On the Road Again

I’m doing quite a bit of presenting this year on Teaching and Learning with Depth (transformative teaching and learning using stereo 3D). Here is a current list showing my speaking schedule, in case you are interested in attending. If you are in the vicinity, it’s also always a good excuse for an opportunity to meet and have some coffee or conversation.

Conference	Location and Date	Topic(s)
TCEA	Austin, TX February 4-8	-       When 3D Comes to School (Monday BYOD Workshop) and  -       Teaching with Depth: Why 3D Matters. (Tuesday TATN Session)
Tech Forum	Atlanta March 1	-       Depth-defying Learning with 3D
ITEEA	Columbus, OH March 7-9	-       Immersive 3D Comes to School
COSN	San Diego, CA March 11-13	-       Teaching with DEPTH: Why it Works, Why it Matters
MACUL	Detroit, MI Cobo Center March 20-22	-       Your Very First 3D@Macul Bootcamp (Hands-On PC lab)
Colorado TIE	Copper Mt., CO June  18-20	-       Teaching with DEPTH
ISTE Nat’l Conference	San Antonio, TX June 23-26	-       In the TI booth at the Exhibit Hall
ISTE SIG 3D	San Antonio, TX	-       SIG3D Opening Launch Meeting

SIG3D

In breaking news, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) reached a new milestone in its support for educational 3D.  A recent proposal to establish an official new Special Interest Group focused on stereoscopic 3D has been officially accepted and SIG3D has been launched internationally.

The details related to this exciting development are concisely cited in an article I recently wrote for Display Central.

Although the above article link covers most of the details you would need to know, let me add several important points here in this brief post:

First, ISTE SIG3D signifies an international level of recognition that 3D has had an impact—and it is here to stay, mature, and evolve in the education arena.

Second, this new ISTE SIG serves educators under “a big tent.” It reaches out to K-20+ folks, researchers, educators who use stereo content, even and educators who focus on student-created content. It also stretches its stakes out to include  manufacturers, content providers, and 3D innovators.

Last, this means that an all-hands-on-deck meeting will take place sometime during the ISTE national conference being held this late June in San Antonio. Please join us there.  Dates, times, and locations will be announced this spring.

Future-Talk World View

Добрый день      Bom dia   您好مرحبا   こんにちは Bienvenidos       

The Future-Talk 3D blog serves a diverse international audience interested in educational 3D. Our readers might be interested in seeing which countries were our top ten blog visitors during 2012. Based on web impressions for the 2012 calendar year, here is how the data shape up:

It is worthwhile to note that there is a relentless back-and-forth wrestling match for sixth place between the Ukraine, Australia,  and India. Also, tenth place France is trailed closely by the Netherlands and then Japan. 

Are there any surprises here? Or are these just “the usual suspects?” What do you think? Please comment.

Of course, this chart only represents the top ten. Many hundreds of other visitors have frequented this blog from countries all over the world. Future-Talk 3D blog has been visited by nearly every country in North, South, and Central America. The same is true for Europe; the entire Middle East is also broadly represented. Most of Asia has visited us, as well as more than 16 countries from Africa.  

I want to thank you for your deep and committed interest in 3D in education. Please write me, let me know what you are doing in your country. I would love to feature some interviews in 2013.

[Special Note: We have many visitors from Latin and South America, and I offer you a heartfelt ¡Gracias! -- Estoy a la espera de viajar a Belize, Honduras, México y Florida (FETC) en enero (2013), por lo que si le gustaría juntarnos para algún café y conversación, envíe me un correo electrónico .]

Best of FT 3D Redux

Oops. I posted this Best of Future-Talk 3D posting two weeks ago, expecting not to see any changes in the last weeks of December. I was wrong. The posting Small Miracles, shot up spectacularly to the 7^th spot. That’s an important statement in that it validates the importance of 3D viewing in the arena of vision health, which still does not receive the attention it deserves. So here is the re-posting, with several other position changes shown as well:

It’s been a thriving year for the Future-Talk 3D blog, which has grown to 3,400 web impressions per month. As the year comes to an end, it is fitting to reflect on the most popular topical posts of 2012.  The top nine posts are presented below, in order of most web impressions received this year:

 

On Youthful Shoulders

eS3D Content Grows

School Safety Update

3D Myth Busting

Teaching with Depth

Wanted Again: 3D Educators

Small Miracles

BVS3D Case Study

Why 3D Works

Actually, it’s quite thought provoking to speculate as to why these particular topics were “top of mind” in 2012 for the diverse international audience that regularly follows this blog. Please let us know your hypothesis or thinking by posting a short comment.

