GIS Ed Weekly: How many GIS software packages does a professional use?

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Visual Capitalist: 3D Map: The U.S. Cities With the Highest Economic Output - The map is from HowMuch.net and ranks the top 10 metro area economies in the country in 2018.

YouTube: Magical Van Gogh Exhibit - "Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings come to life at this magical exhibit located at Atelier des Lumières, Paris, France. Song 'Vincent' covered by Jim van der Zee." Via Ilkka Suvanto.

GIS Education Weekly: The State of the Geography Major

Geography Education

AAG: Should we Be Worried? - AAG President David Kaplan observes, "No matter our research excellence, our success in procuring funding, our prominence in public discussion – if geography loses its majors, the field as a whole is in peril." Kaplan notes former AAG President Ron Abler had "ignore undergrads" at #3 on his list of Five Steps to Oblivion, from 1993. Via Joseph Kerski. This is a topic we need to revisit regularly. That's in part why I cover the new programs and those that are shutting down.

Medium: Is My Learned Society Obsolete? - Bruce Caron, who was one of four keynoters for Esri's Education GIS Summit, is asking. Via @kennethfield. Another topic to revisit regularly.

GIS Education Weekly: Mapping Diversity at MIT, Safety in NYC Schools and Performance in Alaska Public Schools

Mapping Education

KTUU: Most Alaskan schools below proficiency in PEAKS - Alaska students take an annual Performance Evaluation of Alaska's Schools (PEAKS) assessment test. The Alaska Policy Forum released two online maps to depict 2017's public school test results. There's a map for Anchorage and one for the rest of the state. There are lot of red stars on both maps just a handful of green ones around Anchorage.

MIT: Mapping gender diversity at MIT - Over the past 20 years, MIT’s female undergraduate population has risen to nearly 50 percent of total enrollment and such growth has been sustained across almost every department and school. Professor of aeronautics and astronautics Karen Willcox, researcher Luwen Huang, and graduate student Elizabeth Qian devised an interactive map to show undergraduate gender diversity at MIT.

The 74: Exclusive: New School Safety Map Finds NYC Charters Safer Than District Schools in Wake of Fatal Stabbing - Max "Eden used survey results to create a unique series of interactive maps earlier this year showing how New York City teachers and students felt about the level of discipline and order in their schools along with fighting, bullying, gang activity, and drug use." It seems the maps are of perceived safety.

GIS Education Weekly: Spatial Skills Booster Course Raises STEM Scores

Programs, Degrees, and Courses

Advanced Webinar: Land Cover Classification with Satellite Imagery is a free, two session course from NASA that illustrates using QGIS for imagery. It's two Tuesdays, for four hours each starting January 31. Those who complete the required activities will receive a certificate of completion. ht/ Philip Davis.

I noted the Power of Data Project, a professional development offering for U.S. secondary school educators last week (under Geo for All news). Directions Magazine has an article on it this week.

Supergeo will release a series of online tutorials and courses in January. Via press release.

Geo for All News

Geo for all is now on Twitter @Geo4All_. Don't be confused by @Geo4All (with no trailing underscore).

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GIS Education Weekly: Drones for Education Act, Promising Research, Geospatial at Temple

Drones for Education Act Introduced

U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and Jerry Moran (R-KS) today announced they are introducing the Higher Education UAS Modernization Act, legislation that would support the operation of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), commonly referred to as drones, by higher education institutions for research and educational purposes and workforce development. Under current Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations, colleges and universities are treated the same as commercial drone users, meaning students and professors  must apply for approval from the FAA, obtain a pilot’s license and are restricted to using only pre-approved aircraft.

A number of schools (Smith College and Penn State to name two) and organizations (Association of American Universities and Association of Public and Land-grant Universities) support the Act. As I understand it, the act evolved from efforts begun by Smith College's Paul Voss, an associate professor of engineering in 2014. Here's a video of Voss discussing the issues in 2015 on the local PBS station.

The 8th Annual NGTC Geospatial Technology Summer Workshop, 2016

The National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence (NGTC), in partnership with Southwestern College and San Diego State University, will host the 8th annual NGTC Geospatial Technology Summer Workshop. The workshop will be held in the Richard Wright Spatial Analysis Lab on the campus of SDSU from June 22 -24, 2016. It's right before, and attendees get free admission to, the Esri Education GIS Conference. There are stipends, too.

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Temple University GeoNews

I received an e-mail advertisement for the residence program introduced with I guess the double entrendre, "Earn a degree with sustainability." The pitch:

The PSM in GIS is an accredited program, designed to train a highly competent workforce, ready to meet the demands of the job market. Our curriculum integrates rigorous technical training with business, ethics, and professional development. 

