Yes.  I just finished delivering one of my favorite workshops, Using Google Earth.  It is by far the most fun of all the workshops I do because there are just so many wonderful things to explore in the program, with its tight integration with Google Maps and the many Google Earth layers.  I always get oohs and aahs when we visit El Museo del Prado in Madrid, too, because Google has outdone themselves there with a collection of ultra high resolution images of fourteen of the masterpieces held by the museum.  First, take a look at this little video that summarizes how the tour was made. And now take a...

Last week Google launched its “Art Project,” comprised of over 1000 paintings from 17 museums and all viewable from an appealing and easy-to-use interface.  Here is the Visitor’s Guide video which will give you the idea immediately. The project has its own YouTube Channel, where more videos and user commentary can be found. Each of the 17 museums chose a single work to get the “gigapixel” treatment.  That is, to be photographed in super high resolution:  “Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that’s that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than...

Last night my colleagues and I presented our semi-annual plenary break out on Academic Technology at Palomar College. It was well attended, but necessarily by only a small percentage of the enormous number of adjunct professors employed by the college. As a reference for those who did not attend, here is an encapsulated version. We conducted our workshop using the sandbox AT@PC workshop course we had developed. Each professor at Palomar College has an account on our sandbox system. We set the course up for self-enrollment through the Academic Technology Training course, also on the sandbox system. One...

Google Earth 6 has been released, and is available here.  What’s new?  3D trees, for one thing, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds, and a fabulous new street view experience.  As a bonus, while not new, historic view has been improved. First the trees.  In the past only trees that had been laboriously modeled were displayed in 3D, as in this KMZ file.  Now Google has “…developed a way to produce highly detailed, photo-textured versions of specific tree species and reproduce them at large scale.”  Meaning that for designated locales, such as San Francisco [KMZ] or Tokyo...