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You can lead a horse to water

  October 6, 2014 , ,

Taking risks in education is, well, risky. As I have mentioned in several previous posts, one of my SIF assignments is to work on the hybrid U.S. history sections being offered at GSU this fall. The course is innovative in a number of ways: it takes full advantage of the D2L platform, it has it’s own, custom made (and free!) textbook, and it uses video segments, essentially little documentaries, to supplement instruction and to create a class that meets in-person once a week, and in a virtual classroom on the other. The film segments, in combination with reading from both the textbook and from primary sources, become the material on which Thursday class is based. So, the classroom is also flipped, meaning that it replaces time often spent in lecturing for time spent on discussion or other types of activities that usually get little time in survey courses. As great as this sounds, there is a little bug in the system so far – very few students are watching the video. Because they are accessed through D2L, the number of students accessing each video can be tracked, and the results to date have been discouraging. This is frustrating – not only because of the many hours that go into producing each video segment but also because the videos are an attempt to engage learners who are supposedly visual, and who will tell you that they don’t keep up with reading because of the medium, not because they are averse to … Continue reading

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World of web programming 2

  October 5, 2014 ,

For the front end of Deliberation mapping tool, we had the choice of either using HTML5 or flash. HTML 5 is supposed to the future of web development and flash is getting less popular for websites. Hence, this lead to the design decision of using HTML 5 over flash.[1][2] In HTML 5, animations can be shown using canvas element. To ramp up my knowledge about HTML 5 canvas element, I started exploring the web for examples having clickable elements on canvas [3]. In the example, circular regions are created on canvas elements and the clicks are handled using jQuery and iterating over each circular region to find out whether the region corresponding to it has been clicked. This lead to me reading up about jQuery, which I shall describe in my next post. References http://myoocreate.com/why-adobe-flash-is-dying/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML5_and_Flash http://pterkildsen.com/2013/06/28/create-a-html5-canvas-element-with-clickable-elements/ Ram Sundarkumar  

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The Transit City

  October 5, 2014 , ,

Known as the southern commercial railway hub and also for it’s urban sprawl, Atlanta is in constant movement within the city and throughout the metro area.  Originally not the capital of Georgia, Atlanta was the center for rail traffic for the entire southeast.  As industry grew within the city, other, more public transit, emerged and connected industry workers with the various industrial centers, students with large universities, and residents to use for personal transit. What resulted was a large and intricate trolley car line that connected the city, at one time having over 200 miles of  tract-  a system any metropolis would be proud of.  However, the early 1900’s introduced the age of the automobile and our emergence of the sprawling metropolis we see today. The trolley lines were dug up, or paved over, to create an autocentric city dependent on individual transit. The reason I bring up this part of Atlanta history, is that this week I was added to a workgroup that will focus on the progression, regression and reintroduction of public transit in Atlanta.  A small group of us SIF’s will be creating a storymap (curious?) to conceptualize the evolution of our transit system through a spatial and historic lens. With the shift to more sustainable systems, urban centers are creating more vibrant and efficient public transit systems, and Atlanta is no exception.  Between the beltline, the “new” streetcar development, and talks of expanding MARTA to other metro cities, Atlanta is attempting to establish a more connected … Continue reading

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Black Boxes and GIS for Anthropological Research

  October 5, 2014 ,

In modern archaeological research, some portion of the research will take place in a Geographic Information System or GIS. Whether it’s fully integrated into the project both documenting and directing research, or utilized solely for the archiving of mapped data, there is a  GIS. The seeming precision of GIS mapped data, coupled with the ability to calculate complex spatial statistics for research and guidance results in a very friendly environment for black box fallacies. This is the problem of closed source, undocumented analytic software tools being used to conduct research. When a black box is used uncritically, without thought for research design and control the results of the research conducted with the black box can become suspect. Take for example, the issue of  analyzing site inter-visibility with a viewshed analysis. This is a common use of this GIS tool in landscape archaeology. By tracing lines of sight the software is able to create a binary map, where a pixel will be recorded as either visible or not visible. Commercial software package ArcMap from ESRI has one set of algorithms for this purpose. The most popular open source GIS, Qgis has a different set of very similar algorithms. The result is that with the same input parameters and data Qgis and ArcMap can produce slightly different binary maps of visibility. Because Qgis is open source, an interested party could very easily examine the source code responsible for the resultant visibility map. None of this is possible with a black box, whether … Continue reading

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“Will we be lost without paper maps in the digital age?”

  October 5, 2014 , ,

This week, the ArcGIS Online Outreach team started discussing its newest project -“Atlanta Mass Transit: Past, Present, Future.” This project is going to be using the Planning Atlanta collection to access past planning documents for Atlanta’s conversations surrounding transportation. With these documents we plan to make an ESRI Story Map that shows the plans through the decades. Given that the streetcar has raised the level of dialogue around transportation, we hope to contribute to the discussion through this publicly available, online map. While not all mapping is done on web based platforms, almost all map creation has been digital since the 1990’s. Not only has the way cartographers make maps changed, but technology has changed the way we view maps. What was previously printed off, hung on walls, and folded up to put in glove boxes is now contained on screens of varying sizes. Some digital maps are static, but they are becoming increasingly animated, interactive, and even 3D. So is the paper map becoming obsolete? According to Paul Hurst and Paul Clough from the the Royal School of Military Survey, argue that paper maps are still holding strong in the 21st century. In their article Will we be lost without paper maps in the digital age?  in the Journal of Information Science, they discuss their study which examines the the preferred mode of map consumption of experts and non-experts. An expert is someone who is a professional who has expansive experience in paper and digital map creation while a non-expert represents … Continue reading