The snow didn’t keep me out of Cambridge yesterday [primary because it hadn’t yet snowed]. And that means that Henry and I started our weekly study of Old English. He wants to recite some passage in Beowulf; I want to use the language as a super-secret method of communicating — perhaps exclusively with Henry — no matter where I am, regardless of the company. Also, Old English looks and sounds really funny, and that’s reason enough to learn it, too.

But the snow is keeping me inside today. So, rather than go on a winter adventure, I’m prepping the documentation and presentation of future adventures. There’s a giant road atlas of the whole of the United Kingdom on one of my bookshelves. Rather than throw it out once I returned from Scotland two years ago, I had planned to make a website with scanned pictures, anecdotes, and all the rest, and to organize everything through the maps in the road atlas. Alas, things came up, and the website was never realized. But now! now I’ve signed up for an API key to use Google Maps. I was even able to understand and reproduce their example map [which I can’t display on this server].

Soon I’ll start a blog-type site over at the GSD [where I have more file control, access to web services, and other computerish things; you can find all my map stuff there for now]. With some determination, I’ll be about to start up a GIS-powered Wiki, so that you, too, my faithful and ambitious readers, can add geographically anchored markers with linked online media.

I need to think hard about how to make good use of this technology. Check out a good example which maps out recent BBC News articles here. History classes could make large, interactive maps detailing famous exploration, battle maps, or immigration with seemlessly coupled pictures, documents, videos, and sounds. Another day I’ll rant about why this is a fantastically empowering idea in classroom education. Maybe I’ll stroll down the street back to the LifeLong Kindergarten group at the Media Lab.