Image - CC from Flickr

Not a hugely inspiring piece of ICT but this data poster has come from New Scientist via Digg. It’s worth a moment of your time.

Things that struck me were the growth in deaths from HIV/AIDS and the relationship between arms spending and number of conflicts among other things.

Thought it might make a nice bit of work in Humanities – ask the group the question at the top of the page to generate a bit of discussion and then give them the data and have a debate to decide whether it’s true or not.

It could be the starting point for a range of ICT activities. e.g. the students creating media resources to back up their conclusions or maybe using your VLE to host an online discussion out of class time.

In the meantime check out their article on “13 more things that don’t make sense“.

Image – venetia joubert sarah oosterveld on Flickr

This is significant. I sucked at Physics.

Came to this by a roundabout route. Basically, OE Cake is a physics simulator for demonstrating the properties of different materials. Draw on the different materials and watch the fun unfold.

It looks great on a whiteboard.

It requires a download and my desktop machine struggles to play it although my dual-core laptop seems to handle it OK. The more memory and processor the better as lots of different elements make it run slowly.

Click here. (Scroll down and click on the Rapidshare link)

Image – icomei on Flickr

Image Credit - Forklift on Flickr

The Guardian’s Digital World blog has highlighted the outbreak of map mash-ups tracing the spread of the H1N1 virus currently centred on Mexico. The Guardian have their own site with the raw data available (their Data Store is an interesting development in itself) but also there are a load of others out there (see Google Maps Mania for a good selection).

Could this be the fist global pandemic to have every single case  mapped and online for us all to see within hours?

It obviously makes for a useful science and geography resource. There’s been quite a lot of discussion about using Twitter to follow developments in significant events and this is similar if a little less immediate.

I remember following natural disasters when doing geography at school. The Kobe Hanshin earthquake in 1995 sticks in my mind (mainly as my bro is about to emigrate to Osaka for 4 years and it’s just across the bay from there) but it was always filtered through the traditional journalistic media or later through text books.

Now we have the opportunity to watch events unfold in near enough real-time which is amazing but brings with it a couple of issues:

1) Educationally, these map mash-ups, Twitter feeds etc are the domain of the great unwashed (I count myself in that) so everything that appears has to be viewed critically. We’re used to encouraging students to view the press critically but it’s easier to do with a media institution like Fox News (where you can establish a political/commercial bias) than with a myriad micro-blog entries. It requires a different sort of skill to strip out the subjectivity with stuff on the web as you don’t know where people are starting from.

2) Socially, with all this extra info available to us about the spread of a disease are we going to be better placed to counter it or worse off. Control of information and the associated emotional reactions in society are an important element in disease control. What happens to human behaviour when this info is in the public domain.

I’m not saying that information should be censored. There be dragons! It’s just that the impact on behvaiour is going to be just as interesting as the technological developments themselves.

And before I get carried away with all this sociological guff, I have to keep reminding myself that people are actually dying!

Go here to see their website and Youtube channel…if you can!

But of course, Youtube is probably banned in your school. Certainly our broadband supplier, Yorkshire and Humber Grid for Learning helpfully “protects” children by banning it.

Careful now! Students might learn something!

Couldn’t Youtube be a learning resource, rather than a classroom liability? Teachers could be posting all sorts of stuff on their to help with learning and revision and it’s on students’ home ground as it were.

What would we actually be risking by allowing Youtube into the classroom that isn’t outweighed by the pedagogical benefits?

Amazing Grades have a series of podcasts done on a range of topics and you can preview them here.

Is it too much to expect that if you get Harry Hill to do a podcast on Galen that it might be funny? I’m not being trivial here. I was quite excited about listening to this podcast and I imagine that a lot of kids would be grabbed by the possibility, too. How many would switch off and do something else after 2 minutes of listening to Harry reading off a dry, uninspiring script?

Here’s a tip: If you’re getting into podcasting materials for your students think about the quality of the writing. Just sticking you talking onto an MP3 in the hope that it will find its way onto their iPods might be a waste of time.

Don’t be afraid to be funny, controversial even a little dramatic. A little cheese sometimes goes a long way.