2015: Where is GIS Education in the Top EdTech Trends?

Every year Audrey Watters ends the year with a set of posts covering the last 12 months' edtech trends. I read the ones posted up until Dec 18 and here ponder where GIS education fits. 

The Politics of Education Technology

Common Core, the election, Arne Duncan stepping down, paying for college .... most of these are of little concern to GIS educators.

The federal government's interest in geography and edtech (where GIS falls) are of concern. Geography graduated up in the latest education bill (Every Student Succeeds Act) in that it's now considered part of a well balanced breakfast, I mean education. That to me says there's still quite a lot of advocacy and grant writing at the state level needed for any measurable changes in the coming years.

Should Educators Expect Reliable and Backward Compatible GIS Software?

"Two adult Guinea Pigs (Cavia porcellus)"
 by Sandos at Wikipedia. Licensed
under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

Matthew Wilson recapped a panel titled Geographic Education in a Modern World from the NACIS meeting held last month in Minneapolis. There are some interesting tidbits including one about expectations from GIS software providers.

GIS Education Brief: Goal First, Tech Second

Learning about Learning via People I don't Know via Twitter

Jennifer Maze (‏@JenGrayScience) is middle and high school science teacher in Colorado. I don't know her, but somewhere along the way I learned she was an educator to follow on Twitter. I've not been disappointed!

If I parsed her tweets from this weekend correctly, she attended a Google for Education Global Summit. She offered a torrent of tweets, one of which I'll tackle in Thursday's newsletter/post. Today I want to consider this tweet from Sunday.

NASA World Wind is a great tool.
What goal would an educator have
for its use in or outside of class?

Pick the learning goal, then the strategy, then the tool -- NEVER start with the tool! #gafesummit

That's the process I learned from my instructional designers at Penn State. I also learned that at Penn State classes are not aimed at teaching software packages. I'm guessing those who formally study education learn these ideas even earlier in their professional development than I did.

GIS Education Briefs: #GISed, Water on Mars Story Map, Geography Textbook Spat

#GISED

Esri's Joseph Kerski (@josephkerski)  made a suggestion this week regarding the hashtag #GISED and the Esri twitter account @gised.

Keep in touch with all that is happening in GIS education via #gised @gised

I find the hashtag and account quite valuable. The most active users of the hashtag are Esri folks (Kerski, @trbaker, and @GISEd), AAG GeoMentors (‏@AAGGeoMentors) and me (@adenas). I use the tag to highlight content of interest to those involved in GIS education, using any technology. I'd love to see more GIS education tweets tagged!

Questions About the Mars Story Map

You know what didn't get the #GISED hashtag on Twitter this past week? The Discovering Liquid Water on Mars story map. It got a lot of praise including these terms I found in tweets: "fantastic, " "awesome," "stunning," and "amazing."

The story map prompted lots of questions for me. What questions? I wrote them down as I worked through the story map. Each number below is a "dot" in the story map table of contents.

1) I really liked the opening time series from Horowitz Crater that shows the changes in the streaks made by water over time. I guessed that the MY had something to do with the Martian Year and looked up the details. The data shown in the time series are from 2006 through 2011. 

Location of Horowitz Crater

I clicked where indicated to "see Horowitz Crater on a satellite map of Mars." Since I have no specialized knowledge of Mars' geography the locator map didn't mean much to me. I wanted to see where the crater was on the globe of Mars. For example, was it northern or southern hemisphere? 

2) Next was a video of similar streaks on Hale Crater. I wanted a link to the source video so I could get more information about the time frame covered. I think I found the video source here. I also wanted to know where Hale Crater was relative to Horowitz. I tried a few online Mars maps including NASA's Mars Trek and Google's Mars Map but didn't find an answer.

3) The  next image showed Garni Crater with multiple streaks "many of them several hundred yards long." I found it cool to know how long they were! I wanted a scale so I could perhaps see how long they were in relation to other features. I found more information on the image in a NASA image of the day post. 

4) Palikir Crater, like Horowitz, includes a time series. Did Esri create the two time series? I can't tell from the credits/sources. 

The story map collects a lot of interesting images and animations and raises many geographic questions that require additional research to answer. That makes it a great starting point to learn about spatial thinking. The story map reinforces the value of time series imagery to show change over time.

What questions did the story map prompt you to ask? Did you follow up to try to find answers? Did you/would you use the story map in a geography or science class? How?

Slavery and "Workers" in Geography Textbook

World Geography is a textbook from McGraw-Hill Education. It includes a section called “Patterns of Immigration.” A caption of a map reads:

The Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.

A ninth grade student found the wording and his mother took the issue to Youtube. McGraw-Hill agreed something was amiss on its Facebook page . The company plans to remedy the situation by immediately updating the online version of the book and including the change in the book's next printing. The Chronicle of Higher Ed offers other choice quotes from the text. Update: Reuters  reports the company will send stickers to cover the errant caption. (Read more: CNN, Buzzfeed)

Esri UC Q & A Takeaways

Esri User Conference Q & A

When I worked at Esri, I'd print out the Esri UC Q&A and read it on the plane to California for the event. When I joined Directions Magazine, we'd do a podcast highlighting what we found interesting in the Q & A before the conference (2013 edition). Now that I'm on my own, I'm gathering what I found interesting in this blog post.

This year's document is a 169 page PDF and a webpage.

