July 2007 Archives
People here at Penn State on Twitter have been sharing their walk scores. There's a Walk Score site that will give you yours. Basically, the higher the score, the more walkable your living space is to shops and things. The idea is to get people to do more walking, which would be better both for them and for the environment.
Not surprisingly, where I live netted a walk score of 0. But it got me thinking about how interesting it would be to do a mashup of the walk score with both the cost-of-living index and crime index data. My guess would be that many of the higher walk scores would yield places that are far more expensive to live (like downtown State College), or places that may be considered unsafe (like many inner-city locations). I think the base of walkability is good, but it's naive to assume that mere laziness prevents people from living in places that are walkable. It's far more likely that income, crime, and other factors like services (the school system, for example) play a much larger role.
So while it's laudable to get people to want to walk, how can the calculator be really useful? I'd say that people should put in their desired monthly cost for housing (indicating income), and a zip code or city area. They should then be presented with a map that shows them the walkable areas within their income (if any), and a rating of the safety for walking in that area.
I just really wish the Walk Score site had an open API. I'd love for us to do a mashup of this one.
Recently, the IST Solutions Institute, which is where I work as an instructional designer, was assigned a new director. His name is Brian Smith, and he's one savvy guy about both technology and education. One of the things we've been doing as a result of this transition is talking about going in new directions. He recently posted some thoughts on our role in course design/development to his blog, The Director's Cut. I had a few thoughts on this, so I thought I'd post them here.
First, I wholly agree with the thinking that we get out of the way of faculty regarding courses. While instructors may not always have the technical know-how to do the high-tech stuff we often give them, I think it's our responsibility to figure out how to provide them with the support they need without acting as gatekeepers to what is, essentially, their stuff for their courses. It's a complex balance, but the idea of helping without getting in the middle of things is extremely attractive.
How to do this? I keep coming back to the idea Bart mentioned in his comment about a searchable, taggable repository. The question is whether we get involved in something like SCORM, or whether we create our own system for tagging and uploading content. While I personally like the model of using blog-like tags to describe pieces of content, I also think it might be attractive to go in a direction no one else at the university seems to be exploring--feel free to correct that if you will, but I don't know of anyone at PSU working actively to create content that is SCORM-compliant. So playing in this space would be a way for SI to contribute to the larger PSU (and beyond) community.
On the other hand, it might be nice to create something that combined social networking capabilities with ease-of-use, searchability, voting/commenting functions, easy editing and sharing back, AND the ability to easily add the stuff to our CMS. Not asking much, am I?
Regarding Edison's peer review tool, I agree that we should take a look at iPeer. That having been said, however, we need to make it an absolute necessity that whatever peer evaluation tool we use integrates with rosters in Angel. To me, that's a deal-breaker for anything we look at. If it doesn't integrate with Angel, or cannot be made to integrate, we can't use it--because we don't want to have to manually add folks to teams or rosters every semester. That's another version of our "being in the way" for faculty. It should be automatic. I also think that whatever we do, there should be a bank of suggested questions, but instructors should be able to easily and on the fly edit, remove, and add questions of their own. There are other things a peer eval. should be able to do, as well (let students evaluate team members on one screen, good graphical interface, AJAX-y widgets, and extensibility).
Finally, and this may need to go in a separate post because I have a lot more thoughts on this, I think we should seriously reconsider the "how" of how we do things at SI--everything, not just courses. I've been reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, and it's giving me many, many ideas about how we can change how we work to take advantage of the fact that the world has changed so much. More on that, as I said, in another post. :)
As part of my job at Penn State, I've been working on some activities for an honors course in the College of IST. The course revolves around social networking tools, and the section currently in progress is on Blogs and RSS feeds. The last week of this unit discusses the idea of mapping social networks.
In researching the idea of mapping social networks, specifically blogs, I found Twingly screensaver. I downloaded it and have been trying it out. It's a 3D interactive visualization of blog activity across the earth. I like it, because while it is a screensaver, it also allows you to interact with it, much as the screensaver my coworker Bart Pursel has running on his Mac. That one is called NewsStream and it works through RSS feeds, but also can be used as a game similar to Breakout.
In Twingly, you can see feeds of blog postings from around the Earth, while a 3D model of the Earth rotates. Press "i" to interact with it and read short versions of posts, or link to the original blog post. I'm not certain how the app chooses what feeds to show, and some of the content is definitely adult-oriented, but the idea of mapping the where of blogs appeals to me.
The program is in beta right now, but I can think of several extensions that would make it more useful from a social network standpoint. It would be really cool if you choose the feeds you wished to display to start with, and allowed the program to build from other blogs referenced by those feeds. That way, you would be mapping social networking space both geographically and in a way that shows how the network grows organically.
In addition, I could see value in being able to map different networks (by using color, or shape, or whatever) that would allow you to see different social networks and how they may (or may not) intersect, both geographically and network-wise.
Finally, they need to do a Mac version. Really.
