When an image is worth a thousand words — these apps help you understand what is happening during our election season, found on Read/WriteWeb.

Now you can visualize:

• Political contributions by industry — an interactive visualization from Sunlight Foundation
• Earmarks — which states slip the most pet projects into spending bills (I recommend you have latest javascript)
• The 2008 Presidential Election In The Blogosphere — perspctv’s graphs include CNN polls, news mentions, blogosphere mentions, Twitter mentions, a U.S. electoral map, and Google Trends-based timelines
• Electoral College Prediction Tracker — an interactive, embeddable visualization widget you can use to view predictions from different organizations

The Princeton Review surveys colleges to determine the “best” and once again partnered with PC Magazine, who provided the subset of tech questions, to determine the top 20 wired institutions.

They found “a vastly different landscape from what it was in 2006,” the last year surveyed.  Only eight colleges carried over to the list in 2008 and several who were not in the previous lineup appeared.

In terms of academics, I was amazed that three of the top 20 schools offer no online lectures at all (including Pomona, Bowdoin College, and Loyola College in Maryland).  A majority of schools are offering at least a few lectures online, but in some cases there are live webcasts or anytime downloads.  Kansas State University (2) leads the way with 76 to 99 percent of its lectures available online—the only school in the top 20 to make that claim.  Of course, “online lectures” is not really my idea of elearning, but perhaps the survey wasn’t designed to tap into the breadth and depth of online learning opportunities.

Thank goodness every single school in the top 20 says it offers training to its faculty to enhance what they offer students online.

Other measures of “wiredness” include student resources, infrastructure, and tech support.

I found the list itself very interesting, with results I wouldn’t have predicted.  Take a look at the complete article to learn about the survey’s methodology.

The Stepcase Lifehack folks state that mind mapping is a way of taking notes, capturing ideas, exploring concepts and breaking down information into a more readily understood format.

“It’s a place where visual representations and written representations of things merge to create something that is more natural to the mind; it works with and represents the way we think, where as paragraph-based text is not representative of the thought process at all.”

Mind mapping can be used to brainstorm, to flesh out ideas, to organize for change, to look at things in a new way, to share and collaborate with others, and myriad other uses.  You can mind map with paper and pen or with software especially designed for the purpose.  Eleven mind mapping applications and web services are listed in this post.  [via iLibrarian]

They include:

• bubbl.us
• Semantik
• RecallPlus
• Mindomo
• Mind42
• MindMeister
• Labyrinth
• Wisemapping
• PersonalBrain
• Vym (see image)
• and Freemind

It seems like there are a growing number of places you can create online presentations.  Technology Bites points to 280 Slides, an online tool for creating and sharing presentations on the web.

The good part of the tool is that it allows you to pull the data from various online services and to share it using SlideShare, they say.

Upload from Flickr, upload videos, or pull them from Youtube.  Shapes, layouts and themes for presentations are supported and the presentations can be saved to a .ppts, .ppt, .odp or pdf file.  280 Slides is useful to create and share presentations on the fly if you don’t have PowerPoint installed.

280 Slides says of itself:

• Take It With You — We store your presentations securely on our server so you can take them anywhere in the world where there’s an Internet connection.
• Download to PowerPoint — With a single click you can download a copy of your presentation in the Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 format.
• Built-In Media Search — Add photos and movies to your presentation directly from popular web services like Flickr and YouTube.
• Publish to the Web — Put your presentation on SlideShare, e-mail it to a friend, or embed it directly on your own website, all with just a few clicks.
• Stunning Themes — It’s easy to make a great looking presentation with our professional quality built-in themes.
• Run in Your Web Browser — 280 Slides runs right in the browser, with no download and no installation, and it works just like the desktop applications you’re used to.

Google’s “Knol” is now open to everyone, The Official Google Blog announced yesterday.

The idea is to help capture the expertise residing in people’s heads and provide a place for them to author a variety of articles.  For instance, early entries range from “How to Backpack” to information about lung cancer from a thoracic surgeon.  Authorship is known and those who would like to make contributions or edits may make their suggestions to the author, who retains control.  Google is calling this “moderated collaboration.”

Google also has done a deal with the New Yorker which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the magazine’s extensive repository.

Knol says it offers:

• Ease of use — All you need is an account, a name and a desire to write and we’ll take care of the rest.
• Control — You specify the level of collaboration you want with the community. Your knol, your voice.
• Community — You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge.
• Visibility — We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine.
• Growth — Sharing your knowledge with the world is rewarding for everyone.

