GIS Education Weekly: FOSS4G Teachable Moments

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Fake image of a September 3rd, 2019,
fire in Central Park, New York City

Medium: It’s a faaaake… — Or not? - Pierre Markuse discusses how to identify fake imagery in the media. Via SE Sieber.

Bloomberg: Apple Maps Gives Crimea to Russia, Gets Angry Ukrainian Reaction - "Ukraine’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Vadym Prystaiko accused Apple Inc. of insensitivity for having some versions of its Maps application depict the Crimean peninsula as being part of Russia." Via Dave Murray.

GIS Education Weekly: Teaching Nurses about Opioids Using Maps

On and Off Campus

Accessible and inaccessible entrances at UT. 

The Daily Texan: New map helps students find accessible entrances - "The accessible door map is available on the UT Maps webpage and shows students all the accessible entrances on campus, including ones that have power-assisted doors. "

Delaware Gazette: City, OWU form partnership - "Ohio Wesleyan University and the City of Delaware signed a memorandum of understanding on Thursday creating a permanent OWU student internship within the city’s Department of Public Utilities and formalizing additional opportunities for city-campus collaboration." Students will work in many areas including GIS.

GIS Education Weekly: Future of Work Skills Include Active Learning but not Spatial Ability

Resources

Inverse: Twitter Usage Data Can Map How Screwed Up Your Sleep Is - Scientists (biologists not geographers) at the University of Chicago are using tweets to explore U.S. residents' sleep loss.

Esri: Policy Maps - This is a nice interface to data for the U.S. There's an intro video here.

GIS Education Weekly: The Search for Happy Cities

Journal of Maps Best Map Award Winner

Awards

Daniel M. Stephen & Bernhard Jenny won the Journal Of Maps Best Map of 2017 award. The full paper (open access) is available online.

2017 Information is Beautiful Awards - Some lovely maps and visualizations to explore.

Be Careful What You Wish For: MOOC Edition

The Past

Back in 2015 I wrote a post on this blog titled Location Advantage Dropout. In it, I detailed my experience in Esr's Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) focused on GIS use in business. Depending on your perspective, I was brutal or honest as I described what convinced me to drop out of the course. I also provided suggestions on how to make the course better.

The Present

Today I'm Esri's MOOC program manager. I'm charged, along with my team (second to none, by the way), to develop and offer the best possible MOOCs. I like to think my passion for MOOCs and my evaluation of the course helped get me this position. I think it's time to respond to the points I raised, now that I'm on the inside. I want to address each of the suggestions I made in turn.

GIS Education Weekly: Learning Geography with Pokemon GO, Finding Money for EdTech, Making Naked Maps

In and Out of the Classroom

An ASU student works on a paper map that's
part of a Pokemon GO lesson

ASU professor Karen Guerrero has turned the mobile game Pokémon GO into a tool to teach geography, math and language skills. She's a member of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and wrote a lesson aimed at sixth graders that builds on the game.

Yingjie Hu, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Krzysztof Janowicz and Helen Couclelis, both of the University of California, Santa Barbara developed an algorithm for prioritizing disaster mapping tasks, such as the work of HOTOSM.

GIS Education Weekly: Problem Solvers, Updated Cartography Books and the Class of 2020

Resources

The University of Georgia has a Community Mapping Lab. What's that? This video from late August explains the background as well as summarizing a few current projects.

The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education's Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (AACE-SITE) has released tahe special issue on geospatial technologies in teacher education (open access!). My Esri colleague Tom Baker and Marymount University's Elizabeth Langran edited the issue.

John Krygier and Dennis Wood's third edition of Making Maps, Third Edition: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS is out. The new edition contains over 40 pages of new content, more than 35 new maps, and updated and expanded discussions. I confess I've not heard of this book. Via GIS Lounge.

2015: The State of GIS and Geography Education

An 1899 class in mathematical geography at
Hampton University, a historically black institution
Public Domain, via Wikipedia

I've been doing year end recaps of the GIS industry for more than a decade. My interest has focused more on GIS and geography education for the last few years. I started writing about the topic regularly when I was at Directions Magazine and continued via a newsletter which launched in December of last year.

This will be my first recap detailing the state of GIS and geography education.

GIS Education Weekly: High Schoolers and Interns Solve Challenges, MOOCs, Essential Body of Knowledge

Bronx High School of Science Students find Use Cases for DigitalGlobe Imagery

Image by Ryan Jay Crisostomo CC BY-SA 3.0

This year at State of the Map [the OpenStreetMap US event], developers and users gathered at the United Nations in New York City to exchange information on the latest geospatial applications. Among the participants were 15 entrepreneurial-minded students from the Bronx High School of Science. The students were on hand to discuss their use cases detailing the application of satellite imagery, big data, and maps to solve problems challenging the commercial sector, particularly, real estate investment, infrastructure, and security.

Ninety students at the school were part of DigitalGlobe's Bright Ideas competition held at the top notch school. (I was in an NSF high school program one summer and the Bronx High School of Science students kicked my butt.) The good news:

The original ideas within these use cases are the intellectual property of these superb intellectual athletes, and their next step is to apply to for grants through the DigitalGlobe Foundation to further their ideas towards commercialization.

If the ideas come to fruition, DigitalGlobe will sell imagery. Is it possible this detailed imagery is still a solution in search of a problem?

USGIF Publishes GEOINT Essential Body of Knowledge

USGIF produced the GEOINT Essential Body of Knowledge (EBK, PDF). It conducting a cross-industry job analysis to identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities critical to the GEOINT positions. The document was developed in support of the upcoming Universal GEOINT Certification I discussed last week.

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What GIS People Need to Know about MOOCs

Last month (Sept 2013) at the GIS-Pro Conference in Providence, RI I gave a lightning talk (five minutes, 20 slides that advance every 15 seconds). The goal was to provide those in the geospatial industry an overview what they needed to know about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). I thought it went great and URISA videotaped it and published it on YouTube. It's below.

You can find all the talks (well, except one) on this channel.