Most people my age have been schooled with the "sit and listen" method. But today's teachers are breaking out of that mold by tailoring lesson plans for different learning styles using gaming ideas and platforms. So to better understand this shift in education, I am taking a summer class offered through Boise State that focuses on…
Category: Public Works in the Metaverse
MOSES – Ramping up Government Use of Virtual Worlds
We've been fortunate to have a group of federal employees from the US who are dedicated and passionate about government use of virtual worlds. The work accomplished by Eric Hackathorn (NOAA), William May and Lovisa Williams (State Dept), Charles White and Jeanne Holm (NASA), Paulette Robinson (NDU), and Douglas Maxwell and Tami Griffith (US Army)…
Fifty Best Engineering Blogs
A hearty thanks to the civilengineeringschools.org site for listing our blog as one of the top 50 civil engineering blogs and granting us a Blog Frog award. We proudly display our award below and encourage everyone to check out the other Blog Frog award winners at: http://www.civilengineeringschools.org/best-civil-engineering-blogs CivilEngineeringSchools.org
Geneva’s Great Land Adventure
Several months ago, I read some blog posts about frustration with Gov 2.0 not doing enough and a few other posts with offers from people interested in working for free for experience. The two seemingly unrelated topics got me wondering: How could our city use Gov 2.0 to offer job opportunities to people just looking…
Enhancing GIS with Augmented Reality
The other day at work we visited with our police records office to learn more about their reporting software. One of the issues that came up in our discussion was inputting the “address” of incidents. The software they use relies on either point addresses or address ranges along a centerline – both common methods of…
Adding Augmented Reality to Your Zoning Ordinance
Augmented reality holds promise and opportunity for the public works industry. With the development of this technology through efforts like the Smart Vidente Project and the recent release of development tools by Layar, we are moving closer to actual implementation on the job. And over the next few months, I plan to try to set…
Monitoring the Pothole Buzz
Seems like over the last year, several sites have popped up offering people a chance to create a "to do" list for their local public works department. From logging potholes to traffic problems and graffiti, websites like FixMyStreet, SeeClickFix, City Sourced, PublicStuff, Lagan311, and many others are encouraging citizens to upload problems onto maps. Three…
Using Unity3D to Simulate a City
Most of my exploration of virtual worlds for engineering has been in Second Life and OpenSim. However, this year I have been looking more at Unity3D. Engineers are conservative and seem to dismiss virtual worlds like Second Life and OpenSim. Even though these programs are 3D modeling tools, they don't resemble nor do they use…
Virtual Worlds: The Next Level of Government
In small numbers, people can usually self-govern themselves. But as the number of people in a group grows, better control is needed. So history has shown anytime a large number of people start hanging out in a particular place, a government structure is formed. In our world today, we have nations which then have further…
A Brave New Grid – Post 2: The Virtual Plan
In the first post of this series, I explained my decision about moving my efforts related to building government/public works/engineering sites in virtual worlds from Second Life to OpenSim. And I invited anyone interested to read along or visit as I make this move. From here on out, I will continue to write about the…