Fabien Girardin illustrates how using our digital “footprints” can be used to create rich geospatial visualistaions of urban areas.

As Fabian points out “we leave behind footprints from our interaction with the urban environment and its digital infrastructures (e.g. taking and sharing digital photos, communicating through wireless networks, withdrawing money).” These footprints when combined with other data such as grafitti, stickers and the like can be utilised to develop an alternative view of urban landscapes.

In this example Fabian shares how Flickr photo tagging, descriptions and location details could be utilised to create geovisualisations.

He shares another interesting example, MIT’s Wikicity project and its recent application in the city of Rome. This graphic reveals cellphone activity in Rome while Madonna was singing the song “Live To Tell”.

I cannot help but think that this idea could be simplified and utilised in the Geography classroom. Data would need to be collected, aggregated and depicted in a practical manner. How to collect the data? Which data? The ideas are still formulating. Students could collaborate. I need to think more on this.

The diary of Samuel Pepys provides a valuable insight into the lives of the people of London during the 1660s. Samuel Pepys is a famous 17th century diarist who lived in London, England. Phil Gyford is publishing the diary as a blog. A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day over the course of several years. As Phil Gyford explains, 1 January 1660 was published on 1 January 2003.

I have been reading the diary for about three or four years now. It reveals aspects of English life through its references to literature, music, games, fairs, food, drink, sport and individuals that lived at the time. There is an encyclopaedia and glossary with hyperlinked references. This online diary is an excellent resource for students of English social history.

Bernie Dodge of Web Quest fame just twittered this. This is an interesting concept. Livescribe has developed a paper-based computing platform that merges a smartpen, paper, software applications, and development tools. According to their web site this interesting tool will be available online beginning of 2008. “It will cost less than $200-00USD”. I have never paid that much for a pen. It would be terrible thing to lose it. Might be an idea to invent something to prevent one from ever losing the pen.

There is additional dot paper that the company states will be available at prices comparable to standard paper products. I shall keep an eye on this. Is there anything similar to this already on the market?

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The Australian Flexible Learning Network has created an excellent web site that provides a guide and case studies regarding the use of social networking and bookmarking technologies in teaching and learning environments.

The web site, Your Guide To Social E-Learning, is well designed and provides audio clips, transcripts and links to a variety of case studies where blogs, podcasting and wikis have been put to work by a varietry of educators across the country.

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LoudTwitter is a service that allows you to automatically post your Twitter comments to your blog.

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