Syllabus

Class 1: (September 2) Hello My Name Is...

Let's find out who you are, what you're interested in and what you hope to get out of this class. We'll walk through the syllabus, class structure and goals for the semester and discuss the world of location-based services, tools and technologies. Topics: History of LBS, building blocks and tools, breakdown of LBS categories, examples of projects and products and startups and services that define the space.

Assignments:

1. Introduce yourself on the class Wiki! Tell us about who you are, your background and some of the things you've worked on while at ITP. Click here.

1. Three mini readings! We selected these as an introduction to location-based services and user-centered design and to kick start some thinking process for your own projects. Download here.

1. Weekly Research Assignment #1! Two paragraphs or so a personal experience you have with some kind of locative service. Click here.

1. Dust off your tech skills! By next week you should have a web page up and running that can collect data from users and talk to a database. Try to make something that asks people where they are, like this.

1. Two email lists for you to sign up for! Sign up for the Geowanking list and the class listserv (coming soon!).

Class 2: (September 9) Placing Yourself #1 (Let the users do the work!)

Let’s turn some user-generated content into location coordinates! This week we’ll get our hands dirty with geocoders, data service providers, mapping APIs, and the different ways of using web and mobile tools to gather location data from users. We’ll also walk through the basics of product development (wireframing, user experience design) to help us turn the ideas in our heads into projects and products we can release into the wild.

Class 3: (September 16) Placing Yourself #2 (Let technology do the work!)

If week two was all how to let users’ telling us of their location, this week will focus on the tools that can do the dirty work for us. We’ll look at the different types of location tracking technologies we can use to collect geocoordinates (GPS, A-GPS, cell ID, triangulation, IP lookup), the data formats we can use to publish this data (KML, XML, GeoRSS, GeoURL, microformats and machine tags) and the services that are best suited for data visualizations (mapping APIs, Google Earth). Special guest Andrew Turner from Mapufacture will help lead the charge.

Class 4: (September 23) One Map, Many Dots

Let’s look at what happens when we start working with the geocoordinates of multiple objects – people, places and/or things. We’ll work with proximity detection (“What’s within 10 blocks?”) and distance calculations (“How far from Point A to Point B?”). We’ll also start deconstructing and reverse engineering some of the more well-known examples in the space to get an understanding of how things work behind the scenes.

Class 5: (September 30) Designing User Experience

We’ll start off Week 5 with an intro to User Experience Design (UX) from Jennifer Bove (VP, UX @ HUGE). From there we’ll look at UX issues specific to location-aware apps: How do we ask users for their location? How do we control privacy and social awkwardness? We’ll look towards some of the mobile-social and social-discovery apps (both web and mobile) in an attempt to discover what works and what doesn’t.

Class 6: (October 7) Informatics & Data Visualizations

Now that we’re collecting location data from multiple users, how do we turn our simple geocoords dataset into something more meaningful? With the help of Greg Skibiski from Sense Networks, we’ll look at ways of visualizing aggregated geodata and using this data to make predictions on user behavior. We’ll also take a look at the role that location data can play in Personal Data Informatics – think: Nike+, Nokia’s Sports Tracker, Feltron’s Annual Reports, Daytum.com.

Class 7: (October 21) Wildcard Week

Let’s leave this week open – most likely there will be topics you’ll be itching to cover before the midterm and we’ll use this spot to fill in those gaps, bring in a guest speaker or debug your midterms projects.

Class 8: (October 28) Midterm Presentations

Show us what you’ve been working on!

Class 9: (November 4) Beg / Borrow / Steal - Working with External Data Sources

Plenty of services simply take information that is readily available online and use locative tools to cut, filter or push data in ways that make it geographically relevant. Think: Google Maps mashups, Outside.in, etc. This week we’ll take at the tools needed to track down this data (scraping HTML, parsing XML, working with APIs) and present it back to your users.

Class 10: (November 11) "This Was Supposed to be the Future!" (with a nod to Mike's tee-shirt)

Since the dot-com heydays, the locative future has always been 18 months away. We’re getting closer with the latest crop of location-aware devices - iPhone, Nokias and Blackberries. This week we’ll talk a look at this history of location-aware apps, the obstacles that have hindered the space in the past and where we can expect to be 18 months from now. Raise your hand if you have an iPhone and we may just dig into the iPhone SDK.

Class 11: (November 18) Sharing Location Across Platforms

We’re just starting to see presence data being shared across multiple social services – Twitter can talk to Facebook can talk to Dopplr can pull from Flickr, etc. This week we’ll look at how services like Yahoo’s FireEagle are changing the way we think about aggregating location, the social and privacy concerns that go along with such changes, and how the Google’s and Yahoo’s of the world are expected to get into the game.

Class 12: (November 25) Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Locative apps don’t have to be limited to our laptops and mobile phones. Let’s spend this week looking at the future of personal navigational devices (PND): in-car nav systems (Garmin, Navi, Dash), handheld GPS units (Garmin, Trackstick, geocaching, geodrawing) - and the tools people are developing to change the way people travel, train, hike, run, bike, ski and everything in between. And don't forget the networked gaming devices - our Nintendo DSs & PSPs. Remember, where there's wi-fi, there's a way of finding location.

Class 13: (December 2) Wildcard Week

This will be another wildcard week in terms of class discussion. Extra time will be dedicated to debugging final projects.

Class 14: (December 9) Final Presentations

You’ve worked all semester to get here - show us what you’ve been working on!