Here are some selected resources related to copyright law and fair use:

• Online Digital Slider for Copyright  From the American Library Association’s Office of Information Technology Policy, the most recent useful tool for determining whether a work is still under copyright.  See image below.
• LLRX resources on copyright  Law and technology resources for legal professionals.
• Checklist for Fair Use (PDF)  From the Copyright Management Center at IUPUI.  IUPUI has other reliable information on copyright.
• Fair Use guidelines  From Dartmouth.
• Fair Use Chart  From Association for Research Libraries.
• Teacher’s Guide to Fair Use and Copyright   “Modeling Honesty and Resourcefulness.”
• Creative Commons (CC)  How creators can share their work but retain some rights.
• How to choose a CC license that works for you.

The Center for Social Media at American University’s School of Communication has a report on best practices for making online videos within the boundaries of fair use.  Anyone creating videos that might involve others’ work in some way will find the report informative, guiding them through the copyright law maze, along with the Center’s previous report, Recut, Reframe, Recycle.

Some best practice uses include:

• Commenting on or Critiquing of Copyrighted Material
• Using Copyrighted Material for Illustration or Example
• Capturing Copyrighted Material Incidentally or Accidentally
• Reproducing, Reposting, or Quoting in Order to Memorialize, Preserve, or Rescue and Experience, An Event, or a Cultural Phenomenon
• Copying, Reposting, and Recirculating a Work or Part of a Work for Purposes of Launching a Discussion
• Quoting in Order to Recombine Elements to make a New Work that Depends for its Meaning on (Often Unlikely) Relationships Between the Elements

This guide to best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights, they say.  It’s not a guide to using Creative Commons licenses, material that is already free to use without considering copyright, nor to using material that someone wants to license but cannot trace back to an owner — the so-called “orphan works” problem.

The best practices address the most common situations today.  “Inevitably, online video makers will find themselves in situations that are hybrids of those described… or will develop new practices.  Then, they can be guided by the same basic values of fairness, proportionality, and reasonableness that inform this code of practices.  As community practices develop and become more public, the norms that emerge from these practices will themselves provide additional information on what is fair use.”  [via iLibrarian]

Web 2.0 features are “put to a socially significant use” at OpenCongress, says Read/WriteWeb.

OpenCongress recently inroduced 13 new features, and is designed to make it easy to track activities in the US congress.  If you are at all interested in politics and what’s happening in government, you will appreciate this project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

Use OpenCongress to read news, commentary, and blog buzz, link to bills you are interested in, follow hot topics, share information through Digg, StumbleUpon, etc., and find out what your local members of Congress are doing.  It’s quick and easy to establish an RSS feed.

You can create a personal account with OpenID, and enjoy navigating with “a perfect amount of AJAX.”  Outside news and data is pulled into the site, rated by users and actively discussed.

There are many widgets to choose among, helping you to track trends, bills, and issues in particular areas.  Read/WriteWeb also offers suggestions to OpenCongress on additional useful features they might develop.

I spotted this post at Library Bytes and was particularly interested in the idea of today’s set of literacies for our information age.  I think a lot of educational institutions recognize these skills as necessary, but the traditional classroom structure fights against an environment that fosters them.

Students today (and other learners), live in a world of connectivity, community, sharing and collaborating -  especially because of technology - but inside the classroom too often find themselves locked out of that world.  The video Learning to Change-Changing to Learn talks about the issues.  Photo by jnxyz.  Creative Commons license.

What learners need to know (4:06 on video):

• how to find information,
• how to validate it,
• how to synthesize it,
• how to leverage it,
• how to communicate it,
• how to collaborate with it,
• how to problem solve with it.

A posting today on Lat Long Blog announces that the British Government is launching with Google Earth Outreach, and in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Antarctic Survey, new layers in Google Earth that utilize geographical information to show how climate change will affect our planet and its people.

Climate Change in Our World and Climate Change in Our World, Antarctica are two KML files featured on Google Earth Outreach that offer a “unique distillation of informed, scientific and geographically-organized information demonstrating the commitment by the British Government to continue to carry out this important climate research and to communicate the results of the research by making this information readily accessible.”

Climate Change in Our World is by the Met Office UK and you can also make it show in Google Maps, notes Google Blogoscoped.  The layer clearly shows scientific and economic evidence that “climate change is happening and it is probably the greatest single challenge facing the world today.”

As we have seen, many communites around the world, particularly the poor and vulnerable, suffer greatly from weather-related disasters, and the scientific consensus is that the effects of climate change will continue to increase.