May 24, 2010
I really like the creative way David Lee King‘s library looked at publishing their online annual report.
What could have been a boring link to a pdf document ended up being a pop-up interactive book – it still gives you all the fact you need, but in a really creative way.
Here’s the link to the full annual report.
May 21, 2010
Over at Free Technology for Teachers I stumbled upon the InfoGraphic below illustrating which generations (GenY, GenX, Baby Boomers, Silents) use social media most.
(Click on the image to enlarge or go to this link).
What I found interesting is the last comment made in the post:
This infographic confirms what many of us already know, kids are creating and consuming content online at a higher rate than their teachers and parents.
I found it interesting because at Tuesday’s conference Arthur Goldstuck, CEO of WorldWideWorx research, talked about what his company is calling the Digital Participation Curve.
The Digital Participation Curve argues that it takes people (on average) 5 years to get comfortable enough with internet technologies to start contributing content – whether it be on blogs, fb, social media sites etc.
So by this logic, the younger generation should be the ones to contribute more as they’ve had more constant experience with these technologies.
March 10, 2010
- Traditional sources of book discovery continue to be important for ebooks as well. Librarians find and learn about ebooks from book vendors and by inclusion in content bundles. They believe that users discover ebooks through the library catalog and through Internet search engines.
- Participants indicated that users prefer ebooks in PDF format, but as one participant stated, format preference will change as technology changes.
- Digital rights management is the single most important factor that hinders ebook use for library patrons.
- Purchase with perpetual access is the most acceptable business model for ebooks, with 83% of participants indicating that this model is very acceptable. However, significant numbers of participants indicated that other very different models are also acceptable.
Survey responses indicate that librarians learn about ebooks in a variety of ways, but that actions by publishers and book vendors are very important in the process. Book vendors and inclusion in content packages were most frequently marked as very significant methods for learning about ebooks. However, these methods were also frequently marked as significant or very significant: request from patron (54), colleagues (57), reference in the research literature (56), inclusion in content package (74), book vendor (77), and publisher marketing material (68).Users discover ebooks through the library catalog and through Internet search engines
March 2, 2010
The Harvard College Library has digitized thousands of historical photographs, pamphlets, manuscripts, books, music scores, rare maps and other rare and unique materials. The vast majority of these images are freely available online for public access.
The easiest way to lose yourself in their collections is to Explore the Collections – they have various themes that you can chose from:
Of course my eye was caught by the Images of Colonialism – Africa and Asia and there are some great images from newspapers etc.
Thanks to Cheryl LaGuardia for alerting me on this.
February 26, 2010
By now you should have realised that I love visualisations and the Information is Beautiful blog – I find David’s visualisations beautiful and interesting. And his newest one does not disappoint it’s a generative data-visualisation of all the scientific evidence for popular health supplements by David McCandless and Andy Perkins.
They’ve made both an interactive and a static version – below is the static version, but do check out the interactive one.
February 25, 2010
Free posters? Jup, the UN Environment Programme has a series of free posters you can download (in PDF) compiled from the UNEP’s Geo Data Portal
The full-colour posters are divided into four main groups:
The Basic Facts posters contain 9 posters covering: electricity consumption; ecosystem management; hazardous waste management; global environment treaties; forest management; carbon dioxide emissions; fisheries; waste management and recycling and electricity production
The InfoGraphics posters contain 13 posters covering: global environmental indicators; recycling rates of OECD countries; global CO2 emissions and wealth; total CO2 emissions; total final energy consumption; marine fish catch; global total and capita CO2 emissions; energy supplies and FCS forests.
The ISO Code posters contain 9 posters covering: global CO2 emissions; global water footprints; global ecological footprint; world heritage sites and energy supply per $1000 GDP (PPP)
The Bubble Chart posters contain 3 posters covering: CO2 emissions and wealth
February 19, 2010
This a great video on Augmented Reality from the recent Ted2010 conference.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.
In this talk he demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. It’s brilliant!
February 10, 2010
The 2010 TED conference starts today in Long Beach and Palm Springs, CA and the theme for this year is: What the World Needs Now … come on sing it with me “is love, sweet love”:)
The conference covers various themes in the four days and honestly if you see the line-up and speakers for the themes you’ll wish you could be there (all talks will be up loaded to the TEDTalk blog)
TED really is an amazing organisation and website and the quality and variety of the talks are staggering – do check it out.
February 9, 2010
Because of her newest post: 25 places to find instructional videos which does just that – gives you 25 top-notch places to get instructional videos.
Here is her list:
- 5min Life Videopedia – instructional and how-to videos
- Academic Earth – Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars
- blip.tv – next generation TV network
- Google Video – videos on all topics
- Graspr – The instructional video network
- Howcast – How-to videos
- iCue – A fun, innovative, learning environment built around video from the NBC News Archives
- Instructables – Make, HowTo and DIY
- iTunes U - Faculty are using iTunes U to distribute digital lessons to their students, e.g Stangord, Trinity College Dublin, etc.
- John Locker – Documentaries and educational videos
- MindBites – Video instructional marketplace and publishing platform (Some free)
- MonkeySee – HowTo videos
- neoK12 – free educational videos and lessons for K-12 school kids
- Research Channel – 3,500 video titles available
- SchoolTube – provides students and educators with a safe, world class, video sharing webiste
- Sparkeo – a flexible video platform
- SuTree – learn virtually everything by watching how to videos from all over the web.
- TeacherTube – educational videos
- TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) – a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.
- TV Lesson – How to videos
- Ustream – watch live broadcasts, explore networks ranging from music, talk shows, sports and politics and/or review our past broadcasts.
- Video Jug – Life explained. On film.
- Vimeo – a thriving community of people who love to make and share videos
- YouTube – videos on everything under the sun
- YouTube EDU – aggregates all the videos from more than 100 institutions of higher education around the US.
If you want to see some more cool links, go to Jane’s 101+ Free Websites to find out about Anything and Everything
February 9, 2010
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could visualize social bookmarking tags instead of viewing them in their current flat state?
Well, Joris Klerkx and Erik Duval felt so and so they designed a system that “attempts to visualize these structures, so that end users can explore the social bookmarks in a playful, efficient and flexible way.”
I tried it and it really is a fun way to see what’s going on in the del.icio.us system. To download the program click here, to read their paper click here.
(Thanks to visualcomplexity.com for posting this originally)
