GIS Ed Weekly: Remembering Michael Jones and Kobe Bryant

On and Off Campus

 

Yahoo News: Web app helps GPs map out best route for vaccination of housebound patients - "VaxiMap, created by two students from Magdalen College, Oxford, comes up with the optimal route and has already been used for more than 61,000 home visit vaccinations in Britain in the last few weeks."

 

Worcester Telegram: Clark to partner with city, local organizations on $10M workforce training grant - Clark University received a U.S. Department of Labor H-1B One Workforce Grant and will collaborate with Quinsigamond Community College, the City of Worcester, the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, and MassHire Central, among others. "Participants will be able to take part in on-the-job training, paid internships, and apprenticeship programs, the university said, and become prepared for jobs like information security analyst, GIS technician, software developer, and computer support specialist."

GIS Ed Weekly: NGA seeks neurodiverse hires

Resources for Teaching and Learning

 

Journal of Maps: Mobile UX design: learning from the Flyover Country mobile app - "In the paper, we note UX design insights that are potentially transferable to other mobile mapping contexts, organizing insights by mobile representation design (scale, projection, symbolization, and typography) versus mobile interaction design (map entry point, bottom navigation, floating action button, and pull-up information panel)." A timely article to introduce UI/UX into a cartography or GIS course.

Kaiser Health News: Geography Is Destiny: Dentists’ Access to Covid Shots Depends on Where They Live - "A handful of states are making dentists a lower priority than other health professionals for inoculations, even though they have their hands in people’s mouths and are exposed to aerosols that spray germs in their faces." 

GIS Edu Weekly: Mapbox license change is a teachable moment

Mapbox Changes it Software License

Mapbox powers AccuWeather maps

I saw this news last week but did not understand it, so I decided to wait until I did to write about it. Thankfully, Paul Ramsey explained what's going on in a reply to Joe Morrison's post on the topic. In short, going forward Mapbox is changing its licensing of Mapbox gl-js such that at version 2.0 it's no longer open source. "Updates to the v1 releases [with the BSD license] will be made only for critical browser compatibility or security issues for a limited time" per a Mapbox blog post. 

From 2.0 onward, the license is this one detailed on GitHub, that includes fees when an application passes a threshold (which is further detailed in the Mapbox blog post). That's akin to what Google Maps does; the service is free to a point, then you pay. Mapbox was among the companies who tried to "woo" disenchanted Google Maps users to Mapbox after its 2011 price change.

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 Ed Weekly: Making Art Instead of Maps in Geography Class

On and Off Campus 

Work by geography student Myles Peeters

Simon Fraser: Geography students discover the healing power of art - Last semester SFU geography instructor Sharla Stolhandske asked "students to create drawings, paintings, poetry or music to express their ideas for how to make sense of our changing world. She wanted them to discover that art could not only help them engage on topics in a different way, but could also improve how they manage their mental and emotional well-being."  

 

Florida State:  FSU communication, engineering researchers awarded grant to study natural disaster response - "FSU researchers are helping to develop operational procedures for public libraries during natural disasters through a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services." On the team is AMU-FSU College of Engineering Associate Professor Eren Erman Ozguven who "hopes to establish a GIS module that gives librarians the ability to see where vulnerable populations are located and distinguish the resource that is most accessible to them."

GIS Ed Weekly: Revisiting North at the Top

Mapping

 

ABC News: Which US states require masks and which 2 don't at all? - A doctor friend shared this map from July 22. We had a nice chat about the legend.

NY Times: More Than 6,600 Coronavirus Cases Have Been Linked to U.S. Colleges - Frat members, administrators, construction workers and student athletes are testing positive.

GIS Ed Weekly: Mapping Drone Education Programs and Drone Rescues

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Chartable (DataWrapper Blog): Lisa Charlotte Rost offers a three part series on colorblindness. There are valuable insights for anyone creating dataviz including insights from some colorblind cartographers.

• 1 How your colorblind and colorweak readers see your colors
• 2 What to consider when visualizing data for colorblind readrs
• 3 What’s it like to be colorblind

GeoTech Center: Geospatial Technology Educator Certification - The first cohort has completed the certification. I confess, I lost touch with that effort, which was noted in a GeoTech Center newsletter last year (pdf). Thankfully, educator Jason Smolinsky, shared his certification on LinkedIn this week.

GIS Ed Weekly: An Ethics Teachable Moment

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Visual Capitalist: Visualizing the True Size of Land Masses from Largest to Smallest - The sizes are nice but honestly, seeing the detailed shapes is pretty amazing, too! Check out Mali! Here's the graphic for download.

Education Dive: There's more to geography than just 50 states and their capitals - NatGeo, NCGE and a California teacher of the year address the value of and hope for geography's future in K-12.

GIS Ed Weekly: Messages from a Geography Lecturer and Graduating Student

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Big Think: The periodic table also is a map – well, kind of - Fully 28 elements on the periodic table are named after places. This article would make a great story map!

