Visual Cognition References

Paivio, A. (1986) Mental representations. A dual coding approach. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands. In H. Kuklick & E. Long (Eds.), Knowledge and society: Studies in the sociology of culture and past and present, Vol. 6, (pp. 1–40). Greenwich, CT: Jai.

Ullman, S. (1996). High-level vision: Object recognition and visual cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

B. S. Randhawa & W. E. Coffman (Eds.), Visual learning, thinking, and communication. New York: Academic Press.

Online Video Editing Websites

I wasn't able to find a decent video editing freeware for Windows. So I turned to online video editing websites.
I found these two online video editing websites, jumpcut and eyespot. Both pretty do the same things, although I like jumpcut's clip editing controls. Jumpcut has more robust editing features. If you record audio on the video, that's one audio track. Then you can add "background music". With jumpcut, you can fade out the video's audio. So you get a rough version of multitrack audio editing. Both have nice trim functions, and can add special effects. Jumpcut also allows you to remix someone's video. Basically you get access to their project file with timeline and republish it how you want. Imagine a being able to remix a movie with different dialogue or a different ending and then getting to publish it immediately, all in the browser.
Eyespot has a better transitions function. They also seem to have some content from professionals that you can use as well. It's not all user-generated. Definitely check these out. Free uploads, remixing other content, and sharing out to everybody. These are pretty great!
A day after I wrote this O'Reilly Radar reported on an Adobe/Photobucket online video editing site. It's not ready for review. I'll update this post once it's becomes available for use. The main driver in these sites is to create stickiness by editing, an additional feature to draw in YouTube users.

My idea now is to develop an online course using one of these video editing sites to learn how to design instructional videos.

E-Learning Portal: How to edit a page in ModX

This is the main page for which I did my work in ModX. Keeping it quite simple, you can manage many pages of content working with just the template and content pages. Because the template is the only page for which I am adding styles, I found it more convenient to keep the CSS styles embedded in the page. Poor practice I know, but convenient.
How to edit content pages:
1. To edit a page, click on a name on the left hand menu.
2. The page properties show up in the main work area.
3. Click the EDIT button, also get in the habit of selecting the Continue Editing radio button.
4. You will only be able to code in HTML, no WYSIWYG yet.
How to edit template pages:
1. Click on Resources in the tab menu on top.
2. Click on Manage Resources in the second level of the top menu bar.
3. It should now look like the above graphic. Click on EDIT.
3. Click the EDIT button, also get in the habit of selecting the Continue Editing radio button.
4. You will only be able to code in HTML, no WYSIWYG yet.

GO Inquire: How to Register a New Group

In this screen, use the drop down menus to register a new group. If 'Your School' or 'Your Name' is not available, this means that you have not registered yourself as a teacher in the system. Go to the Teacher Prototype. Currently the system is designed for elementary students, however if you need a higher grade level as a choice under 'Your Grade', then please email someone on the GO Inquire development team. Finally, those familiar with the Student Prototype know that student answers from all groups in a class are displayed. Most teachers only like to display answers that are part of the class only, not another class that they teach. So if this is the second time using the system this year with a different class, under 'Your Class' select 2 instead of 1.

Conference Presentations

On Paper Presentations
Donata Renfrow and James C. Impara's tips (pdf) provide a very helpful structure for trailblazer studies.

1. In the Introduction:
   
1. Give a teaser, where it fits with prior research;
   
2. Build a case, build logic, give background;
   
3. Give purpose and importance.
   
2. In the Body:
   
1. Give enough details on methods and procedures to establish credibility;
2. Give conclusions with supportive data;
   
3. Describe relevant literature, showing how and why your approach is new;
   
4. Mention serendipitous findings.
   
3. In the Conclusion:
   
1. Review study's conclusion;
   
2. Note limitations;
   
3. Emphasize relevance;
   
4. Consider next step.

Gunapala Edirisooriya's analysis of AERA presentations (pdf) provides a few nuggets of insight that I liked. She narrows the talk to the core components:

1. Background,
   
2. Research method,
   
3. Data analyses and interpretation,
   
4. and Conclusion.
   

Other tips. Don't waste time on justifying the research method, just explain what you did. Just provide the most important analyses that show the difference or major finding. Be professional, always provide copies of the paper. If you run out, follow up by taking down emails and actually send them as soon as possible. These are people who are interested in your work, cultivate these possible relationships.

Sam Wineburg's 10 tips (pdf) are great for distinguishing between the paper and the presentation. I especially like rules #1 and #8 . Rule #1 is your talk is not your paper. The talk is an advertisement for your paper. Hit the highlights in the 15 minutes you've been given. Tantalize the audience, interest them not bore them. Rule #8 is an academic talk is a diamond. Unlike a newspaper article in which you need to give the reader the whole news in the first section, called an inverted pyramid, you can start small, work your way up to the middle, and wrap it up with a tight summary or conclusion.

The Oceanographic Society's Scientifically Speaking (pdf) is an good overview of tips for both Papers, Posters and even non-scientific audiences. What I really like is their breakdown of visual elements like title and layout of slides. They provide visual examples and non-examples.

My notes on Poster Presentations
So what goes on the poster? For novices, just follow the traditional Science Fair Poster Board three column layout. Major sections from upper left to lower right: Abstract, Research Questions, Methods, Participants, Treatment, Data, Results, and Conclusion. My recommendation is always to emphasize any visual representations of the data, tables, graphs, photographs, concept maps. Too much text is hard to read and process at a poster. You can speak to those. Think about a Movie Poster, how many words do you typically see? Also make sure the font size never drops below 36 point. Keep in mind that someone is standing 3 feet away and probably walking by. Your poster is likely in their peripheral vision.

