Consider Google Earth, as described by the University of Southern California’s Viewfinder project:
There is something almost cosmic about flying around in Google Earth. It allows world travel at lightning speed. It cultivates a sense of global awareness on a visceral level. And it places you in a reference frame akin to astral projection, ultimately altering your perception of the planet, and of yourself.
Then think for a minute about Flickr:
There is something equally significant about Yahoo Flickr, albeit on a folksier, more grounded plane. Simply providing people with a means to share their photographs has resulted in a library of over 2 billion images. These photos are tagged and organized in an organic, ad hoc, bottom-up manner, often referred to as a “folksonomy.” Community-based tagging allows new and often idiosyncratic cross-cuts through the database – through tags such as “cats in sinks,” “scattered images,” and “blue,” for example – and while these may seem trivial to outsiders, the tags are pertinent and highly significant to the communities from which they emerge.
Viewfinder is trying to put it all together (vision). Watch the video (linked image on right) and let your teacher’s imagination sour!
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Tags: warlick, education, google earth, flickr, viewfinder
Great idea… but I think (hope?) you want teachers’ imaginations to _soar_!
Yep! You’re right! I get to going to fast sometimes.
Dave,
After watching this video, it seems that a good mashup would be cameras and gps. If every digital photo had gps data encoded when you took the picture, it would make mapping photos to sofware like Google Earth that much easier….
JZ
Great post. Looks like a great project to assign to students in groups. Virtual field trips. Thanks for sharing.