In, other news from the school, a handful of classes at Temple University invite undergraduate and graduate students using their bodies as tools of spatial exploration. “Bodies in Geography” and “Bodies Studio” I and II are taught by Allison Hayes-Conroy, an assistant professor of geography and urban studies. The vision: to help students find new ways to think about the human body—more specifically, how the body is viewed through social and biological sciences.

GIS Education Research

A team from Illinois State designed a curriculum and produced maps using QGIS as part of a three year $450,000 study funded by the National Science Foundation. Fourth and fifth graders in Springfield Illinois are the main testers. The goal of the program is to see if using GIS, which helps college and high schools improve spatial thinking, will do the same with elementary school students. Preliminary findings have been encouraging. The curriculum and research materials are available.

"Lessons that incorporate publicly available data from Earth observing sensors can expose students to the thrill of scientific discovery." That's the subhead of an article by a team reporting on  the Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration Project (Project EDDIE). The idea is to expose college students to the excitement and challenge of working with real world data. A curriculum was developed and its success is being assessed. The work looks promising.

A pilot study reported by Carey et al. [2015] indicates that working on modules improved students’ quantitative literacy and enabled them to grapple with difficult concepts such as data visualization and how resolution affects our ability to detect environmental changes.

Quote of the Week

I graduated last Spring and have essentially only used ArcGIS software in college and my last job, and have minimal experience with QGIS and Whitebox GAT.

This from a newly hired GIS professional posting on on Reddit/GIS. The poster next needs to learn Smallworld. I am concerned by the poster's lack of confidence in learning something new. The more packages a student touches in school and the workplace, the more confident he or she will be picking up the next release or a new package. How many different software packages do your GIS students touch?

How In-App Purchases for Geography App Worked for Montessorium

A screen from Montessorium's geography learning app

They didn't, per Three Lessons From Offering In-App Purchases, by the company's CEO. I'll note that building and making money from edtech is hard! Bottom line on the changes made in the Intro to Geography app:

What really happened is that we confused users with buried purchased points, made it impossible for some institutions to even buy it, and undervalued the worth of our product.

Points of Interest

NCGE is requesting those interested in funding for geography at the K-12 level from the U.S. government contact their senators. This is the next step in funding grants detailed in ESSA.

Stone Environmental built a story map to provide interactive public access to the Bennington, VT Downtown Area-Wide Plan (via Geolibrary-L). I found this data point interesting:

Total effort to build this was about 20 hours, mainly because of the number of pages. We feel that 8-10 hours would be average time to build a decent Story Map Journal using the template and tools available on ArcGIS Online.

An interactive map, put together by the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the University of Georgia's eHistory initiative, taps the Library of Congress' database of historical newspapers, Chronicling America, to track frequency of keywords in newspapers and visualize the results across time and space. It's built on CartoDB. More at Slate.

McGraw-Hill Education has withdrawn a textbook and plans to destroy all copies of it due to criticism that four maps in the book are inaccurate. The political science textbook, Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World is no longer available.

A bit of the top level domain cartogram

Diana Sinton profiles the The USAID GeoCenter and its Mapping for Resilience University Consortium, also known as mappersU, a “global community of university students, faculty, and scholars who create and use open geographic data and analyses that addresses locally defined development challenges worldwide.”

I love this cartogram of top level country domains.

Esri Education GIS News

GISCI is now considering offering the GISCI Geospatial Core Technical Knowledge Exam at the Esri UC conference in San Diego, CA, scheduled for the last week in June. The organization requests a show of interest via e-mail in this press release.

@GISed has been featuring new GeoInquiries all week.

GIS Education Weekly: Open Education GIS Degree, MOOC News from UC Davis and Elmhurst

Team Submitting Proposal for Funding to Open Education Initiative for GIS Degree

Achieving the Dream announced the Open Education Initiative Degree Initiative on February 24. A team is already putting together a proposal to develop content for an open source GIS degree. Philip Davis reports he's part of a team including Adam Dastrup and Kurt Menke representing DelMar College, Salt Lake Community College and Central New Mexico Community College respectively. Per an update from Philip Davis: Del Mar College will not be proposing to this round of ATD. Adam Dastrup reports SLCC is preparing its own initiative unrelated to geospatial.

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MOOC News

The UC Davis GIS MOOC will start approximately monthly, not every two weeks as originally suggested. The next session is already scheduled to start March 21.

