New Technology and Outdoor Learning (5 of 8): Activities with purpose - Open Street Map and Microsoft Photosynth

This is the fifth of eight posts where I discuss some of the things that I talked about at the 2010 Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor learning Regional Events.

I think that all outdoor learning should have a purpose otherwise it is just ‘outdoor’ (isn’t it?). During my presentation at the Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor Learning Regional Events I talked a lot about purpose including:

• Learning new skills and reflecting on what you have learnt
• Overcoming physical challenge and understanding progression
• Facing your fears and sharing this with others
• Collecting scientific data and publishing your results to a wide audience
• To complete a national accreditation award eg: John Muir or Duke of Edinburgh Award
• Geocashing

I also talked in detail about two other technologies that could add purpose to outdoor journeys.

These were:

1) Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Maps are created using data from portable GPS devices, aerial photography, other free sources or simply from local knowledge. Both rendered images and the vector graphics are available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Again, children gathering real data to support global collaboration projects like this provides real purpose for students work. One of the most impressive up-dates of OpenStreetMap ever was after the Hati earthquake.

Globally, after the earthquake, hundreds of people collaborated to produce a map of the island using satellite imagery that could then be used by the rescue services. Just have a look at the video below.

OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

2) Microsoft Photosynth

Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos. Its great for outdoor learning because lots of children can take a picture of a landscape or feature and then when you get back to class the software can turn it into a 3D object.

For example all of these photographs below of the view of the River Clyde....

Become a stiched 3D panorama (Silverlight plugin required):

This can be used to develop collaboration (eg: combining childrens photographs when you get back to school), the objects can also be used for reflective purposes and you can even geo-locate photosynths in Bing Maps to give real audience for students work.

Comments

[John McLear]

Good post Ollie, honestly speaking I wanted photosynth to be cool but I never really liked it much.

OSM is nice and will probably eventually get purchased and merged with the Google data, or they will feed Google Maps, as is the usual way of these things.

It may be that I'm not creative enough to appreciate the data. We feed Plings School Closure and School Holiday information to aid in creating maps of places to go and things to do, they overlay this information both on GMaps and on OSM so kids can easily find stuff to do if they are bored or if their school is closed.

I guess what I'm saying is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Maps alone are useful but maps with a desired practical application are even more useful.

I want to get from A to B isn't necessarily how we use mapping software in the 21st century.

Nor is I want to see Point A or B physically, we have to think of maps in a whole new way, thinking about ways we can layer information on and OSM allows that a lot easier/friendlier than GMaps.

[Ewan McIntosh]

The OSM example is one that I pick up on talks where I'm trying to explain how collaboration can make things happen in the real world. However, if you've ever tried to edit accurately and in a way that the community feels adds value to OSM, it's a different matter - it's bloody hard, and I've yet to see an example of where kids' efforts have stayed and/or had an impact in the same kind of way as, say, Wikipedia. If you come across any, please do share. I'm for up for trying to change that situation :-)

[Scott Hewitt]

Thanks for sharing photosynth. Free app with that functionality is great with its link to bing. You could also use QR codes to create location markers when out in the field.