A 3D Word Cloud (2012 Edition)

Here’s a graphic word cloud of all the key words used in our Future-Talk 3D blog during the year 2012.  The more the word is found, the larger it appears in this word cloud.

(Click on the graphic to enlarge it, or HERE to explore the details.)

It’s quite interesting to visualize, in this way, the recurring themes and concepts that have emerged from Future-Talk 3D this last year. It’s like putting your fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in educational 3D—and taking a read.

Best of Future-Talk 3D 2012

It’s been a thriving year for the Future-Talk 3D blog, which has grown to 3,400 web impressions per month. As the year comes to an end, it is fitting to reflect on the most popular topical posts of 2012.  The top eight posts are presented below, in order of most web impressions received this year:

On Youthful Shoulders

eS3D Content Grows

School Safety Update

3D Myth Busting

Teaching with Depth

Wanted Again: 3D Educators

BVS3D Case Study

Why 3D Works

Actually, it’s quite thought provoking to speculate as to why these particular topics were “top of mind” in 2012 for the diverse international audience that regularly follows this blog. Please let us know your hypothesis or thinking by posting a short comment.

3D In Depth

Two new online resources in the arena of educational 3D are now up and running. Here is a quick look at each of them, along with links to access them:

Nancye Blair

InDepth Education: A New 3D Educational Blog

A new 3D blog for education has just arrived on the stage. This new blog is aimed at a unique audience: practicing teachers who are actually using stereoscopic 3D in their classrooms. The blog is authored by Nancye Blair, who is currently an educational technology doctoral student and a seasoned conference presenter.  Named Polk County’s Charter School Teacher of the Year (2008) and a PBS Teachers Innovation Award “Teacher’s Choice” winner (2010), Nancye is one of the nation’s longest-practicing 3D educators. She has made her mark on the speaker circuit, working with an innovative 3D document camera produced by Lumens. She knows her stuff. Plain and simple, her new blog is a much needed resource. While the Future-Talk 3D blog focuses on the larger universe of stereo 3D in education, this new blog is a virtual community designed for teachers—a place to share concrete teaching strategies, lesson plans, and creative ideas for the use of 3D in live classroom settings.  Nancye’s goal with this new blog is to create a thriving community of practice for teachers to hear from other 3D educators about what works, and what doesn’t.  Although the blog is starting slowly, we expect big things from it. You can subscribe to this blog at: InDepthEducation.com.

Display Central

Display Central is perhaps the most comprehensive resource on "all things 3D" on the planet. Although educational 3D occupies a smaller footprint on this fact-filled site, it is a great place for educators and innovators alike to go and learn about anything 3D—3D in the past, present, and future. 

Small Miracles

It’s been some time since I’ve offered a posting on the topic of 3D and vision health, so please allow me to take a brief side journey back to the world of optometry and the importance of 3D in vision health. It is important to revisit this theme because the negative mythology associated with 3D is still so stubbornly apparent.

In fact, just this last week I read a movie review, written by a well-known critic, who repeated two stubborn myths:

1. "How uncomfortable cardboard 3D glasses are." (Folks, we don’t use those any more); and 
2. "I get headaches when viewing 3D" (My dear friend, read the research.  Such symptoms  serve as an indicator of an underlying vision problem, one which can be successfully addressed by your optometrist or vision therapist)

In combatting these unfortunate misconceptions, we need every good story we can find. And here are two good stories, worth your time:

Can a movie change your life?

Awoken from a 2D world.

These stories give you a reason to teach with the 3D tools you’ve come to love  or sell the 3D resources you sell. These stories help dispel the stubborn myth that 3D is somehow harmful. One story, one miracle at a time—we will see the change.

3D StereoLab

NextGen 3D Educational Content Series [Part 5 and Series End]
Our last entry into a future hall of fame for educational 3D content is 3DStereoLab. This is a group that demonstrates the most impressive creativity, artistry, and negative parallax I have seen in 3D production to date, bar none. I am talking about absolutely compelling production quality. This firm got its start by pulling together some of the best talent in L.A. and Hollywood, securing a new studio, and pushing the production flywheel forward. Much of their work is for corporate innovation centers, and most recently they have undertaken a large project involving school safety PSAs and simulations for school emergency preparedness training in 3D format.