Required Reading

The ArcGIS Book: 10 Big Ideas About Applying Geography to Your World

This book is an interactive website that will be available soon (expected by July 15, 2015). Today, you can download The ArcGIS Book as an interactive PDF (70 MB).

Actually, the interactive website is slated to be available July 18 (as of July 13) as of July 15. The Q&A recommends User Conference attendees read the book before the conference.

I had a look at the PDF (156 pages, almost as long as the Q&A!) which includes links to videos (Jack Dangermond, Jim Herries, and Allen Carroll make appearances), Learn ArcGIS lessons and in the later chapters projects with ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro.

It's interesting to me that the book is hosted on the Learn.ArcGIS.com website and I'm guessing was produced by that team. I wrote about Learn ArcGIS last year; it rolled out at last year's User Conference.

Nepal Earthquake Mapping: Telling Your Company's Story

Word is Out!

Status of one Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Task

In the geospatial circles where I travel on Web, the crowdsourced mapping efforts related to the Nepal earthquake are getting lots of digital ink. Based on my experience the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap effort is most mentioned, then Tomnod (DigitalGlobe) then the Kathmandu Cultural Emergency effort.

These efforts are making the rounds outside my geo and tech-focused media orbit in mainstream outlets like Wired, The Atlantic, the New York Times and many local papers where a local school, company or organization is participating.

I'm very happy to see all these stories. The coverage helps people around the world understand the value of maps and offers them a way to help in the recovery and relief efforts. And, it helps raise awareness of projects like OpenStreetMap and tools like CrowdMap (a crowdsourcing tool from the team behind Ushahidi). And, it reinforces the role for profit companies like DigitalGlobe can have in times of crisis.

Working in Geospatial: Skills Stay the Same, but the Toolset Changes

Being a Handy(wo)man

Image by Karenne Sylvester
under under CC-BY-2.0 

Lyzi Diamond of Mapbox tweeted this last week:

Working in geospatial tech is like being a handy(wo)man. Skills stay the same, but the toolset changes with technology. (h/t @Shawn_Goulet)

I responded:

Prepare students accordingly! #gised  

This is not a new idea to me. My first days of college included "The Aims of Education" address. The tradition at the University of Chicago is that incoming students listen patiently to the lecture and then go back to their residential houses to discuss it. I'm sure we didn't come to any conclusions about what the aims of education were, but we did get the idea in our heads that it was a topic to be pondered for a lifetime.

I concluded at the ripe old age of 25 that what I learned in college and grad school was to read, write and think. I didn't choose those terms, John Wilson of Arthur D. Little did. He was a senior consultant, who attended the same college. When he called me to his office he informed me he'd picked me, an intern, for a project because he knew I had those skills. Those skills, I found, were all I had to create a happy life and career for myself. As I've moved through my career, I've realized all the jobs I ever had came down to reading, writing and thinking, though I'd broaden writing to "communicating" since I've done a lot of speaking, too. The one addition I'd make is to note that the technology and the topics to which I apply them have changed.

2014: The Year in GIS Education

Here's a roundup of the key GIS education news from 2014. While I'm skeptical of the impact of badges and Esri's ConnectED efforts, I think the grass roots growth of open source GIS in education has legs. I think there is promise in geo-related educational technology, but this year's efforts are but toes in the water.

UAS Education Front

I've been following Unmanned Vehicle University over the past few years (2012, 2013). The organization was surprisingly quiet this year and I found out why: the founder and Executive Director, Dr. Jerome LeMieux, Jr. passed away July 4.

U.S. educational organizations pursued federal funding opportunities related to UAS teaching and research (pdf on UAS Centers of Excellence) even as others banded together to express frustration about limitations in UAS use in research and teaching. U.S. educators (and most other users) must be patient as the Federal Aviation Administration finalizes its rules. The current word from the Government Accountability Office suggests that will not happen until 2017.

What is new this year in UAS education?

• Ohio students are working with simulations of drones. Students in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics program at Greenon High School are are in what's called a first of its kind program in the region. 
• In Australia, Unmanned Experts is moving from instructor-led and classroom-based instruction on UAVs to online training. 
• Nicholls State  University (Louisiana) geomatics students received a donation from Lafayette-based Navigation Electronics Inc. (NEI), a GPS and GIS equipment provider: a Trimble UX5 unmanned aerial vehicle, optical sensors, image processing software and training worth $70K. Why? The Harold C. “Charlie” Poche Jr. Laser Scanning Laboratory at Nicholls is named for the former NEI owner and president, who died in 2000.
• Penn State and the University of Denver launched online UAS courses as part of their GIS programs.

GIS Education Learning Communities

I was not really familiar with the idea of "Learning Communities" the related "Communities of Practice" until I took a MOOC that introduced the idea. Our assignment involved observing and documenting such a community in action. I explored a community I was already in that I'd never though of as a learning community: my running club. That project prompted me to consider such communities in GIS/geography education.

I consider TeachGIS (now dormant), the GeoTech Center and Esri's Learn ArcGIS and Esri's Education Community (via its Facebook, GeoNet, listserve and other presences) infrastructures aimed at creating learning communities. My sense is that not one of them has reached critical mass ...yet. What education focused learning communities do I frequent? I regular visit communities that are not really focused on GIS education, but GIS in general: Reddit/GIS and GIS Stackexchange.