About two weeks ago Coursera launched Mentor-Guided Courses. Per Class Central, it's "a new initiative which allows learners to pay extra and get mentor support. 'Mentors' in this sense are professionals who work in the industry that a given eligible course is based upon." There's a fee (full cost $248, but "mentors" are currently "on sale" at $149) and currently only ten courses offer mentors. Should GIS MOOCs have mentors? Would you want to be a mentor? Would you pay for one?

Esri is supporting Elmhurst College’s Skills for the Digital Earth MOOC, which runs from April 3-30 2016. Registration opened March 1. Here's the brochure (pdf) and an infographic (pdf) with stats about previous iterations. The course content remains the same as previous offerings.

GIS Education Weekly: ArcGIS Online, A Blog Returns, GISP Exam

The Map Room Returns!

Jonathan Crowe wrote The Map Room blog for eight years, until 2011, when he shut it due to burn out. Now he reports, it's coming back, likely in January.

I’ve made a decision to restart The Map Room. If all goes well, the new version will go live some time in January 2016 — next month.

The business model include Patreon, so go help him fund the effort if you are so inclined.

Graduating Students can take ArcGIS Online Map with Them (...if their school has 3rd party software)

The educational institution needs to have software from GeoJobe (@GEOjobeGIS). Its tweet:

Congrats 2015 #graduates. Ask your University #ArcGISOnline Admin about taking your content with u.

GeoJobe's Senior VP Neill Jobe told me the company will be providing more information about the use of its product (Admin Tools) in education in the new year.

GIS Education Weekly: GISCI Exam, Skills Competition Finalists, MOOC Update

GISCI Announces Exam Application Period!

The exclamation point in the press release (and above) illustrates how excited the organization is about the news, which appeared last Friday. Bottom line:

• Exam application period runs Monday, September 21 and closes October 9, 2015.
• Apply here.
• Exam Dates: Nov 12-17, 2015 at PSI Testing Centers.  I've never heard of this provider, but found nine in Massachusetts (on a Google Map!).
• Deal: Early qualified applicants can get $100 Application Fee and the $100 Portfolio Review Fee reimbursed.

Modeling Human Trafficking in St. Louis

As part of her master’s thesis at the University of Missouri—Columbia, Amanda Colegrove, director of the Crime Victim Advocacy Center’s Coalition Against Trafficking and Exploitation (CATE), thought about taking what researchers consider as risk factors for human trafficking and applying them to the landscape of St. Louis.

The idea, backed by the Washington University School of Medicine and Brown School of Social Work is to integrate data on topics that tend to encourage traffic to determine "hot zones," then see if in fact the predictions are accurate based on documented prosecutions. The study also looks at resources to prevent and respond to trafficking. Among the ideas floated are "UburHouse," a way to have those in community shelter victims until they can find permanent safe housing.

Geo For All Student Awards

Geo for All announced the winners of the OSGeo Student Awards for FOSS4G 2015, Seoul. Going forward, the Student Award initiative at FOSS4G conferences will be handled by the Geo for All team. There are no details on what the students won or how many students participated. I'd like to see both details included in future news releases.

One in Four Americans Holds an Alternative Educational Credential

The Census Bureau reported today (press release) that some 1/4 of U.S. adults hold a credential that's not a tradition college degree. The Census cites a professional certifications, licenses or educational certificates as examples. The data is from fall 2012 and is detailed in a report titled Measuring Alternative Educational Credentials: 2012 (pdf).

Money does come with these credentials.

Among full-time workers, the median monthly earnings for someone with a professional certification or license only was $4,167, compared with $3,433 for one with an educational certificate only; $3,920 for those with both types of credentials; and $3,110 for people without any alternative credential.

But, if you have a bachelors degree, adding on one of these does not significantly change income.

Two findings are relevant to geography and GIS leaners and workers.

About three-quarters of professional certifications and licenses were required for the current or most recent job. 

That's not something we see (yet?) in our field. It's a rarity when a professional certification is even noted in a job posting and in most U.S. states, there is no licensing of GIS users.

More than 90 percent of these credential holders took training or courses and had to demonstrate on-the-job skills or pass a test or exam in order to earn them.

This is also something not common in the U.S. geography/GIS market. However, with the current work on a test for the GISCI GISP credential, there may be some movement in this direction.

The main finding of this data for me is this: Educational institutions, educators, learners and hiring managers should open their eyes to these alternative credentials. They are here to stay.

Making Sense of Certificates, Certification and Badges: A Hiring Manager's Guide

You might have seen image posted on SlashGeo.

 It prompted the Twitter conversation below.

I don't  believe the writer who posted the certificate misrepresented how one can complete a (free) Esri course and receive such a certificate. And, I'm not sure if Mr. Fee was really confused about the difference between a certificate of completion and Esri's formal, test-based Associate and Professional Certifications. 