Michael Page, President/CEO of 3DStereoLab, explains their interest in educational 3D content development: “We believe 3D's impact on the educational space will be similar to the impact of sound to silent film and the addition of color to black and white movies and television.” He adds, “Immersive 3D presentations will be the adopted norm of the future, no doubt about it.” The focus of 3DStereoLabs is on the wants/needs of the education customer:  “We are 3D production experts who fundamentally follow the teacher's lead in developing content which is primarily scripted and approved by qualified teachers.” Their plan is nothing less than to “provide a new technologically advanced immersive learning experience.” 

3DStereoLab founder Michael Page (without 3D glasses) demonstrates Panasonic 

full HD 3D technology to Colorado State Senator Steve King (seated), Littleton Fire Chief 

John Mullin (far left), Chuck Burdick of the Colorado School Safety Task Force (2nd from left),

 and members of the Panasonic delegation attending the signing of Colorado Senate Bill 11-173 

by Governor John Hickenlooper at Rock Canyon High School in Highlands Ranch, Colo. 

(Photo by Chris Schneider)

Michael Page—yes, he’s the same Michael Page of Chubby Checker, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie fame—states that  educational change is what he is all about: “We couldn't think of a more rewarding experience than to apply our knowledge and talents to the good of our children's future.” Their work has already launched in Colorado, a state which has taken the initiative by recognizing the potential impact of 3D on education in the school safety and emergency preparedness arena. So, what happens when better-than-Hollywood 3D production meets K-12 education? Stay tuned and watch what comes out of this group. They can be reached at http://www.3dstereolab.com/

3D in the Cloud

NextGen 3D Educational Content Series [Part 4]
Another entry in our sweepstakes for the future of great educational 3D content is a stout and familiar player, Sweden’s Eon Reality. Eon Reality offers a crowdsourced vision of cloud- and social media-based 3D educational content development and distribution: Eon Creator and the Eon Experience. Both are well integrated and offer a distinct social-media look, with easy user search, access, or upstream contribution, as well as user-generated content ratings.

Eon Creator, explains Brendon Reilly, the business development manager for Eon’s U.S. operations, “a tool for educators or users to easily generate 3D content and store it in the cloud.” He continues: “It has the scalability to design something as small as the human blood cell to something as expansive as the Taj Majal.”

Eon Creator is tightly integrated with the Eon Experience platform, enabling users 

to download commercial or user-generated 3D content or publish their own content.

The Eon Experience is a platform that permits search, access, downloading, uploading, and rating of user- or industry-generated  stereo 3D content. Some content is free, some is for sale, and I imagine a strong barter economy will eventually arise. The content is organized into three categories: Avatars, 3D Components or 3D Scenes. Reilly notes that the Eon Experience is “cloud based, multiple-device friendly, and offers great possibilities for education.” 

Now this is the point where I am forced to chime in: “You betcha!” Eon Creator was designed for non-professional content producers (a.k.a., students and teachers). The advantages are obvious. The Eon Experience platform creates a friendly space where the 3D educator can become a consumer, producer, or both. More importantly, both tools were evidently created with the school educator or industry “human performance improvement” professional in mind.

After learning resources are attached to a 3D model in a walk-through gallery, 

the learner can access those learning support resources by simply clicking 

on one the icons layered in a pyramid above the 3D object.

For example, 3D objects can be placed within a 3D gallery or exhibit hall scene for casual or in-depth exploration.  A trainer can also insert or embed learning resources into the 3D objects he/she has designed. This enables the creation of richly layered, hypermedia-based learning experiences that can stand on their own. The trainer/instructional designer can associate many different types of “learning objects” with the 3D model or object, including short video segments; personalized text or audio annotation; a PowerPoint presentation; a wiki, blog, or discussion board; or a hyperlink to a website or simulation activity. Folks, this is designed for great teaching, learning, and instructional design!

Depth by PowerPoint

[NextGen 3D Content Series, Part 3]

Bringing the 3D Advantage to Presentations

I teach some very popular workshops on how to do teaching (or sales presentations) differently, based on how our minds work. Based on brain research, the techniques I employ cleverly draw the attention of the audience, while sustaining their focused attention on the learning at hand. Done well, these techniques can even go so far as to visually ‘delight’ the viewer. It’s all part of my personal campaign—my intentional effort—to utterly destroy the old notion of “death by PowerPoint,” the notion of tiresome, unimaginative, overly lengthy, and utterly boring PowerPoint presentations. Of course, the notion of “death by PowerPoint” is forever immortalized in such Dilbert cartoons as the PowerPoint Coma, the PowerPoint Chimp, and PowerPoint Poisoning. 

