Create Visual Metaphors with Open Source Software

Visual metaphors are becoming a popular teaching tool in the classroom. What exactly is a visual metaphor? A visual metaphor is substituting an idea or object with another and is used to help explain a concept or an idea. It is done using visual imagery or symbols. We see visual metaphors everyday, especially in advertisements. Since educators have access to different types of media (like web 2.0 tools), why not introduce visual metaphors as teaching tool? Our ability to learn via images dates back to the time where information was passed down by oral history. Some experts claim its wired into our brains to learn through visual metaphor. So you’re interested in using this teaching tool in your classroom, but your budget is tight. Well why not use some free open source programs that could help you create visual metaphors that would complement the literary metaphors you use in the classroom. Here is a list of open source programs that can get you on that track.

The GIMP- The GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. If you are familiar with Photoshop, than the GIMP is the open source alternative to it. You can load photographs and edit them in the GIMP. Change colors, edit and crop, write text, the possibilities are endless!

Inkscape- Inkscape is a vector art program. You can create images, graphs, charts, etc. and you are able to resize them without losing the quality (sharpness) of the drawn objects (since they are vector). Create simple or complex diagrams to help explain a process or problem.

Blender- Ever want to demonstrate something in 3D? Well you can create and animate simple or complex models in Blender. It’s recommended that you have some experience in 3D software, but it is not required. The user interface can be tricky at first, but it becomes easier with experience.

The GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender have many user forums and a big user community, so there are a lot of free tutorials and documents to help get you started in your open source journey. Use these tools to help create your visual metaphors that will help your students connect with concepts in the classroom. Happy exploring!

~Angel Brady

John Suler is a Flickrin’ Star.

Rider’s own most visited web author, John Suler, has recently become just as watched on Flickr, the online photo sharing service as he is on Rider’s Web Site. If you’ve never seen any of his online work, you should go visit now:

http://www.rider.edu/~suler/tcp.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jsuler/

He always graces the top of the report of most hits at Rider: http://www.rider.edu/usage

Category:Creativity Techniques - Mycoted

Found this very interesting. John Baer gave us some help in the CII a few years ago by leading small workshops on Creativity as a pedagogic tool. I always thought that creativity has a little bit of a bad rap in general society, because it implies thinking differently, change, new ideas, and sometimes, restarting from scratch. Depending on the project at hand, creativity can be a real wrench in the works for some. For others, however, it’s a great way to fix what’s broken, and to make a project do what it should. Anyway, here’s a great resource I found on del.icio.us regarding creativity methods:

Category:Creativity Techniques - Mycoted
This is a general category of Creativity and Innovation Techniques, simply listed in alphabetical order. Like most tools these creativity techniques all have their good and bad points. I like to think of these creativity techniques as tools in a toolbox in much the same way as my toolbox at home for DIY. It has a saw, spanner, hammer, knife and all sorts of other things in it, they are all very useful, but you have to pick the right tool (creativity technique) for each job. We will try and provide a little guidance along with each tool to let you know whether it’s best used for cutting paper or putting in nails.

For the future, the aim is to also have sub-categories which will identify Techniques for;

* Problem Definition - including problem analysis, redifinition, and all aspects associated with defining the problem clearly.
* Idea Generation - The divergent process of coming up with ideas.
* Idea Selection - The convergent process of reducing all the many ideas into realistic solutions
* Idea Implementation - Turning the refined ideas in reality.
* Processes - Schemes and techniques which look at the overall process from start to finish (or at least 3 of the above 4 areas)..

Special thanks to the Open University for their kind permission to use material from their publication B822.

Introduction to platonic geometry and fractals

This is a mighty cool website focusing on the beauty of visual mathematics. Having never been very good at maths myself, but very interested in the visual arts and design, this is one way I can very deeply appreciate math.

Introduction to platonic geometry and fractals

The Koch Snowflake: example (below) is similar, except rather than subtracting the middle of the line in each step or iteration - we add a triangular bulge to each line, and then to each resulting line … and so forth until the border goes from a triangle to a star, to a wrinkled snowflake.

This also illustrates a fundamental property of fractals .. infinite boundaries.

ZillionBits » What is keyword researching?

Since I have been doing my own research of how people value content and ‘vote’ for links of their own high value rank on http://del.icio.us , I have found sites I never would have been exposed to otherwise. social_bookmarking++

Paying close attention to /popular on http://del.icio.us has been an enlightening experience to say the least.

At any rate, this is one of the links I found by regularly scanning /popular, and it’s sort of related to my recent research activity. It involves the idea of learning how people search via keywords and finding out more about how to search more effectively as a result. Good stuff.

ZillionBits » What is keyword researching?

Keyword Research describes the practise of looking at what users are searching for and how they search for it on the Internet, Keyword Research helps us understand the types of things people are trying to find, as well as the words they’re using.

There are a two common methods that Keyword Research tools use to give an indicator of competition

The first one is called the R/S ratio, which shows the ratio of searches to web pages containing that keyword or keyword phrase. R/S ratio is how many times something is searched for against how many pages are found in the search engine with that keyword or phrase included in the page.

