SIGGRAPH 2009

There are few conferences as fun and cool as SIGGRAPH, and I’m pleased to have gone to this one.  Of course, New Orleans is a fun and distracting city, and that doubled the pleasure.

I have to say, my favorite part is always the art installations.  This year did not disappoint, and my very favorite from this year’s installations was Biological Instrumentation, by Nina Tommasi.  This one took a lot of thought and ingenuity. I felt a the thrill of wonder as I listened to the plants “singing.”

Biological Instrumentation by Nina Tommasi

Here’s the artist statement on the SIGGRAPH site:

Biological Instrumentation is a time-based spatial installation of mimosa plants, each connected by a series of tubes to an air compressor and wired with audio speakers and other electronic equipment. Algorithmically triggered compressed air forces the plants to contract. As the plants begin to open their leaves again, sound signals play from the audio speakers. This work explores the poetics involved in creating new relationships between machines and plant life. Nina Tommasi is an Austrian-born media artist and architect.

Wandering around in this space of hanging shy mimosas watching their leaves contract and listening the sing as they relaxed was like being a little kid wandering around in a new wonderland.

Cassiopeia Project

I met Todd Hall and his lovely wife, Cynthia, while drinking Pimm’s cups at the Napoleon House in New Orleans.  We started talking because we had both gone there to attend the SIGGRAPH 2009 conference and we’re both into educational technology.

Todd runs the website, the Cassiopeia Project, which is a repository of science videos.  Here’s an example:

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big proponent of science education. It’s always a pleasure to find a website with well-done good science videos–especially on my pet topic of evolution.  Thanks Todd! Keep up the good work!

Diseasome

Yet another example of how we can use visualization techniques to better understand relationships between complex data.

Diseasome maps genetic disorders to genes affected.  You can zoom in or out and see the gene-disease links.

the interface is easy to use

Video Glossary

Here’s an interesting service from Lawrence Berkley National Laboratories: Video Glossary!

Videos of scientists explaining scientific terms have been compiled into an online video glossary, and a new one is added each week. Each video explains one term and they’re only about a minute long.

Search Engines

I just heard about three new search engines that present your search results differently.

WolframAlpha is pretty cool. It comes up with some interesting information. Type in “meaning of life” and see what happens.

The Wonder Wheel is from Google is a type of visual search. I don’t have a direct link to it, but here is a link to my “instructional technology” search. It lends itself well to exploration.

Lastly, Spezify is the one that is especially well suited for exploration. I did a search for “instructional technology” on that one, too (you might have to reload it if there are a bunch black boxes). The text field where you type in your search terms is just to the right of their logo on the header. I like how you can explore the visual results, but also there are search terms on the black bar just under the header/text field that you can click on and go to different results.

Cool protein folding game

Protein folding is such a complex, amazing, and beautiful phenomena. I have often wondered why someone didn’t come up with a program where you can visually play with the globs and get a sense of how the pieces attract and fold. Well, someone has! Last year!

Foldit is a game using distributed computing a la SETI@home, and crowdsourcing. Too cool!

Introducing or teaching social media to newbs

I think the big takeaway message from the last class (which really just reiterated previous class discussions) is that when you’re teaching people how to use social media, you need to make sure that your learners understand that they have to take responsibility for their actions. They need to be taught how to use proper ‘netiquette, understand ‘nethics, and how to protect (or kinda protect) themselves.

spreading the word

Well, I’m sure that you all know that today, 5/7/09, is odd day. But just in case, I thought I’d pass it on!

Final project revisited

Well, I realized that my interest in Second Life might have clobbered me. What I thought I wanted to do is way too vast given the time and resources at hand. I mean, people do Ph.D. dissertations on this stuff!

So, I backed up a little and gave it a little more thought. I’m working on a project for my 801 class on eating out healthily and I can’t really build any of the main instruction out for it until I get more skills under my belt, but I can certainly work on the Web 2.0 aspects of it. That would be really rewarding and I can get that project at least a couple of inches off the ground. Whew! Aside from the Facebook page, and cheat sheets (that hopefully will be read on an eReader as well as printable) I’ve been told that WordPress allows users to build web apps for the iPhone. While that’s not really an iPhone app, a web app is still OK in my book! So we’ll see what happens…

last 830 class for instruction

Last week’s class was a lot of fun. It’s always fun, but we got to get into our little groups and brainstorm about Web 2.0 and education. Everyone designed their maps differently, and each one brought something different to the experience. While I am biased and thought my group’s was really great, I admit that none of us are confident artists — so it didn’t look cool.

I was really impressed with the Web 2.0 learning cycle map — the one that’s like the nitrogen or carbon cycle in biology books. The names they came up with and the ideas that they attached to the land, sea, and clouds was really fun and FUNNY. Lastly, I think Ty’s description that the information has to be filtered before being pumped to the individuals is like municipal water filtration was very thought provoking.