Tools to share

From our Center

QuickVotes: get Selectricity for your site

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Quickvotes are about finding your choices quickly, in order of preference. They are like polls but are built on Selectricity’s heavy-duty election machinery. They can be created in under a minute and voted on in just a few seconds.

QuickVotes are meant for simple, quick decisions. They are not limited to registered lists of voters. They support simple lists of options -- no pictures, no position statements, and no long descriptions. They are simple enough to decide where a group is going to dinner, what you're going to name a project, or when to have a group meeting.

Organization: 
Center for Future Civic Media

Hero Reports

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September 11th showed us we're vulnerable. We are not immune to terrorism; we are part of the battleground. But its horror also showed us our strength. That a city scared to death can be courageous. We all can be heroes. To keep us safe, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority told us to look for signs of danger, and report them. We think we should also look for signs of courage. We call them hero reports.

Organization: 
Center for Future Civic Media

beyond the looking, to the seeing - A Scratch workshop

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How do I see the world? How do you see the world? How can we understand each other, solve problems collaboratively, and express ourselves?

beyond the looking, to the seeing is a workshop in seven parts that explores these questions through programming, storytelling, and perspective-taking activities. The purpose of this document is to share the workshop’s approach with other educators, and to provide getting-started guidance.

Organization: 
Center for Future Civic Media

Scratch

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Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Organization: 
Center for Future Civic Media

From the community

TimeLab 2100 software toolkit

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Funded by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, TimeLab 2100 is a new Augmented Reality (AR) game. TimeLab 2100 was designed to create a participatory educational experience, leveraging existing AR technology in which participants consider and discuss local issues of scientific and societal significance (and potentially prompting civic media and citizen/political action). Playing TimeLab 2100 takes approximately 2-3 hours.

Additional collaborators: Joshua Sheldon, Judy Perry, Marleigh Norton

Location

Cambridge, MA
United States
Organization: 
MIT Teacher Education Program

Many Eyes

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Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.

All of us in CUE's Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways.

Location

Cambridge, MA
United States
Organization: 
IBM Watson Research Center, Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research group