are not inclined to use the Google Earth client. Now you can view a Google Earth tour right in a web browser, which is pretty handy. Thanks, Google Lat Long Blog.

And thanks to this tweet for letting me know.

Research and Google Earth

I'm going to the Caribbean soon. I'm interested in tsunamis, too. So the mention of both of those combined in OgleEarth caught my eye. Apparently, Richard Teeuw from the Geohazard Research Centre at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and his colleagues found using Google Earth a weak coast line that may be susceptible to collapse during an earthquake which could then trigger a tsunami. Ogle Earth mentions this post in Silver Scorpio but you will find more information on the study at the New Scientist link. The study was published in AGU's EOS which is locked behind a password protected gate.

Fun, isn't it, using Google Earth to conduct research. Here's a study on cow alignments and one on finding Osama bin Laden. Just ten short years ago, this couldn't be done with this magnitude of swiftness. I love my job!