Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Obama's inauguration - one second in 1000 photosynthed photos

The very moment Obama was inaugurated over 1000 images were captured and stitched together to create a navigable, zoomable, flyover-able capture of that second. Microsoft's Photosynth put to practice so we can all say we were there on the CNN site.

All my movements in one page

It's as if I owned one-and-a-half hummers, apparently, my travel for one year. This poster chart for a year of travel highlights is lovely touch from the lads at Dopplr. Click the image to view the full version.

Internet Memes - the timelines

So you've done your YouTube anthropology class, you now need to spend a bit of time brushing up on history's internet memes with these delightful, entertaining and "was it really that long ago?" moments. A nice way to start rounding off the year...

The fascists' names are leaked... crowdsourcing finds its place

Earlier this week the UK's very own "Nationalist Party", the BNP, had the misfortune to leak its member list, showing the names and addresses of racists, fascists and those who "don't want that kind of person taking our jobs". It's been citizen-created mashups of this data that have made the news.

To republish the list would be illegal, so newspapers such as the Guardian printed the numerical stats on line-art maps. Far from breaking the law, it was crowdsourcing that came up with a better solution, both allowing us to see how many BNP-ers are on our doorstep without revealing their names and exact locations. Cue the anonymous, but powerful, BNP member Google Heatmap, which has since allowed our Government ministers to realise the pockets where local politics lets people down.

These are some of the subversive uses of technology that keep an eye on money and power that we are keen to support further through 4iP. We've got a few on the boil, so keep your eyes peeled for them.

Thanks to Stuart on the 38minutes blog for highlighting it.

World War One in colour

It's a week late, perhaps, for some topical teaching but astounding nevertheless. Der Spiegel has published several collections of old colour photos, but this set of WW1 trench warfare in colour just reminds us that the world wasn't played out in black and white before the 50s.

Why would you use words on the screen when they do just fine in your mouth?

David Jakes and Dean Shareski show us that it's not just what you say, but how you say it. It's 21 years since PowerPoint was invented, 21 years since we've had to relearn how we communicate, to get away from the bullet-point death into which many of us were induced throughout the nineties and right up to the current day.

1. Teach them biology
When we experience a presentation we experience it in two ways - through the auditory nerves (ears) and the optical nerves (eyes). The brain is geared up to seeing above all else: 30% of the cortex is devoted to visual processing, only 8% for touch and 3% for hearing. So, biology tells us that our presentations must be, above all, visual.

2. Teach them to make it visual
PowerPoint doesn't kill presentations. Bullet points do. We need to move our students away from text-based presentations. The text is in what we say.

"Why would you use words on the screen when they do just fine in your mouth?" Seth Godin.

It's not about killing all the words in a presentation, but if you remove most of them then the presenter has to internalise the content. Great for learners. But great for listeners, too. Our cognitive load will tend to move into overload if we have too much going on through the screen as we listen to the words from the presenter.

3. Teach them how to find images
Flickr is great for finding images, but Flickrstorm is another alternative, which makes it easier to search within the creative commons images contained on Flickr, add them to your tray of photos, and download all of them at once, providing you simultaneously with the original URL of each picture. iStockphoto is a pay-for site but gives an exceptional quality of image. The best part for presentations, is that images can be searched for with white space in particular areas. Tell the advanced search that you want to have images with whitespace in the top left corner, so that your text there can be legible, and it will return images that suit your means perfectly.

4 Tell them how to respect Creative Commons
Creative Commons is the licence that tells people how they can use your content in their own sites or project, legally. There are several types of licence which are important to understand. Not everyone does, so it needs taught, not caught.

5. Teach them design
Design is often seen as the thing that we get around to eventually, "if there's enough time to get to it". Design is key. It's the first thing we need to consider. It changes the way we develop our original idea so fundamentally, we're best to approach things from a design perspective from the outset.

The first thing we need to do is strip away the template that came with the presentation package. We also need to strip away anything that's minor, that we can simply add in passing. Then, can we reduce what's left to once sentence, with an image that speaks 1000 words telling us everything we need to know, along with the oral presentation that we're giving.

6. Teach them to sell
In libraries we see children copy and paste chunks of text, learning nothing about that particular topic. Children need to learn how to craft and sell a message. Communication is the transfer of emotion (another Godin-ism).

7. Colour and font choice matters
Fire trucks are becoming yellow - it's the most noticeable colour in our spectrum. Green signifies renewal for most cultures. Red signifies alertness or anger in most cultures. Americans do indeed seem to have a preference for the colour blue, deep blue signifying trust. Combining national preference with the most flashy colour leads Blockbusters and Goodyear to the logos they have.

"Comic sans is illegal in 34 States," says Jakes. Serif fonts help you move from one word to the next, great for when you're reading. But in presentations you don't want your audience to be reading - you want them to be listening to you. Therefore, in presentations we need to use Sans Serif fonts. With American audiences, avoid the use of Helvetica - it's used by the Inland Revenue Service.

8. Teach them to incorporate multimedia
Everything on the web these days, if it's worth watching, has the word <EMBED> next to it. But if YouTube or Google Video is blocked in your school district then students need to learn how to use Vixy or ZamZar to convert online video at home to a hard file they can import into their presentation.