In the stereoscopic 3D world, many have tried to provide a way to convert traditional presentations into stereo 3D, hoping to capture the illusive golden goose ‘wow’ factor.  Our third entry in the field of  Next Generation Educational 3D content is Presente3D. This new startup aims to become nothing less than a game-changer for educators. What these folks are up to is so promising, I playfully call it Depth by PowerPoint, and I assure you it is a good thing, and for quite a number of very practical reasons. First, Presente3D enables 3D content creation through a truly easy-to-use and extremely flexible ribbon bar add-on to PowerPoint 2010. " It enables the educator, e-trainer, or student to turn their presentations into a 3D format, but more importantly, to turn any graphic or chart within a PowerPoint into a 3D object that can be manipulated in space and depth. Any object or text can be individually extruded and the z-depth adjusted, as well. Presente3D, with offices in New Jersey and a talented technical team in the Ukraine, offers the potential for some very creative and immersive presentations. Their easy and flexible process for designing 3D presentations also offers a stiff advantage: it’s easy enough to use that you can construct effective stereo 3D PowerPoint presentations the night before your presentation. Here an overview video and here is a video showing how their interface works. In addition, this tool is quite extensible. It runs on most portable devices, including Apple and Android operating systems, the iPad2, and all 3D TVs and projectors.

Yet, the significance of this effective new 3D tool lies with content creation. Perhaps 95% of educational 3D content currently available supports science instruction. Math content is well on its way toward a solid presence this year. But this tool opens up the floodgates of immediate amateur content creation for all the other subject areas, such as English, world languages, social studies, and the arts—to name a few. Think about it. There are over 500 million PowerPoint users worldwide. Currently, over 50 million PowerPoint presentations are made every day. Now, anyone can be able to create 3D content. It is simply content creation for the rest of us. 

Spatially Cool

[NextGen 3D Content Series, Part 2]

Our second featured nextgen company is Spatial Thinking, a California-based company with a talented international programming team located in both L.A. and Lebanon. Spatial Thinking is led by its founder, George Dekermenjian, who is a gifted master teacher and active college mathematics professor in his own right. Formed to exclusively serve the education space, Spatial Thinking builds interactive simulations that can be presented in stereoscopic 3D as tools for teaching and learning math for grades 4-12 and college math. Their flagship product is Space Geometry and Measurement 3D (SGM-3D and SGM-S3D). Both versions contain the same content, but the latter (SGM-S3D) is optimized to be viewed in stereoscopic mode while the former is produced in rendered 3D. This approach exemplifies a generally wise strategy for success in the stereo 3D marketplace: offering 2D content as well as 3D content. When schools are ready, the shift to 3D is easy and costs less.

Using 3D to teach concepts that are harder to learn without stereo 3D.

I chose Spatial Thinking as an example of one of my nextgen educational 3D content developers for five main reasons:

1. This company starts with the premise of the added value stereo 3D can bring to learning; I like that. Spatial Thinking produces simulations that use stereo 3D to an advantage, concepts that lend themselves naturally to 3D visualization. Essentially, that means using 3D to teach concepts that are difficult to learn without 3D.
2. Spatial Thinking understands the educator perspective as much as they understand the technology of 3D visualization. This company demonstrates an openness to learn and do what schools, teachers, and students want and need, not just pursue the technology for its own sake.
3. Their content represents a significant move beyond the current hegemony of science content in the 3D educational marketplace—and math is a great place to start.
4. They are not developing just a few quixotic titles—they are developing quite a few key math concept sims. (You see, if there are not many resources to choose from, my experience is that teachers won’t spend time to learn to use the technology.)
5. They surround their software with exactly the kinds of supporting materials that teachers are dying for: visual PowerPoint supports, lesson guides, and extension materials.

Topics covered on the “Space Geometry and Measurement” (SGM)
product from Spatial Thinking.

Stereo 3D educational software designed the way teachers like to teach.

In this series, I asked each content provider to explain what was so defining about their approach to 3D content. In designing their software, Dekermenjian noted his desire to “creatively use negative-parallax to highlight key ideas of particular concepts” and importance of “ensuring each lesson/module could be explored in 10 minutes or less, leaving enough class time for reflection, discussion, practice, assessment and review.”

Spatial Thinking’s plans to build additional interactive stereo content for other areas of mathematics, such as analytic geometry, calculus (high-school and college level), and other higher mathematics courses typically offered at the college level or beyond. Spatial Thinking’s web site can be found at: www.spatialthinkingllc.com.