Here are some notes from this morning’s session at the NITLE Summit conference in San Francisco. The topic is web based mapping and geographic tools.

News flash from this session: Google Earth is about to put out infra-red images of the US.

What is “Webmapping” ? The progression from static maps to animated, real time, interactive, collaborative maps and the virtual globe.

• Biomapping.net maps sensors on people which track physiological response to their emotional state as they move through a geographical space
• Gapminder allows creation and sharing of complex geo-data vizualizations
• MapFrappe let’s you draw on Google Maps
• GMDir is a directory to many such Google Maps based mashups

Thanks for info to Vidya Ananthanaryanan of Trinity University

Here are some excellent projects other schools presented in sessions this morning at the NITLE Summit in San Francisco, as provided by NITLE friends via Twitter.

• Lewis and Clark College Ceramic Art Project using Flickr
• Sarah Lawrence College Library uses del.icio.us tagging as a reference service to faculty and students
• The Viper Project “A Cyber-Enabled Community of Practice for Improving Inorganic Chemical Education” sponsored by DePauw, Reed and other colleges

Now online at the Nobel Prize web site is a series of Educational Games, designed for younger children, but still fascinating as an example of how basic concepts in science, economics, and literature can be easily imparted by using a visual narrative and a directed simulation to teach interactively.

I used it to make some plastics with the help of a talking rubber duck and learned about monomers, polymers, thermosets, and why nylon stockings run so easily. You can also help stop nuclear arms proliferation and join a tribe on The Lord of Flies.

There are other games which academics have helped to design that accurately reflect scholarship. Professor Katherine Smith of the History Department recommends the Museum of London’s online game The Medieval Game of Life, which helps students get a historically accurate appreciation for the range of life and career choices available in those times.

There are signs that both the study and use of computer simulations and gaming are entering the academic mainstream, including a number of academic journals on the topic. And computer gamers are beginning to return the favor.

The University’s own Professor Andrew Nierman’s Java Instructional Gaming Project is one of these efforts, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Just found a fascinating new product called Prologue, which is part team project site, and part Twitter-like micro information site. It is made by the creators of Wordpress.com, and based somewhat on the WordPress model. (A first review is on ZDNet.)

Everything in it is taggable and RSS enabled, too.

Sounds like this would be an interesting tool for group and class projects that are highly interactive and require lots of interaction outside of class.

We all know how dull Blackboard discussion boards are: simply assigning them as tasks doesn’t make the quality of discourse much better.

Why not take a fresh approach with a group Twitter-like tool? Here’s a Prologue demo. Hope it is available soon.

Get a Mac from Santa? Switching from Windows? Here are some really useful links that have helped me to make the transition when I got a Mac laptop two months ago.

Lifehacker’s Guide for switching to a Mac is a fantastic guide for switching from Windows to Mac, with some great user comments and tips from people who have switched. Also useful is their guide to how to tweak an out of the box Mac for usability.

And of course, you will want to add some goodies! Some top downloads guides:

• Lifehacker Top 20 Mac apps
• Best Mac Software.org
• Or go whole hog at download.com

In general, I find Lifehacker to be a really useful and reliable site; one of my top feeds of all time.