Since August, I’ve pushed blogging and other forms of time-wasting activities firmly to one side and dedicated myself to a series of adventures in hidden places. Every weekend has been a new experience, learning new skills and going deeper and further into the hidden parts of the built environment that surrounds us. It’s a simple, yet hugely fulfilling activity, filled with remarkable characters and stories, risks and rewards. This Flickr River stream randomly serves up a taster of some of the places I’ve been:
The hobby has benefited both History and Geography lessons. This weekend we visited a hidden deep shelter, built to house 2,500 people during WW2. It was a surreal time walk:
I made this video for a local teacher (I had the song going around my head while exploring the shelter) Others might also find it useful:
It’s been VERY quiet on the blog for a while – every so often I like to take a break and re-calibrate my life. Digital Geography is in a bit of a hiatus at the moment as my weekends are fully booked with various adventures – in fact I might even sell the domain if I get a good enough offer!
However I’ve been really enjoying working on some new projects. Dave Holmes and I are running a Web 2.0 / Google Earth course in London soon and as usual there will be quite a bit of variation to the published programme. I’m particularly interested in student publishing at the moment, so along with the usual Google Earth updates I’m looking forward to sharing ideas for personal geographies, VR images, and new decision-making activities. I’d like delegates to finish the day confident that they can get their students up and running with their own blogs and happily working with a range of neo-geography applications. Feel free to get in touch for more information, or go to the Philip Allan site.
The Google Chart Creator by Jim Allen is a nice front end for the Google Chart API that is capable of making a wide variety of graphs, including QR codes. The results can be inserted into other web pages or for example Google Earth placemarks. Some schools will prevent students from accessing Google Docs, so this little application makes a good work-around.
This is a huge brownfield site near Fleet in Hampshire. Owned by the government, the National Gas Turbine Establishment facility was used to test jet engines until decommissioning a few years ago. The machinery and buildings are unique, but following the inevitable planning arguments, Tesco’s will be converting this extraordinary example of our industrial heritage into a warehouse distribution centre.
I’m delivering some INSET courses coming up in the next few weeks, which is the reason why there haven’t been any posts here for a while. I’m hoping to manage a few surprises!
I’ve been having another look at AR Sights – the augmented reality application that superimposes 3D models into a real-world view. It’s now available in a Mac version, and there is a greater choice of models. A web cam is required; this one looks good for other experiments such as time lapse as well. Once AR Sights is installed, simply browse the library of 3D buildings from a special Google Earth layer. It works very well.
Here’s the demo I made a little while ago.
The AR models include a number of religious buildings that make a great resource for RE lessons. In geography, students could design a suitable setting for a relocated iconic structure like the Petonas Towers.
I stumbled across a preview of an interesting interface for Live Search Maps (or should that be Bing Maps?) today called Virtual Earth Street Side. The screen is split in two, with an eye level “Street View” image occupying the top half, and the map below, onto which is imposed a racing car icon. The car is moved via the keypad, and is able to track the street (at least some of the time) rather than driving over the buildings. Once the street view images are loaded into the browser, the keyboard gives a smooth and realistic driving experience; in my view somewhat better than Google’s Monster Milk Truck.
Virtual Earth Street Side
At the moment San Francisco and Seattle have been treated to this feature. I think it’s pretty slick, and I’d use it as part of my San Francisco decison making exercise – students can drive past their selected location.
Today my dad and I went on adventure. We were historian explorers for a day and we visited a Royal Observer Corps post. ROC posts are bunkers underneath the ground used during the Cold War; they are just like bomb shelters in World War Two. Here is some more information. The ROC post’s usually occur in the middle of isolated fields, they have barbed wire fencing protecting them and they look like mini submarines. They are coated in green paint for disguise. It took us a while to find the post, but when we did it felt like Narnia. We climed down a long ladder, which took you about ten feet below the ground and there it was, a room with a bed, a sink, a fire blanket sign and what I think was an air raid siren. It was such a good feeling after going down there. I have to confess, I wasn’t too keen on going down after seeing all the big hairy spiders; well lets just say that I’m not exactly a big fan of them. And what a better way to end such an exciting day by having some cheese and toast at a local cafe. I would definitly recomend it to you (not the cheese and toast but going to see the ROC posts I mean). If you like to explore and you like your history, go and hunt for some ROC posts. Here are some photos to show you what it looked like.
Laura
The hatch
Thanks Laura for writing this guest post and for taking the great pictures. Are there any ROC posts near you? Download this Google Earth file (there will be
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