As someone who has one foot in the ArcGIS world and another in the GoogleEarth/GoogleMaps world, I'm continually annoyed at how cumbersome it is to shuffle data back and forth between the two product lines. I'll skip the diatribe for now and instead just point out a cool new tool that I ran across last week when I was getting ready to talk to a Women's Studies class that will … [Read more...]
3 global data visualization tools to use in your class
Last fall the World Bank launched a contest aimed at challenging web developers to create web-based tools using the data available through the World Bank's Open Data Initiative. Click here to read an article from Programmable Web about the contest winners (excerpt below). You can visualize nearly every indicator of economic, social and human development on StatPlanet World … [Read more...]
Peer-reviewed articles on spatial thinking & GIS
Diana Sinton, Director of Spatial Curriculum and Research for the University of Redlands' LENS Initiative, recently tipped me off to a website with full-text PDFs of peer-reviewed papers that are being presented this week at the Spatial Thinking & GIS conference being held in Tokyo, Japan. The papers (including one from GIS Hall of Fame-r - yes, there is such a thing … [Read more...]
Physics Dept coffee talk on using the Flying Bison drone to collect aerial imagery
Come hear Nick Urban, Computer Science '12, talk about designing, building and flying the remote-controlled Flying Bison drone. Nick will be presenting on Monday, 9/26 at noon (Olin 364) as part of the Physics department's coffee talk series. He'll have the plane with him and will be showing some new video that will be captured by the drone in test flights he's conducting this … [Read more...]
More web tools for helping students understand scale
In previous posts here, here and here I've mentioned different resources that can be useful in helping students understand scale. Joseph Kerski, ESRI's Education Curriculum Development Manager, recently posted to one of the GIS in higher ed listserves about some new web-based tools for teaching students about scale. One of the websites, Scale of the Universe (created by … [Read more...]