But the interchange does highlight how a potential employer, especially one not conversant in the GIS/Esri/Education lingo regarding GIS recognition, might be. Employers would need to know about certificates of completion (like the one above, saying a course was completed), industry certifications (GISP, ASPRS), educational institutions' certificate programs (Penn State Post Baccalaureate Certificate), and vendor certifications (Esri's Certification program).

Free Education, Badges and other Credentials

And, now of course, we have a whole new set of credentials that may make their way to GIS: badges (for example from Mozilla or Khan Academy) and letters from instructors for those who participate in massive online classes (for example, the Stanford AI class). All of these (mostly free) learning and credential collecting opportunities tend to have as part of their mission making "education available to all." Khan Academy basically adds the term "world class" to that to define its mission statement. I can find no fault with efforts to bring education to all.

There are many issues to be resolved with badges and other credentials; I want to set that aside for right now and focus on these free learning opportunities. Who are they for? Ideally, they are for anyone who wants to learn something "new." Audrey Watters (my favorite edtech writer/podcaster) is currently taking a massive online Python course. Among her fellow students? Those who program in Python for a living! Moreover, she reports that in the course forums there wasn't quite the respect for "newbie" questions as she might hope. Why are working professionals taking the course? I can only guess, but fear one reason might be to gain the credential at the end. It's a way, as the SlashGeo poster put it, to "help you pimp your resume." 

Advice for Hiring Managers

Pity the overworked hiring manager who gets a pile of resumes and has to navigate all these certificates, certifications and badges! What is he or she to do? Ask a lot of questions. 

If the applicant hasn't provided a reference to explain the nature of credential (say a link to the GISCI website), the employer should ask about it either in a phone or personal interview. Ask the applicant who granted the credential, what is means, what was required to attain it and why they pursued it. 

That last one is key and can reveal a lot about the applicant. I'd love to hear an applicant who took one of Esri's free three hour classes explain they did so because they were taking a university course that included the topic and didn't quite understand the key points. I'd love to hear that an applicant was working on a project (for work, school, or on their own) and needed to know how to do that specific thing to complete it. Other answers, such as "I don't know," "I don't remember," or "to pad my resume" would not be as promising.

As more and new types of credentials appear on resumes, hiring managers, the consumers of those documents, have to dig deeper to tease out their value. Alternatively, they could ignore the credentials and administer a test or assignment to see if the applicant has the skills.

The Geospatial Technology Competency Model in Plain English

I’ve gone to conference presentations and I’ve stared at the multi-colored pyramid on the Dept of Labor website, but when pigeon-holed at a conference (Thanks, Neil!) I could not recall the name, nature, or purpose of the Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM). So, I did some homework. Here, in plain English is what you need to  know about the GTCM. 

1. The GTCM is one of many competency models.

The Dept of Labor has a whole bunch of models for different industries. I count 19 as write this; they range from Advanced Manufacturing (there is no basic manufacturing) to Water Sector. They all have that same pyramidal shape.

2. The GTCM defines GIS Technician workers' skills and competencies in the US.                  

Industry experts helped build it. Here’s the corresponding job description (which seems a bit dated to me based on the software products listed, but is a fine start).

3. The GTCM can be used by educators and trainers to develop course outlines and degrees/certificate programs that match these competencies.

It’s vendor and technology agnostic; that is, it's about skills, not specific software or hardware. There are some course outlines (including an open source software based one) from workshops done in 2011 by the GeoTech Center. You need a login/password to access them via a Moodle server.

4. There is a GTCM Assessment Tool.

The assessment tool is big spreadsheet that those with existing courses can use to see how their courses match the competencies. The assessment can then be used to enhance the course where there are weaknesses or confirm that topics missing in that course are covered in another course in a program.

5. The GTCM can ideally make it easier for business to hire qualified workers.

Since industry helps define the model, the argument is that schools (and other education providers) will address competencies in the model and thus graduate students who can tackle available jobs.

6. The GTCM can help in the creation of articulation agreements (agreements whereby schools accept each others credits).

For example, students who study GIS in high school may be able to transfer credit when joining a community college GIS certificate or degree program.

7. Industry organizations are beginning to use the GTCM as a basis for a variety of activities.

USGIF will be using the GTCM in its accreditation program for GEOINT (for schools, not for individuals) and GISCI is considering the addition of a competency-based examination aligned with the GTCM for its updated certification program. The GeoTech Center uses the model for a competition and URISA is looking into a management version of the model. (Source: Career One-Stop pdf)