How do you do it? I always recommend printing your poster on on plotter, 4' x 3'. Hang your poster with double-sided foam tape. Posters are heavy and nothing hampers your ability to explain something that you using one hand to keep your poster from falling down. Get to your session 15 minutes early, skip the session before in order to mentally prepare yourself for your talk. Poster sessions tend to be informal affairs, sometimes food and drinks are served to entice conferees to attend. One time, I was in what was called an interactive poster sessions where there is a 10 to 15 timed talk and then a bell to rotate. This was experimental session that largely failed. The lesson, be prepared for anything. You might have been expected a wall to hang your poster on, and all you've got is a table. Oh, no! Showing up early gives you a chance to figure something out. A poster session sometimes implies that there is a full research paper that supports the work. Sometimes the poster is all that is expected. Find out the presentation requirements from the conference.

References

• AERA
• NIH
• C.S. Weiler
  

Online Music Services

finetune.com is a new online music service, that I spent way too much time yesterday playing with. They have stolen the very best features from others into one engaging experience. The way finetune works by the creation of playlists, similar to Apple's iMix. Once you log in, you can create a playlist of 45 songs. It seems like a lot, but they have an I'm Lazy button that will fill out the rest based on the artists already in your list. The website is rocksolid, I noticed only a few bugs. The Flash-based interface of album covers is also iTunes-esque. They have a 30-second preview button for every song, it works much more seemlessly than Amazon's preview feature. Another nice thing about the preview button is that the music is automatically faded or mixed into the current track. This feature, unexpectedly, allows me to compare the music with what's already in my playlist. It helps me to hear if the song will fit in. This feature is as robust as the one that I like at the music kiosks at Barnes & Noble. Better than that, I get to record what I like and hear the full song. I'm still trying to remember a few songs/artists that I heard at B&N that never got written down. The catalog seems pretty full, although a few indie artists and rap groups were either not well represented or there at all. For now, I like it better than AllofMP3 the russian music download store because it's easier to test-drive songs within the context of my other songs in a playlist. I use it for pop songs, indie bands, rappers and world music that generally have a shelf life of a few months for me. The last thing is the social network aspect. While certainly not a unique feature, I found it much better to look at other playlists and similar bands for songs than using the search box, which requires the specific not fuzzy search process. In the end, this is the best experience at me building the top-40 radio station of my choosing. Thanks to Pop Candy's Whitney Mathewson for the heads up.

Pandora is an online music service that provides music recommendations based on artists or songs. Derived from the Music Genome Project, Pandora serves up song based on the "genetic makeup" of the thing that you are searching for. I stopped using the site, a few months ago. The music stations I created tended to throw me off. First, individually they sounded too boring for me. Although I liked the song the station is created on, I kind of like variety, but more than that I just want to hear the song that I like. The Quickmix feature came along, I thought this would solve the problem. It mixed songs from the group of stations I had created. Because I like to listen to music while I work. Being served a song that I hadn't heard forced me to listen, drawing my attention away. Overall, it just didn't work for me. Thanks to Adam Barea for the heads up.

PodShow is different than Finetune and Pandora so it's a bit hard for me to explain. But it is another place to listen to music online. PodShow is really a podcast media company. They work with or run the Podsafe network, where musicians can upload their music. This is the equivalent of the podcasts section of the iTunes store. They have both professionally produced and locally produced podcasts. I have explored too much, but I found a hip hop podcast called D4E Hip Hop Mixtape. The "pj" rummages through the Podsafe network and remixes the songs into a 20 minute "mixtape". There no way I could find such artistry anywhere else. Anyway, I find PodShow's interface very confusing, so I don't really spend a lot of time roaming around. There is just too much for me to sift through. Thanks to Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast for interviewing Ron Bloom, co-founder of PodShow, and Ray Lane, venture capitalist.

My Daily Read

In the New York Times today, this article, A Small Part of the Brain, and Its Profound Effects, discusses the Insula, a part of the brain recently discovered to be associated with smoking cessation when damaged. The insula is understood to be deal with pain. It is also seems to translate our feelings into actions. The article makes me wonder what kinds of research we might do in education in regards to this part of the brain. Would math anxiety be activated? Would procrastination to do homework? This may be a key part of the brain to help us understand motivation, as goals turn, should turn, into actions.

In Wired today, they describe a very modern trailer home, which can be purchased for $59,000. I like the term they used in the article, drag-and-drop. As we live with computer interfaces, we want the same interface in the physical world. IKEA allows us to be modernist interior decorators. I've often said I wish I had an Undo function after I did something. These functions may be truly useful in the way they support our work even through how we fail often and don't know until we try.

In Worldchanging today, there is an article about how all types of engineers came together to search for a Microsoft engineer, Jim Gray. Basically, they harness satellite imagery, then used Amazon's Mechanical Turk, to have people review images for relevancy. This is similar to our GO Inquire project. Instead of satellite images we use school-grounds photography. Instead of reviewing images for evidence of a human being, we ask students to review them for relevant evidence of geological concepts. Perhaps this satellite imagery and Mechanical Turk could be used to teach students to geological observation?

Michigan's Ross School of Business has posted a press release about a presentation given by Iain Roberts of IDEO. In discussing industrial design he notes three core elements, "Aesthetics (how the product looks), ergonomics (how it works) and manufacturing (how it is made)." I think if you survey a 1,000 people on what design is, these are the three elements most people would refer to. He adds, "empathy, experiences and connections" as human factors that must be kept in mind as the design process is at work. It would seem to me that he wouldn't need to mention these other three human factors. Seems like adding three extra elements takes away from his core message, or maybe that his core message is not core enough.