GIS Education Weekly: What Industry Can do for Young Professionals

Resources for Teaching and Learning

The Scotsman: Map of Scots women accused of witchcraft published for first time - A new map tracks more than 3,000 Scots women who were accused of being witches in the 16th and 17th century. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh built on the Scottish Witchcraft Survey which detailed the persecution of women during the period, with many burned at the stake or drowned. Interesting symbols!

Devex: Should open-source software be the gold standard for nonprofits? - This article, that tells the story of a move from open source to proprietary, is making the rounds. It should prompt some good conversations in classrooms worldwide.

GIS Education Weekly: Just Because You Can Map Something, Should You?

Some Assignment Ideas

AdForum: BayCare Ad - This is a series of ads (a billboard version is at right) trying to help health care users select the appropriate resource: either urgent care or emergency care. They are very clever. I was thinking about a fun assignment for students. Use that technique to distinguish between:

• CAD and GIS
• Surveying and GIS
• Google Maps and GIS
• Certificate vs. Certification

Alice Jin of Esri Canada offered her take on how to explain GIS in Google Maps vs GIS Maps - What to say at your next Dinner Party on LinkedIn. Jeff Thurston shared an article, The Evolution of GIS In a Changing World saying, "This article attempts to explain the power of GIS in layman terms." Ask students to offer their own insights in 500 words or less.

A Geographer Looks at EdTech in 2013 - Part 7 - Data vs. Privacy

--- This post is the seventh in a ten part series examining top 2013 trends in education technology in the context of GIS and geography education. ---

Watters notes that the collections and use of education related data was a trend in 2011 and 2012, but its appearance in 2013 is the most dismaying. Watters regularly explores how learning management systems (LMSs) and other software solutions collect data about students including their grades, how long they watch videos, their uses of social media and more. She asks, quite correctly, who owns those data and what can they legally do with the? She also pushes at the irony: the students are not always the ones benefiting from this data collection.

Privacy regarding personal and educational data is certainly worth attention. But now, privacy regarding student's location information around education is coming to the fore. For example:

• Schools track students as they get on and off buses.
• Online schools track where students are (IP map from UW) but could (and perhaps already do?) collect details such as where individuals watch videos or take take tests.
• The University of Alabama announced plans to use drone to monitor student safety on campus.

We, as geospatial educators, need to raise the location privacy concern associated with these sorts of efforts. Are they required? Opt-in? Invasive? Transparent? Valuable?

That last question is most relevant in 2013. Remember the student who refused to wear an RFID-enabled ID tag because she felt it conflicted with her religious beliefs? A court did not support her preference to go un-badged. But, not long after, the school dropped the program because it didn't provide the expected return on investment.