Spatial Reserves Blog: Top 7 Satellite Imagery Sources - The list is from EOS dated April 2019.

GIS Ed Weekly: Alaska Losing Geography, Wyoming Trying to Add GIS&T

Events

Instagram: TODAY Thursday at 12pm ET there's a special Map Time with Stace Maples, who will discuss a 1943 map of the prevalence of malaria by Dr. Seuss, among other things. Via @HarvardMapColl.

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Mapbox Blog: Square’s New Map Looks Great on Receipts - Have you ever received a receipt with a map on it? Should all receipts have maps? Why or why not?

GIS Ed Weekly: Winners from Bay College, Dutchtown High, Wollongong and Green Bay

On and Off Campus

Twitter: "This semester, the Community GIS class at UGA partnered with the Linnentown Project to digitize and provide analysis of records about the demolition of an African-American neighborhood near campus in the early 1960s." The thread includes links to the projects and student reflections. Via @cmaplab.

Moose Jaw Today: Sask Polytech could use student's year-end project in engineering course this fall - "A Saskatchewan Polytechnic student’s year-end project about the former Husky refinery site in Moose Jaw could be used as part of the environmental engineering program this fall." His was only one of the two projects using GIS in the Applied Research Student Showcase.

GIS Ed Weekly: Dataviz for Cholera and COVID-19

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Extent of the cholera epidemic in 1849

Twitter: James Cheshire of UCL captures where John Snow's map of cholera fit into the maps of its day. He starts, "Here's a lesson for COVID-19 dataviz..."

UCGIS Blog: Reflections from a Decade of Online Teaching - Karen Kemp reflects on her work at USC. "Bottom line: Don’t try to do everything perfectly all at once and don't overload your students. Design your course thoughtfully, make sure everything included will have value to your students and that they will understand why they are learning it. And, importantly, design your assignments so they are easy to grade and clearly written so that your students understand what you are asking them to do without needing extra (time-consuming) guidance." I could not agree more. Via @dianamaps.

GIS Ed Weekly: How will we teach this fall? HyFlex?

People

The First News: Teacher's pets: Teacher becomes online hit with guinea pig geography lessons - "The 20-minute-long video lessons show teacher Marta Łapińska-Kubiak from Poznań [western Poland] using maps, globes and presentations while her two pet guinea pigs Leoś and Sobieś wander across continents asking questions which she then answers." There are currently four lessons.

RIT: RIT graduate Peter Yeung found perfect fit within university’s deaf community - Yeung has three RIT degrees and works at NGA.

GIS Ed Weekly: Geography Finds a Home in New Credentials and Schools

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Columbia Journalism Review: The topography of local news: A new map - "This study builds on the work of others in our field in two key ways: first, by identifying the complete range of journalistic news providers (print, digital, and broadcast) serving an entire US state, and second, by mapping those news providers according to the communities they cover, rather than where they are headquartered, as some have done."

Visual Capitalist (blog): Incredible Map of Pangea With Modern-Day Borders - Massimo Pietrobon created a map of the supercontinent called Pangea with the approximate borders of present day countries.

GIS Education Weekly: Mapping Coral and Coloring Buffalo, NY

Resources for Teaching and Learning

A user playing the new NeMO-Net game that helps NASA 
classify the world's coral. Credits: NASA/Ames Research
 Center/Ved Chirayath

NASA: NASA Calls on Gamers, Citizen Scientists to Help Map World's Corals - "NASA invites video gamers and citizen scientists to embark on virtual ocean research expeditions to help map coral reefs around the world in an effort to better understand these threatened ecosystems."


TIME: How the ‘Father of Epidemiology’ Made the Connection Between Disease and Geography - Because John Snow. The article is an excerpt from a new book The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask.

GIS Edu Weekly: Beyond the Default COVID-19 Maps

Beyond the Default COVID-19 Maps

Scientific American: Map Reveals Hidden U.S. Hotspots of Coronavirus Infection - " ...a team from the University of Chicago has mapped confirmed COVID-19 infections per county—and has adjusted for population sizes. The researchers’ findings reveal significant clusters in parts of Georgia, Arkansas and Mississippi, among other areas. Even though the involved populations may be smaller than those of New York or Seattle, they could be disproportionally hit by the disease." 

wnky.com: Program pairs high-risk residents with low-risk volunteers to help them - "Using geographic information systems (GIS) to help find and arrange matches between elder or high-risk residents requesting assistance and low-risk volunteers who can help, this project is a collaboration between Western Kentucky University geography staff and students, the City of Bowling Green, Warren County government and the Warren County Sheriff’s Office."

GIS Edu Weekly: Universities and Students Build Coronavirus Maps and More

Teaching and Learning in the Time of Coronavirus

ASU Now: ASU geographers, urban planners bridge distance gap, build community - "On a recent Friday morning, nearly 30 Arizona State University School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning faculty, staff and students gathered for virtual coffee."

Mapbox Blog: 7 best practices for mapping a pandemic - This is from Kelsey Taylor, Senior Map Designer.