Maps Projects

Because I have been promoting the XO Map Activity and olpcMAP.net, I thought it'd be good to write about a couple of other map projects.



I'm running a course on Online Maps with OpenLayers. The idea behind OpenLayers is that you have many sources of maps, such as ESRI, Google, and Ushahidi, and you want one open system to combine them. That makes it a good fit for Mozilla's School of Webcraft: a new initiative for techies to teach the open web and publish helpful guides for self-learners. Out of the 20 Webcraft courses, this one stands out as one about goals and projects rather than code.

Why am I doing this? Well, maps were the first webpages I wrote on my own. It lets you make something visual and powerful even if you're just a newbie. We'll get some cool projects and true believers out of this course, I'm sure of it.



I'm also making maps for RAIN, an environmental group keeping tabs on everything water-related (except rain, ironically). The maps get used by the state's environmental protection office and the city of Pittsburgh. The map itself isn't that special, but it turns their numbers into a live picture of the environment. When I worked on a water research project, it was clear that we need more of these, to take good public data and match it with good visuals. Plus, there's something futuristic about seeing this from hundreds of miles away:

OLPC Activity Analytics

One of the big take-aways from the OLPC Summit was: let's share more data! We want to know how often students use activities, when they play with them, and how much time they spend.

My SugarLabs GMap Activity takes reports every 3 minutes. I use it to see if users understand the UI for using zoom and adding markers. It's also fun to see if students are checking out the Taj Mahal or the World Cup stadiums in South Africa.

I am now ready to release 904 usage reports (map center, zoom, and marker locations) from 456 activity launches, over a period of ten days - for education, technology, or research purposes. Almost all of this data is from Uruguay; a few reports are from Paraguay and Argentina.

The data contains no student-written text, contact information, nor identifiers. For additional privacy, I am limiting the release to members of the education and research communities -- and these people must agree to a privacy and data usage statement.

Write an explanation of how you'd work with this data, then e-mail it to ndoiron AT cmu.edu

Some news

White House blog: Apps4Africa offers promising technology for education and economic development

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/07/29/apps4-africa-state-department-driving-collaboration-through-competition