GIS Ed Weekly: A Geography Course on "Worlds of Football"

On and Off Campus

Mountain Democrat: Masterful map makers celebrated - Surveyors, Architects, Geologists and Engineers of El Dorado County (SAGE) held its 26th student map-drawing contest celebrating Geography Awareness Week. More than 800 entries were displayed but due to COVID-19 there was no awards ceremony.

Study: Crowdsourced Data Could Help Map Urban Food Deserts  - "In a feasibility study published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, scholars found that the methods used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to identify areas with low access to healthy food are often outdated and narrow in scope." UTDallas research suggests Yelp may be a helpful addition.

Concordia: Circus research team creates a global stories map - The fourth international graduate seminar in circus research, “Circus & Invention” is being replaced in part by a story map put together by contributors. "The Circus Stories Map will use an interactive open-source participatory mapping platform called uMap, and will be populated with three types of stories: contemporary circus stories, historical stories about particular circus sites, and COVID-19 related stories." 

University of Illinois: Illinois' big trees are on the map - U of I Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) graduate and forestry technician Julia Allison developed a story map to give big tree hunters access to detailed information about each of the 88 champion trees listed on the Illinois Big Tree Register.

Programs and Courses

College Heights Herald (Western Kentucky University): The Department of Geography and Geology will have a new name - The WKU Department of Geography and Geology has taken action to change its name to Earth, Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences. Per the article, alumni support the change and it matches what other departments around the country are doing.

UVic: Campus landscape becomes the new focus of remote-sensing course - "It’s a shift in both time and space. Students in Geography 228, a popular remote sensing course, will explore how the present UVic campus compares to 70 years ago—and do it from off-campus." Says Terri Evans, UVic lab instructor, “Remote sensing software is very expensive but shifting to Google Earth Engine and open source makes it virtually free to use.”

Straits Times: NUS geography dept offering module that allows students to explore issues in the global game - The National University of Singapore will offer a general education geography course called "Worlds of Football" starting August 10.

New Mexico State: NMSU gets state funding to digitize and create maps of water rights - "Thanks to a grant from the state engineer, New Mexico State University will be digitizing the state’s water rights database in map form by the new completion date, the end of the year, due to delays with COVID-19."

People

Martlet: UVic professor leading international geography journal’s special COVID-19 issue - Reuben Rose-Redwood, a UVic geography professor and managing editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, arranged for a special issue on the pandemic.

Star-Tribune: University of Minnesota geography Prof. Dwight Brown dies at age 83 - "Professor Robert McMaster wrote in an e-mail, 'He was a renaissance geographer, interested in all aspects of our discipline. Dwight is the faculty member who started our GIS course.'"

COVID-19 Mapping

Press Herald: How the geography of the pandemic is determined by centuries-old regional difference - Colin Woodard argues that "A detailed analysis of the regional variations in new case trends, using a county-level COVID-19 data set painstakingly assembled, updated and shared with the public by The New York Times," maps precisely to what his 2011 book “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America” would predict.

Resources for Teaching and Learning

LinkedIn: Incorporating GIS in the new Tennessee K-5 STEM Standards - Michael Camponovo shares resources from recent Geography Department at UT Knoxville and the TN Geographic Alliance (TGA) workshops to train elementary school teachers about GIS and how to integrate the technology into the classroom.

Science News for Students: Scientists Say GPS - A short explanation of what GPS is and how it works. Challenge: Write one for GIS.

Credentials

TES News: Scrapping of geography GCSE fieldwork 'ham-fisted' - Last week the Ofqual (England's Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) proposed that the 2021 exam drop the assessment of content related to fieldwork.

GISCI: GISCI Announces 2020 Fall Test Period - The PSI testing centers will administer the exam Dec 5-12, 2020. You can apply for a spot now, worldwide.