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:
- Create a profile page on the Wiki. Tell us what brings you to this class and what you’re interested in exploring this semester.
- Brush up on your tech skills - get your MySQL database back up and running and get some PHP/Ruby talking to it via a web form.
- Your first weekly research assignment (topic TBD) - post your findings on the Wiki (1-2 paragraphs). Remember: finders keepers - no duplicate projects!
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) 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.
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.