The second common indicator is KEI, which stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. This is very similar to R/S, however, it’s weighted so the higher the keyword volume, the more tolerance it has to lots of competing pages. Keywords or phrases with lots of searches will have a higher KEI compared with ones that have fewer searches, even though their R/S ratio may be exactly the same.

EDUCAUSE | EDUCAUSE Live! May 17, 2005

This looks like an interesting event for anyone interested in using iPods in instructional Technology.

EDUCAUSE | EDUCAUSE Live! May 17, 2005

In August 2004, Duke distributed 20GB Apple iPod devices to each first-year student. Titled the Duke First-Year Experience, the iPod initiative was intended to stimulate creative uses of digital technology in academic and campus life. Duke’s Office of Information Technology, Center for Instructional Technology, Division of Student Affairs, Office of the Provost, and Office of the Executive Vice President, along with Apple Computer, Inc., all collaborated on this project. They now have two semesters of experience using iPods in the classroom and in student life. In this session, Tracy Futhey and Lynne O’Brien will discuss how iPods were used at Duke this past year, what they’ve learned so far, and how the project will be extended in the next academic year through the newly announced Duke Digital Initiative.

NewsForge | Advanced image editing from the command line with ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a command line image editing application. If that makes no sense to you, you should definitely read this article. ImageMagick is a very powerful tool, and 100% open source.

NewsForge | Advanced image editing from the command line with ImageMagick
Creating mosaics

We can create a mosaic by superimposing many images onto a surface at various positions. Instead of the -gravity switch with its rigid positions, we use the -geometry switch to specify locations on the image.

First we create a canvas to work on and colour it with the xc switch:

$ convert -size 200×200 xc:wheat multiple.png

Next, we place various images on the canvas, specifying the horizontal and vertical coordinates with the -geometry switch.

$ composite -geometry 15 30 1.gif multiple.png multiple.png
$ composite -geometry 19 20 2.gif multiple.png multiple.png
$ composite -geometry 12 28 3.gif multiple.png multiple.png

Since IM reads in all the input images before opening the output image, it can work on the same input image again and again without creating new images.

If an image exceeds the canvas dimensions it is cropped. To overcome this problem, use the -mosaic switch, which automatically creates a canvas large enough to hold all the images. The color of the canvas in this case is supplied by the -background switch.

$ convert -page 15 30 1.png -page 49 60 2.png \
> -page 52 58 3.png \
> -background wheat -mosaic mosaic.png

You can find more tricks on creating multi-image mosaics on the Web.

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > A New Photoshop Makes Retouching Reality (Somewhat) Easier

David Pogue, one of my all time favorite authors, talks about the new Phostoshop CS2, and gives some insight into what they could have possibly added, feature-wise.

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > A New Photoshop Makes Retouching Reality (Somewhat) Easier
Still, Photoshop is now 15 years old, and Photoshop CS2, as it’s called, is the 11th version. What features could possibly be added that would not make Photoshop even more vast and complex than it already is? (To give you some feeling of that vastness and complexity, there are at least 95 Photoshop how-to books, 3 Photoshop magazines and 4 annual Photoshop conferences. No wonder, because you don’t get a printed manual with the software.)

Some of the additions in CS2 are administrative tools rather than creative ones. One, in particular, is aimed at alleviating the sense of despair you may feel upon first encountering Photoshop’s staggering array of 494 menu commands. It’s the Edit Menus dialogue box, where you can hide commands you never use and highlight (in color) commands you use most often. You can even switch among sets of edited menus on the fly.

A proponent of MindMapping: Dave Pollard

In a blog entry on Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World Blog, he talks about the benefits of using MindMapping tools for many useful teaching and learning activities. From his site:

How to Save the World: “In addition to building and documenting consensus, this tool is useful for some other things:

* Taking notes from oral presentations, conversations or broadcasts, and written reports and books
* Brainstorming and analytical problem-solving and decision-making
* Individual and team learning
* Project management
* Organization of material prior to publishing or presentation
* Creating a story (’story-boarding’)

What intrigues me about this list of applications is that some of them are left-brain, deductive processes while others are right-brain, inductive, creative processes.”

Innovation Weblog - Springboard thinking

There is a great entry on Springboarding, which the Innovation Weblog defines as ‘turbocharged brainstorming.’ The term is better defined by a book the entry refers to: Big Ideas: Putting the Zest into Creativity & Innovation at Work by Jonne Cesarani

Innovation Weblog - Springboard thinking: “In short, ’springboarding is turbocharged brainstorming.’

Springboards can include:
* Redefinitions of the task headline
* Wishes
* Starting ideas
* Challenges to constraints on the problem
* Random thoughts
* Feelings or gut level reactions
* Apparently conflicting points of view

Here are some rules for Jonne recommends for effective springboarding:

* Suspend your normal judgment
* Do not ask questions or allow them to be asked; encourage people to guess.
* Use in-out listening to hear everything spoken for what it suggests, not whether it is right or wrong
* Practice suspending judgment in your thinking as well as your speaking
* Use headlines followed by background to express the springboards when working in a group
* Capture the headlines on flip charts so that the group can revel in their productivity
* Use language like ‘how to’ or ‘I wish’ which encourage positive thinking about possible new futures.”