GIS Education Weekly: Can Carmen Sandiego Fix America’s Geography Woes?

Education News

The spread of automated essay scoring

Vice: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays - "Essay-scoring engines don’t actually analyze the quality of writing. They’re trained on sets of hundreds of example essays to recognize patterns that correlate with higher or lower human-assigned grades. They then predict what score a human would assign an essay, based on those patterns." Via Audrey Watters. The article includes an interactive map; screen capture at right.

TES: GCSE results: 'A tectonic shift in geography entries' - "Geopolitical and environmental crises help to explain why more students are choosing geography GCSE" There's a quote from Sir Michael Palin.

GIS Education Weekly: More GeoInquiries, More Open Source from Uber, More Night Data from NASA

deck.gl in Action

Articles and Resources

TechCrunch: Uber’s open source data visualization tool now goes beyond maps - Uber offers an open source version of the data visualization framework it uses internally, called deck.gl. Announced and available since last November, it’s just been updated with more visualization options.

Esri: Two sample packs of GeoInquiries (free, no log on lesson plans for K-12) have been released:

• Esri GeoInquiries for Mathematics (announcement) 
• Esri GeoInquiries for American Literature (announcement) 

h/t @trbaker

GIS Education Weekly: Free and Discounted Resources for Teaching and Learning

Resources

The GI Learner program, funded by the Erasmus+ program and the European Union, offers two reports of note:

• Spatial Thinking Review (pdf) - literature review of research about spatial thinking
• GI-Learner competencies (pdf) - spatial competencies for K-12 learners

There's an update to Learning QGIS and a deal to encourage purchases: 100 copies of the book are available at 30% off for print and 50% off for eBook.

ArcPy exercises, including course data and a 200 page PDF, are free to download from Esri. These are the course materials for Paul A. Zandbergen's ArcPy (Python) book.

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.