More broadly, I’ve found myself in the strange position of visiting old houses and neighborhoods in Google Earth, and on the web. I stroll down Motomachi and note a new Gap–they show up everywhere these days. As do, it seems, the Street View vans. It made sense that they would start with the large cities, but I somehow didn’t expect them to start covering my old neighborhood in Buffalo (ah, so there’s the neighbor’s new playhouse–they told us about that) or my Mom’s place in California that I’ve never visited, but sits out in a spot that is pretty remote. What happens when the Google car covers the globe? Well, they turn around and do it again, of course. That way we can also roll the clock back.

Google Earth already integrates some photos, those marked on Panoramio, but wouldn’t it be nice to integrate video from YouTube, or images from Picasa (or heck, be more open and include Flickr and Revver). As more of our multimedia becomes time stamped and geotagged, I think we can look forward to records that come close to approximating what was happening at a given time or place. Now, of course, if you are out in the middle of nowhere, the nearest tagged photo may be beyond the horizon and five years old. But in Times Square, you can see photos from last week. Is it that hard to believe that, as more and more phones and cameras include instant uploading, that images from an hour ago, or from five minutes ago, are that far off?

This isn’t some huge leap in technology, this is just charting the current trajectory. What happens when you want to know where your friend is standing and can pull up five views of 82nd and Broadway from your mobile?

There will be a public wiki built up around some of the projects being done at QUT and elsewhere in Australia surrounding mobile learning. There were a lot of interesting little ideas, some of them seemingly cultural. The idea, for example, that someone would drive by the campus to grab something off the wireless network is absolutely foreign to me. While we may not have the broadband penetration common in some places, I get the impression most have as good, or better, connections at home these days than they do on campus.

Richard Smith related an experience of unintended mobile-enhanced public backchannelling (MEPB). He runs a piece of software called BluePhoneElite that communicates the incoming text messages from his mobile to his laptop. Students in one of his classes stumbled across his phone (I guess), and started messaging it. As people realized that this showed up on the overhead projector, they started using it to ask questions and the like. Eventually, he used to to do things like ask questions of the class, and they would text in short responses. With some manipulation, he was able to tally up responses, etc.

The BluePhoneElite folks have been promising scripting hooks for newer versions of their software. With that, you could bypass the whole clicker infrastructure that seems to be seeping onto campuses lately, and just have students use their mobiles.

In any case, I’ll be experimenting a bit with this. The trick is that most people still don’t use text messaging, and so it may be a bit of hurdle to get folks to try. Would have been fun with a big class though.

As I said, I took decent notes, but they are gone. I enjoyed the session, though I think I would have liked a bit more structured look at what people are doing–from a technical perspective–and case studies of what worked and didn’t. While I appreciated the broader focus on active learning, I suspect that those interested in a workshop like this already lean pretty heavily in that direction.

* Somewhere in Japan (can’t read where)
* Seal TV, in case you wanted to watch people in Atlanta selling seals (?!)
* Puppies at the WanWan house (i.e., Woof-woof house).
* Labled as RLE Front Door, I have to assume it is a night-time view of this
* A dark something in Cortland, NY
* A courtyard in Houston
* Twinkly lights in South Wenatchee, Washington
* More blinkenlights at Creative Solutions in NE Wisconsin
* a harbor somewhere in Japan?
* Maybe a school, maybe in Sendai?
* The Awaji “Flower Galleries”
* Central Blavand (in Denmark)
* Fairwind Farms, Maryland
* Somewhere on the coast of Japan — The signs are almost readable.

Would make a fun game, though, yes? Two teams get each get a set of random working cameras, and the one that can most effectively track down the locations wins?