Category Archives: Google

Online Google Earth Tours

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It seems like the widget that allowed you to embed Google Earth tours (with audio and motion) online isn’t working. We had at least one person in the county who wanted to be able to do this because they’d seen this Jimmy Buffet tour. Compared to teacher assessment and other bottomless problems this seemed pretty attractive, especially using the Buffet page as an example. I hacked off most of the extraneous parts and this seems to serve the purpose although there are a few more pits that ought to be carved off.

You should be able to download the source HTML at this page. Once you do that it’s just changing two URL strings from what they are now (http://etechplace.org/debordenave/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Bon-Jovi-Tour_KCJ.kmz) to the URL for wherever your KMZ source file lives. The example is below in an iFrame and it will likely play automatically. My apologies for that.

Google Form as Choose Your Own Adventure Tool

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Just a quick proof of concept for a session I’m doing at VSTE. I’m trying to show how you can use most things in all sorts of ways despite what they were intended to do. Apparently the example Google put out for this way back when actually used choose your own adventure to demo the concept. I promise I didn’t know that.

Embedded below is a simple example of a choose your own adventure story using the branch logic options in Google forms. It’s a little hard to keep the pages straight at first but it gets easier as you go. Were I doing something large, I’d probably have to map it out first.

The Future of Search

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It has been interesting to see the excitement surrounding WolframAlpha .

The new “Computational Knowledge Engine” called Wolfram|Alpha has gone through a full media cycle before it has even been unleashed on the world. It has been hyped as a “Google Killer” and denounced as snake oil, and we’re still at least a few days from release.

The simple goal behind the engine is to connect searchers with precise information. Wolfram|Alpha’s search magic comes through a combination of natural language processing and a giant pool of curated data.

That quote is from Radio Berkman (which is a very interesting podcast out of Harvard Law) and they’ve got an interview with the creator as well. Watch the abbreviated 10 minute version below.

I’m not sure how well the idea of a curated semantic web will work (although I can understand that urge). This does really show a different way to think about searching for information. It really takes it beyond search, making it closer to exploration maybe.

It’s similar in some ways to one of David Huynh’s Parallax project (of Simile Exhibit fame) which has been out for quite a while now. Video of that is below.

Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

While the media may be portraying Google as being totally out of the mix here, keep in mind the GoogleLookup function available in their spreadsheet program. Don’t get me wrong, it’s limited and somewhat frustrating but it shows that they’re thinking along similar lines and playing with the same ideas.

Simple search isn’t enough. The data and the connections are too complex.

Where all of this matters educationally is that search and how you’ll be able to interact with the information you find is going to change drastically because of the size and sophistication of the information we’re dealing with. The finding phase is going to become more and more a component of use.

No doubt you’ll still be able to look for simple answers and that’ll be as necessary as ever but being able to leverage the artificial intelligence and squeeze the potential out of the relationships in the data you find will be a major difference maker between individuals who thrive in this environment and those who don’t.

The computer can show you possible connections but it can’t force you to see their importance or relevance. So in that way it increases the need for people to be able to grasp sophisticated relationships, to be able to analyze and make connections in interesting and useful ways. By making the data more accessible and showing that it is related, it increases the importance of the ability to make the connections as a basic skill.

It’s also important to see how this devalues certain skills as well. The obvious connections are going to be made by the computer. That’s going to make cognitive jumps, the ability to assimilate and relate seemingly unrelated material, the ability to understand the macro level of connections much more important. There’s beauty in being freed from the grunt work, but it makes the idea, the conceptual portion, that much more important.

Many of those worrying about white collar jobs being outsourced to China and India haven’t really thought it through far enough. If it’s repeatable logic computers are going to end up doing it. In some cases, they already are1.

Excerpts from
Robot makes discover all by itself (click for full article)

Meanwhile, some software programs can analyze data to generate hypotheses or conclusions, but they don’t interact with the physical realm. Adam is the first automated system to complete the cycle from hypothesis, to experiment, to reformulated hypothesis without human intervention.
….
They armed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes and proteins involved in metabolism in other species. Then they set the mechanical beast loose, only intervening to remove waste or replace consumed solutions. The results appear Thursday in Science.
…..
Still chugging along on its own, it designed experiments to test its hypotheses, and performed them using a fully automated array of centrifuges, incubators, pipettes, and growth analyzers.

After analyzing the data and running follow-up experiments — it can design and initiate over a thousand new experiments each day — Adam had uncovered three genes that together coded for an orphan enzyme.
King’s group confirmed the novel findings by hand.

Granted all of this is at an early stage but you can see glimpses of the future. And by “future” I mean 10 years (or less) down the road2.

What does it mean for education? It means a lot. We better get moving.

1 That sounds melodramatic but the cost of computational power is plunging while wages are rising. If you can be replaced cheaply, you will be.

