InqBlot

WGBH/NOVA approached us to build two web interactives on the topic of evolution to go with their new PBS television shows. They were specifically looking for data-driven investigations. “Great!” we thought. We’ve done web interactives! We’ve done evolution! And no one does data-driven investigations like we do! Where’s the catch?

Oh, you want it done in 3 months?

Both of them?

After a very frantic 3 months, we are happy to announce the launch of Inquirium’s latest creations, a pair of web-based investigation tools for teaching high school students about evolution.

On the surface, these interactives look like just another database and animated diagram. But we’ve designed the interactives around an activity context which draws students into data-driven investigations.

* “Bones of Contention“ has students playing the role of a physical anthropologist trying to identify and classify “mystery” fossils using a database of most of the significant hominid fossil finds.

* “Regulating Genes“ introduces students to the evolutionary processes at work during development (and technically, at conception) by having them explore how mutations in both coding and non-coding areas of genes lead to different morphological features in a fictional creature.

Cramming what could easily have been two year-long research and development projects into a single 3-month timeframe was an interesting challenge. We sharpened our teeth building similar software for longer term grant-funded projects, which afforded more opportunity for background research, formative evaluation, and design iteration. For this project, we had to adapt our design process to fit a new sort of timeline, forcing us to commit to certain design decisions very early in the process and leaving very little wiggle room to explore emergent ideas. There’s nothing like a short timeframe to make us reflect on our design process and pare down our cycles only to the bare essentials.

While the interactives are simple by necessity and by design (both are scoped to work within 1-2 class periods), they draw upon models of inquiry and investigation that, unfortunately, still do not see much light beyond the realm of academic research and school reform projects. Kudos to NOVA for bringing this approach to a wider audience.

Both tools were created to accompany NOVA episodes commemorating the 150^th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species. One episode, “Becoming Human,” explores human origins, and the other one, “What Darwin Never Knew,” explores the emerging science of evo-devo.

We conceived, designed, and produced both tools. We also created a complete set of classroom materials that include background essays, student worksheets, and teacher guides.

Joel Sposky has a nice tutorial out for Mercurial (hg). I’ve mentioned that we’re moving away from Subversion (svn), and one of the things about this tutorial that I like is that Joel specifically addresses how being an experienced svn user can make it harder to understand how to best use hg. Situating this within some common coding work models helps illustrate how to use hg well, and where hg offers improvements over svn (and the default use models svn promotes). This is a great introduction to hg, whether you have svn experience or not.

Joel also suggests an alternative repository scheme to the more complex git model I described last month. That’s one of those issues that are often not mentioned in introductory tutorials, but since you establish a repository structure early, it’s actually quite important to get it right the first time.

The other thing about this tutorial that I liked was the way that Joel is monetizing his own mistakes. He kicks off the tutorial like this:

When the programmers at my company decided to switch from Subversion to Mercurial, boy was I confused. First, I came up with all kinds of stupid reasons why we shouldn’t switch.

And all the kool kids think: that Spolsky guy. Of course he wouldn’t get hg. What would you expect from a Microsoft stooge?

But look at what he’s got us reading. He’s leveraged his experience learning hg not just into an entertaining tutorial, but into something that’s valuable to his business. This is not a typical half-assed web tutorial. It has its own domain. He’s getting folks excited about using hg and switching away from svn. And what’s that funny looking bird in the corner? Oh, Fog Creek happens to be launching a commercial version control system based on hg? Gee, you don’t say…

We’re in the process of transitioning from Subversion to Mercurial, and one of the challenges is defining a coordinated framework for managing development work. Subversion essentially came with an ‘official’ branches/tags/trunk model, as well as a central repository location, but the distributed landscape seems more wide open. (Granted, that’s part of the appeal.) The Git model described here is a nice step forward, and seems to apply to Mercurial as well as Git.

Time Out Chicago highlighted the Miller Family Youth Exhibition at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in its list of 8 Highlights of 2009 for Chicago Families.  Inquirium’s Take a Stand exhibit occupies 30% of the exhibition, using virtual reality technology to provide kids with an immersive social experience in which they encounter the challenges and rewards of standing up for others and taking action to benefit society.

Matt pointed me to AppJet’s announcement that they’ve been acquired by Google. (AppJet is the developer of EtherPad, a fabulous web-based collaborative editor.)

We are happy to announce that AppJet Inc. has been acquired by Google. The EtherPad team will continue its work on realtime collaboration by joining the Google Wave team.

Congratulations to the AppJet team. EtherPad is great; seeing similar functionality in Wave will probably also be great. What may be frustrating is if there’s a doughnut hole of no service from the point at which EtherPad shuts down…

The EtherPad site will stay online through March 2010 with some restrictions.

If you are a user of the Free Edition or Professional Edition, you can continue to use and edit your existing pads until March 31, 2010. No new free public pads may be created. Your pads will no longer be accessible after March 31, 2010, at which time your pads and any associated personally identifiable information will be deleted.

We have added a feature to the Professional Edition that allows you to export all of your pads as one ZIP file archive. You can find a link to the zip archive at the bottom of the pad list after signing in to your Professional Edition account.

…and whenever it is that similar functionality emerges in Wave. In the meantime, EtherPad users take note and save your pad data locally. (You were doing that already, right? Or did you trust a free service with your data?)

Then again, falling back on SubEthaEdit is not that shabby.

Update: There are plans to open source EtherPad and maintain service until it is open sourced.

A quick plug for our events calendar. We maintain a learning sciences-related events calendar, primarily as a way to keep track of conference dates. It’s a publicly accessible Google calendar, so feel free to follow it (via HTML, Atom, or ICS). We’ve also added an events listing to the sidebar of this blog.

Generally we update the calendar with events as they’re announced via mailing lists and weblogs. If you have a learning sciences event you’d like to us to include, please let us know.

It’s great to hear Nichole on Chicago Public Radio talking about YouMedia.

For an example of the right way to create an after school environment supporting youth media, check out the YouMedia space that opened this summer in Chicago’s Harold Washington Library.

The space affords many types of interaction from casual hangout, to media production, to presentation. The program makes good use of mentors too.

YouMedia is a collaboration between the Chicago Public Library and Digital Youth Network (founded by Inquirium Alum Nichole Pinkard). Check out this spotlight from the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative:

YouMedia from Spotlight on Vimeo.

Via Simon Willison, a fabulous keynote about design from Matt Webb. He pushes on a cultural definition for design, and speaks from the perspective of a principal in a small design firm. Quoting one of his partners:

Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention.

If you read the latest news, it would seem that HTML5 is most notable for killing off XHTML2 (to accompanying sturm und drang) and backing off on codec specifications for use with the new <video> tag. Practically, since HTML5 is now the de facto road map forward for web developers, it may be of more interest to folks to browse the HTML5 spec or scan ALA’s HTML5 preview article from a few months back. There are some nice things in there.

It’s also worth mentioning: Video for Everybody!,  a nice two-codec solution to implementing the <video> tag.