9. Teach them some PowerPoint secrets
Pressing the button B makes the PowerPoint go blank. W makes the screen go white. Typing the number of a slide will take you to a slide, even if it's a hidden slide that we didn't see in the main presentation.

10. Teach them to share
Dan Roam's new book is the quickest read (it took me a Sunday afternoon) but one of the most valuable if you present.
Pic: Presentation Skills from RXAphotography.com

Ben Saunders' Purple Haze a real inspiration to young people

In my final few hours in the tent, waiting for the helicopter and staring into the abyss of self-pity, I had a wonderfully apt text message on my satphone from a dear friend, Oli Barrett. “Stories about journeys”, he wrote, “are always better than ones about arrivals.” So this, then, is a story about a journey but not an arrival. At least not where I expected to end up, anway.

Ben Saunders came up against it in his high-speed attempt to cross to the North Pole. His journey, though, has not been in vain, not from his perspective of having tried to do something no-one had done quite as quickly yet, and not from the perspective of some students who picked up his trail after reading about the race against the clock on this blog.

Lorraine Leo, who I bumped into on a cruise around Boston Harbour last year, has been using real-life adventurers in her classroom for years, namely Skipper Rich Wilson, the solo global sailor. Having left a comment on Ben's blog, and emailed several others from students, each with their own inspired takeaway, Ben responded within ten minutes to them, with his own personal message of thanks.

The thing is, from both perspectives - Ben's, alone somewhere on the ice, and the students, inspired and amazed by this one man's nerve - the exchange was a winner. And nothing like this could have happened without the whole combination of technologies bringing text (the blog), photography (Flickr) and video.

Meet my friend Noel: global explorer and NYC cabbie

When you've spent nearly a year traveling the world, to every continent, who wouldn't want to be a NYC cab driver?

Noel "noneck" Hidalgo is a bit of an enigma, and I was lucky enough to work with him earlier this year in the preparation for the LIFT08 Open Stage. At that point he had just come back from his On The Luck Of Seven project:

for seven months, he will traverse the seven continents, dive into the seven oceans, and attempt to visit the seven ancient wonders of the world.

He used a variety of social media to capture his adventures: video and audio podcasts, and amazing Flickr photo feed, a wiki to coordinate his travels, couchsurfing to coordinate his bed/sofa/floor arrangements, Dopplr to let his friends know he was coming, Twitter to keep his news up-to-date, and Facebook to pull it all together.

Well, he's at it again, life-blogging, filming and Flickring his weird and wonderful life as a newbie New York cab driver, from shaving off his fine mane of hair for the job, learning the ropes and taking the test, the hidden costs, and heading out for his first day in his first cab. You can listen to him interviewed on NPR's Bryant Park, too.

For me, it's a great example of the interest that's in everyone's daily lives, when you look carefully enough. Would your students know how to write interestingly about what might be considered 'mundane'? And why do companies still persist in telling me that most of their business is not 'of interest' to customers, and therefore not for blogging/filming/recording, when most people would have said that a taxi driver's life wasn't of interest to them when they were trying to get from A-Z?

Noel's just finished his first week on the job and is discovering just how much cabbies make - about $10 per hour. He's certainly changed my tipping patterns:

now the road journey begins. over the next few months, i will continue to push myself to do things i've never done - see things i would never dream - fulfill the promise made to family and friends from around the world - and figure out a way to worship the all mighty dollar in ways only a hard working capitalist can. "welcome to my cab. where would you like to go?"

Well, Noel, if you're able to pick me up from JFK on July 6th for the Empire, I'll bring the Leica... ;-)

Viewfinder links Google Earth and Flickr pictures

Google Earth is great, but doesn't give the best feel for a place. Flickr pictures are great, but it's hard to place them in geographical context beyond a pink dot on a map. The gang at Viewfinder are linking the two systems together in one of the most exciting mashups I've ever seen, allowing you to see Flickr pictures in location, tilted to just the right angle, offering a snapshot within a snapshot. The photos could also be historical, allowing you to flick back in time in that location.

Take a look at their video, above, to see how it might work, and follow their progress as they develop something that will help more of us understand the cultural, historical, linguistic and geopolitical worlds we are living in.

Art students put to work. For real

A marketer is on the verge of publishing her first book and is agonising about her cover. Most would let the publisher - the experts in all this - take the lead. You'd trust them. If the book didn't sell it would be the cover's fault, and therefore the publisher's fault. Not Tara Hunt.

I met Tara a few years ago in Paris in a rather swanky rooftop bar, and ever since have kept an eye on what she's up to. Seeing this post on her blog made me smile, since it shows how a mixture of ambient intimacy in the form of a Twitter post, a publishing space with a large appeal and an ingenious teacher-facilitator led to a whole group of art students putting their ideas forward to Tara as legitimate potential covers for her book - click the links in this long Flickr comments section. To say she was overwhelmed would be an understatement.

What I love about this is the real brief, against a short deadline, with the slightest chance that your cover design could make it, and be displayed around the world and on Amazon.

The let down in this story? I think the publishers have gone for another design, by Cindy Li, a pro designer who also jumped to the call for action from the original Twitter message. Next time, guys, next time...