Resources for Teaching and Learning
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| Girl Scouts Virtual Map |
Girl Scouts: Girl Scouts Launches Virtual Map Exploring State Parks in All 50 States - "Girls and their families can access free tours and activities from state parks across the country, safely from home, as part of the second annual Girl Scouts Love State Parks weekend."
Good News Network: Map Lets You See How Your Hometown has Moved Across 750 Million Years of Continental Drift - The project allows users to enter most towns, cities, and countries into the search bar, and a 3D rotatable globe will show you approximately where they were on a 750 million-year timeline.
StreetsBlog USA: Talking Headways Podcast: Ian McHarg and ‘Design with Nature Now’ - "This week, we’re joined by Billy Fleming, who is the Wilks Family Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s McHarg Center, to talk about the center’s book, Design with Nature Now. We chat about Ian McHarg’s influence and legacy since the original Design with Nature, the influence of his work on GIS and the environmental movement, and how the Center seeks to find where design fits into the larger discussion of human life and policy like the Green New Deal."
Digg: The Worst Tourist Attraction In Every State In America, Visualized - Matt Shirley took an unscientific poll of his approximately 400,000 Instagram followers on what they considered the worst landmark in their state and made a map. Via Adam Carnow.
Anton Thomas: North America Map: the Basics - Thomas explains his thinking in putting together his latest map.
New York Times: How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering - "In the 20th century, local and federal officials, usually white, enacted policies that reinforced racial segregation in cities and diverted investment away from minority neighborhoods in ways that created large disparities in the urban heat environment." Another map-packed interactive from the Times. Via many.
Programs and Courses
Directions Magazine: The University of Vermont launches the Geographic Information Systems and Data Communication Professional Certificate - "Launching on September 2nd, and now accepting registrations, the program emphasizes knowledge of concepts and theory for critical problem-solving." UVM offers this blog post on the program, Career Opportunities Abound in Geographic Information Systems or GIS.
RocketMiner.com: University of Wyoming adds new geospatial program - "The GIST program is still waiting to see how graduate classes will turn out."
Community Health Maps: Mapping COVID-19 with QGIS: Kurt Menke offers a recording of one hour webinar on using QGIS to map the COVID-19 pandemic using free data.
Gizmodo: Look at this Horrible Map - "The map, packaged in a recent paper co-written by Fauci, showcases the many other emerging diseases besides covid-19 that pose a threat to our health." It's nice to see a discussion about the content of the map for a change.
Augustana: Solving Pandemic Problems: Augustana GIS Student Gives Viking Athletics ‘A Place to Start’ - Wyatt McLeod, '21 fresh off the school's very first GIS course, was asked to figure out maximum capacities for events based on different guidelines already provided, or those that the CDC could possibly roll out in the future.
Utah: First daily surveillance of emerging COVID-19 hotspots - "In a new study led by the University of Utah, geographers published the first effort to conduct daily surveillance of emerging COVID-19 hotspots for every county in the contiguous U.S. The researchers hope that timely, localized data will help inform future decisions."
ProPublica: Cellphone Data Shows How Las Vegas Is “Gambling With Lives” Across the Country - A hotbed. But then so was a meeting in Boston in February. Via @distruptivegeo.
MassLive:‘A map is not a plan;‘ Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone criticizes Massachusetts’ strategy for reopening schools - "Somerville mayor Joseph Curtatone is looking for more than a map to guide him on reopening the city’s schools." That's my mayor challenging my governor. My city was one of the first in the commonwealth to have a mask requirement and is still in phase 2 when it comes to re-opening. I've been reading that most people can't find their city or town on this map of the 351 in the Commonwealth!
On and Off Campus
Potomac Local: Germanna awarded NSF grant, will teach geospatial technologies, online drone pilot course - "Germanna Community College has been awarded a grant of $561,000 to develop coursework for geospatial technology and unmanned aircraft systems training. Germanna will be in partnership with Virginia Tech, Old Dominion University and the Virginia Space Grant Consortium to develop these programs."
Delmarva Now: Parsons Cemetery drone work in Salisbury discovers unmarked veteran graves, receives honor - Zaprowski and Stuart Hamilton of the Geography and Geoscienses Department, as well as their Salisbury University students, used drones and GPS to discover hundreds of unmarked veterans graves — and tell their stories and won a preservation award.
Clemson: App created by Clemson researcher uses photos of dead bodies, roadkill to help forensic teams determine time of death - "The app, dubbed geoFOR, allows coroners and forensic teams to enter observations when human remains are recovered and then upload photos along with accompanying information related to variables such as geography and crime scene data. The goal ... is to capture as much information on body decomposition as possible across a variety of geographic areas."
Birmingham: Routing apps can deliver real-time insights into traffic emissions - "Making use of the crowd-sourced data from routing apps could, the researchers argue, provide a low-cost and highly effective alternative to both high level and localised modelling."
People
UM St. Louis: Fall Semester Opening with 33 new faculty members - "Robert James Ubbelohde, associate research professor Ubbelohde will serve as the director of the National Security and Community Policy Collaborative, which will level partnerships in the growing St. Louis area geospatial ecosystem. Ubbelohde spent 32 years at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as a cartographer, geospatial analyst and a manager and leader. He did graduate work at the University of Nebraska-Omaha."
Delaware: Understanding Earth’s climate system - Jack Stone is a student in meteorology and climatology working under Tracy DeLiberty and Dana Veron, associate professors in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences. He's studying sea ice dynamics, specifically how short-term weather and longer-term climate events influence sea ice, and the implications of those changes using data from Dumont D’Urville Station (DDU), Antarctica, as a case study.
Esri
ArcWatch: Serious Game Play | Games Created With ArcGIS Teach Disaster Management and Resilience Skills esri.com - "Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York recently used ArcGIS to create two new serious games that can be important learning tools for responding to, mitigating, and recovering from calamities ranging from hurricanes to pandemics."
Journal of Geography in Higher Education: Active learning using a smartphone app: analysing land use patterns in Cork City, Ireland - "In this article, we report on a strategy for integrating mobile technology into our large (275+) module GG1015 Applied Geography, via the use of smartphones and the ESRI [sic] Collector for ArcGIS app."
Esri:Hurricane Tracking App - Esri's Sajit Thomas offers a really amazing dashboard.
Geography Treasure Hunt: Pioneers of Geography and GIS - Joseph Kerski offers a game worthy of GIS Day!