2 Try imagining any of the things in this post in 1999.

Publishing Google Docs to WPMU

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I was looking to have some people in my class publish lesson plans to their WPMU blogs via Google Docs. So I consulting the dean of WPMU, The Right Reverend Jim Groom, and he made it look so easy. Yet, I failed. Feeling stupid I started drinking looked at the differences in our set up. I began to worry it was because I wasn’t using dynamic subdomains. I reached such a depth of despondency that I actually read one of the error messages from Google itself.

It said “Hey Dummy, you haven’t turned on XML-RPC publishing for that blog. Why don’t you go turn it on?” I did and everything now works. There’s a video on how to do that below in case it helps.

pub2wpmu

Google Forms Meets the Spaghetti Syndication Monster

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Or – how I do things since I can’t program – but isn’t the first title much more fun?1

First off, thanks to Jim Groom for letting me bounce ideas off him, giving some technical assistance and for testing services rendered. Now to business.

Here’s what I wanted- a web accessible form that would display the data as it rolled in right under the submission form. Just like comments for a post but we wanted multiple questions2 and we wanted to be able to divide the responses. So that, in and of itself, is pretty narrow and stupid but what this can do in the end is pretty cool and can have widespread power. Using Google forms and the selective publishing option you can embed all sorts of user inputted data w/o having a clue how to program- and I think that’s pretty neat.

Obligatory Warning for WPMU users (WP single user should just work)- Some of the stuff I’m going to tell you to do is not a good idea if you’ve got other authors on your WPMU installation that you don’t trust. If it’s just you and people who won’t be doing crazy stuff then proceed under your own recognizance.

To make this work in WordPress MU3 you’re going to need to install one plugin - Unfiltered-mu. This basically lets you put in the iframe embed codes w/o WPMU stripping it out as unsafe4.

So once you’ve done that, you can get down to business.

Embedding the form part is easy. Just log into google docs and select New>Form.
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Once you’ve got it set up the way you want – save it. Then go to More Actions>Embed.

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You’ll get a pop box with the iFrame code. Copy it. Go to your blog post or page (make sure you’re in HTML view) and paste it in.
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Once it’s embedded you’ll see something like what’s below- and that is real. Go ahead put something in there and hit submit.

So that’s going to allow people to enter information. Now we need to take what they write and put it other places. Keep in mind you could have multiple questions of multiple types and display different chunks in as many different places as you’d like. Unfortunately, you can’t make multiple forms for one spreadsheet. That’d be awfully convenient at times.

Initially I was using the spreadsheet’s RSS feed to pipe the results back in. That’ll certainly work and you can use the embedrss plugin to make things easy5. In the end, I didn’t go this route but might in the future. With the RSS feed I think you could control the look a lot better and decide how much recent data to show.

In the end I used the selective publishing options that Google SS has. I hadn’t messed with this before so I was surprised how flexible things turned out to be.

Step one – Go to the spreadsheet that was auto created when you made the form. Then publish the spreadsheet as a web page.
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Make sure you click Automatically republish if you want it to update (also note that if the Republish button is yellow you need to press it to make your changes go into effect).
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Once you’ve got that set up. Click on More Publishing Options. You’ll then put in the following info. Choose – HTML to embed in a web page. You can then decide which cells to show. It’s just like Excel here. I only have one question and it’s in column B so I chose B1:B55 but you could do things like B1:D55 or whatever. This is really handy for breaking your data up and showing different pieces in different places.
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Now that you’ve got that set up the way you want- hit Generate URL AND cut and paste the HTML it made for you. Then paste it where you’d like your data to show up. I pasted the result below here. Notice too that the changes in formatting I made to the spreadsheet (the blue background) carried over to the embed. It seems like you have to republish to make that take effect6. Meanwhile, the data from the form should pipe right in every five minutes or so.

So you can use this in lots of fun ways with the added benefit that the info is in a spreadsheet that you can use in lots of other ways.

The information you enter in the form should show up here in a few minutes.

As additional background, I got Jim involved in this originally when I trying to use Cformsii (which is awesome by the way) and its RSS feed to do this (which is a really cool feature). I stopped using it because the feed for new entries was only working globally, that is for all forms, and not per form which is what I wanted. The feed also seems to fail in Google reader but I’m not sure why that is b/c it validates… Things seemed erratic to me but there could be lots of variables causing that. The upside of using Cforms would be increased control over the form and its look. You would have to figure out how to format the subsequent feed via CSS though – which is both good and bad in my opinion.

1 I freely admit that this may be seen as a stupid and useless thing to do (esp. by people who can write any sort of php.) I still see it as interesting if only for the fact that it shows different ways to make the information both portable, dynamic and embeddable.

2 To help make sure people actually addressed each aspect of the questions. If you give three questions in a post and ask people to answer in the comments you tend to get 1.4 questions answered rather than the 3 you wanted.

3 See Patrick, I am doing better.

4 The Rev. passed this on to me when I was cursing a few other plugins for not really allowing iframes to embed despite their claims to the contrary.

5 Thanks to Jim for that one.

6 It could happen automatically but I never waited long enough to see.