Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I’ve been reading a lot this morning and finding some ideas congealing in my head. Writing about them seems to be coming a lot harder. As I struggle with it, here’s a little piece that in some important ways, starts to express them, from Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, a cool example of crowd sourcing, Cellphones to track air pollution.

Computer scientists in Cambridge, UK, are using bike couriers to monitor air pollution. These couriers are doing their usual jobs, but their bicycles are equipped with air-pollution sensors and GPS units that connect to their cellphones via Bluetooth. So their phones are constantly reporting the levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and nitrogen dioxide in the area. And back in the lab, servers are updating a Google map for Internet users and regular cellphone users. The sensors used for this project could also be fixed to a pedestrian’s jacket, which means that everybody in the area could become a pollution tracker.

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