Old NYC

Old NYC maps historical photographs across, well, NYC.

Climate Spirals and Climate Lines

Climate Spirals have gotten popular, so here is a nice comparison showing the same data as spiral charts and line charts. More about this here.

Plate Tectonics: 240 Myr - Today

Three more versions: interactive, scientific paper, and NYT article.

MapXtract - beta

MapXtract - beta is pretty useless, but fun!

Small-Multiples / Sparklines Map of the USA

More details at A Field Guide to Red and Blue America and Grid map shows shifting states.

WorldClim

WorldClim is pretty useful: simple grids of current, future, and past climate data in ready-to-use GIS data formats. Version 1.4 is the current one, but Version 2 is already available for preview.

The NMC (New Media Consortium) Horizon Report 2016 Higher Education Edition is out and identifies six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in ed-tech that are relevant for higher education.

Now, it is important to recognize the sources here: this report is a collaboration between the NMC and EDUCAUSE which are both in-essence lobbying groups promoting the use of ed-tech in teaching and learning. (Related: would this pass the CRAP test?)

Still, these type of reports can be used as a framework to ask: which of these topics are we addressing or discussing @ Westfield State? Below is the table of contents from the report (via Laura Guertin @ GeoEd Trek):

Key Trends Accelerating Technology Adoption in Higher Education

Long-Term Impact Trends (5+ Years)
Advancing Cultures of Innovation
Rethinking How Institutions Work

Mid-Term Impact Trends (3-5 Years)
Redesigning Learning Spaces
Shift to Deeper Learning Approaches

Short-Term Impact Trends (1-2 Years)
Growing Focus on Measuring Learning
Increasing Use of Blended Learning Designs

Significant Challenges Impeding Technology Adoption in Higher Education

Solvable Challenges
Blending Formal and Informal Learning
Improving Digital Literacy

Difficult Challenges
Competing Models of Education
Personalizing Learning

Wicked Challenges
Balancing Our Connected and Unconnected Lives
Keeping Education Relevant

Important Developments in Educational Technology for Higher Education

Time-to-Adoption Horizon (1 Year or less)
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
Learning Analytics and Adaptive Learning

Time-to-Adoption Horizon (2-3 Years)
Augmented and Virtual Reality
Makerspaces

Time-to-Adoption Horizon (4-5 Years)
Affective Computing
Robotics

http://hackeducation.com/2015/12/01/trends

Mercator Projection Examples

Nothing too original, but nice examples of how our view of the world is distorted by the Mercator projection. My favorite:

WRI Water Stress and Risk Maps

This is almost too much: a Web GIS with interactive dashboards showing global water risk indicators. All data are available for download and further analysis: very cool! Some additional information about the maps and data are here.

• Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas (WRI)
• The Water Risk Filter (WWF)

The Illusion of Truth = Cognitive Ease

This is very good!

June 2016

More here: National Overview - June 2016

Average Student, Average Day

Details here: Big Debt, Little Study: What Taxpayers Should Know About College Students’ Time Use (consider the source!)

HERE Reality Lens

HERE Reality Lens makes total sense: why just drive around a car to take 360 degree still images when you can also add a LiDAR system / laser ranger finder to generate an instant 3D model = the first step towards Augmented Reality. Read more about it here or try the app for ArcGIS.

http://geoawesomeness.com/here-reality-lens/

Pivot Tables in MS Excel & Google Sheets

Pivot tables (and cross tabulation) in MS Excel are great for exploring and analyzing data, but a) people seemed to be scared of them and thus b) nobody uses them.

A great place to start is the nice tutorial Saving Time And Energy With Pivot Tables by Anne K. Emery (also available via Learn Excel: An In-Depth, Thorough Tutorial (With GIFs) in the Intermediate and Advanced Techniques section).

Also great: How to get data in the right format with pivot tables. This tutorial shows you how to use pivot tables to reformat tables from 'long' to 'wide' - see the animated GIF below.

Time To Choose

Time to Choose is the latest climate change documentary. I don't know anything about it, but here's the announcement / promotion from Popular Science.

The FOSS4G Academic Curriculum

Well, why not? The FOSS4G Academic Curriculum and associated open-source tools are great, but have one major flaw: the world is dominated by Esri products and therefore any responsible academic program has to include them in an appropriate way.

Food Insecurity and Climate Change

Food Insecurity and Climate Change is a well-designed interactive map / modeling scenario to visualize vulnerability to food insecurity around the world based on different emission scenarios, adaption measures, and time horizons.

They provide a nice tutorial, video animation, and you can save and download your maps (see example below).

Rap Guide to Climate Chaos

Rap Guide to Climate Chaos – Scene Selection from info@babasword.com on Vimeo.

The ArcGIS Book

Esri's The ArcGIS Book is a great and free tutorial in 10 chapters - available online and as a PDF document for download.

Now Esri Press came-out with the Instructional Guide for The ArcGIS Book and that makes sense. What does not make sense is to charge $59.99 for it! Come-on Esri: it makes no sense to give-away the tutorial for free and then charge a hefty amount when you want to use it effectively for teaching and learning.

The Smithsonian Learning Lab

The Smithsonian Learning Lab looks like an excellent resource to gain entry into the vast collection of, well, the Smithsonian. They provide a well-written Help, Getting Started, and For Teachers section.

Compare Climates

Here for two stations: pick them and see how they differ.

Annual Temperature Cycle for the USA

This is simple and elegant and useful for exploring these patterns across time and space: Average maximum temperature from 1979 to 2011

Null = 0 = Nothing?

Animated Weather Maps

So, these are NOT new, in-fact I compiled a bunch of them about one year ago at Currents in the Air, Ocean, and Lakes, but here we go:

• It all started with the US wind map by the folks at HINT.FM.
• Then we got earth and that is still one of the best: different atmospheric levels, 2D/3D, and different projections.
• Windyty is all that, but also includes the forecast models.
• VENTUSky is more of the same (albeit in 2D), but includes some additional variables.
• MeteoEarth, finally, seems to be similar to VENTUSky, but in 3D.

Data Journalism with R

Who will win the presidency?

Who will win the presidency? by FiveThirtyEight is about as real-time as it gets...

Five Years of Drought

Five Years of Drought is a nice mapping example and tutorial by John Nelson using data from the US Drought Monitor. Or, play around with the already processed data.

Snow TARTES

For geeks only: Snow TARTES is an online snow albedo computation using Python.

NASA’s Global Tour of Precipitation

Virtual / Augmented Reality in Education

Sure, both Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are pretty hip topics these days in education...especially in Higher Education with the obvious goal to make online learning more 'realistic' and thus appealing to a greater number of potential 'students' (aka customers). Here are some useful sources related to VR and AR:

• Kathy Schrock has a nice compilation and discussion of tools and resources at Virtual Reality in the Classroom and at Augmented and Virtual Reality in the Classroom.
• Audry Watters offers a much more critical view and history at (Marketing) Virtual Reality in Education: A History.
• Still - let's be honest: VR is cool and The Garden as a Story Map and in Virtual Reality is a great example.
• Wearables in Education looks at some of the current tools available.

Finally, Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality for STEM Labs and teaching (STEM) labs online - that's for many the 'Holy Grail' of online education = finding a way to outsource these resource-intensive science labs for non-science majors that - let's be real - nobody actually cares about.

Here's the future when AR 'blends' with real reality.

HYPER-REALITY from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.