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Ad Age counts ITP as one of the top 5 digital media and marketing schools in the country. What an unexpected accolade for our odd little art school.

Today I took a trip down to the Field Museum of Natural History to meet with Drs. Mike Draney, Petra Sierwald and Jim Louderman. We did a videoconference using Adobe Connect with students in Milford, Illinois. The students in Milford did a great job of collecting data on spiders and keeping research journals on the process, so our initial plan was to go visit them. That was before we realized exactly where Milford was. I think technology really saved the day in this case, saving us more than 4 hours of travel there and back, giving the students access to the lab with its spiders and letting us record the conference for other students and teachers to see. The recorded video quality isn’t perfect, but I think it does the job.

A special shoutout to my boys Tim Stack and Kim Cavanaugh, who talked me through the Connect setup. It really was as easy as they said it would be.

Today, I gave a presentation to the Illinois Youth Summit Student Advisory Committee and their teachers in some beautiful offices near the top of the Willis Tower. The Youth Summit is an annual project that encourages high school students to debate three controversial topics and present their ideas to the Illinois Senate in Springfield. It’s a fantastic program by the fantastic people at the Constitutional Rights Foundation of Chicago. The Summit students will be using the Collaboratory to share their ideas on topics, so I showed them how to use it for the great work they are doing!

Not into spiders?  That’s cool, we’ve also got a Frog and Toad Study!  It’s the Year of the Frog according to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, due to the startling fact that 50% of approximately 6,000 species of amphibians are threatened with extinction.  So to make us more aware of the [...]

So I relaunched the IDNR Illinois Biodiversity Spider Study. It’s much less time-intensive for the teacher with 18 billion tests to administer. It’s not as data-heavy as the old one and students don’t have to complete research journal every time they collect data. Students can observe a spider at home (instead of only at school) and your class only needs to post one monthly report each month. We have also added four more species of spiders your students can observe! Sign up your class today and let’s start hunting for spiders!

The other day I got a letter from an editor at Schmap Guides:

I am writing to let you know that one of your photos has

been short-listed for inclusion in the fourth edition of

our Schmap Salt Lake City Guide, to be published later this

month.

Wow, really? I hadn’t even submitted my photos for anything. They must have been blown away by my amazing photography skillz. Could it be the picture of the towering mountains? The pretty botanic garden? Or the Great Salt Lake itself?

No, it turned out to be my photo of the unfortunately named Red Butte Cafe. A photo that took zero artistry on my part. In fact, most of the picture is made up of the cars parked in front of the cafe. I just wanted a record of where I ate. I can’t remember what I did eat, but I remember it was pretty darn good.

In any event, the photo is published. And these Schmaps are pretty cool, too. What’s interesting is how they are using the Flickr users that publish photos under CC licenses, asking their permission and providing a very fair contract to illustrate their maps … er, Schmaps. Models like this can make Fair Use for education a lot less hairy.

I caught up with a lot of old friends and met some new ones at the annual ICE Conference put on by the Illinois Computing Educators this year at Pheasant Run, in St. Charles, Illinois.  I had two poster sessions (back-to-back, which is why you may have seen me scarfing down a veggie wrap at [...]