GIS Education Community Blog

The Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) has proclaimed February as Career & Technical Education Month. The association and its constituents are dedicated to developing an educated, prepared, adaptable, and competitive workforce in a rich blend of workforce pathways best represented by the Career Clusters Framework. Laced inside these individual clusters are geographical thinking, GIS, and geospatial technology and their application in the everyday world.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight some of these career cluster and geotechnology intersections. Generally, our lives and the world around us are predictable. However, we also live in a world of change, the unexpected, and, at times, danger. A brilliant blue sky becomes a thunderous storm with serious flooding. The ground below our feet quakes toppling buildings. A tiny spark turns into a huge wildland fire engulfing forests and homes. A tanker car derails putting deadly fumes into the atmosphere. And, difficult to believe, some people inflict disaster on others on small and large scales. While our first line of protection in these instances is ourselves or our friends and family, at times we need help from others—persons involved with public safety, such as firefighters, emergency managers, law enforcement officials, or persons in related fields.

www.esri.com/haiti

Public safety occupations have at their core a mission of dealing with situations where life, property, and/or the environment are at risk. The tasks persons in these positions tackle involve many skills, including geographical thinking and the use of GIS and other geotechnologies. Surprised?

When we see a helicopter dropping a load of flame retardant on a spreading brush fire, or watch fire equipment racing off to a location, or hear evacuation alerts because of toxics in the air miles away, we probably don't think about it but underneath these actions is geographical thinking. For instance:

Where do you decide to drop the retardant? How might the choice be affected by the path of the fire, terrain, presence of fuels (things that will burn) and weather?

Where's the fire? Where's the fire station? What's the best route to the incident at this time of day? Once there, where are the fire hydrants? What's burning, where and what else is in the vicinity?

Which way is the wind blowing and how fast? What is the rate the toxics will scatter and drop to the ground? What lies in the path of the noxious plume? Who should we evacuate and to where?

Public safety is not only about responding to emergencies. What if you could prevent a calamity from happening? This means being able to assess various threats, anticipate problems, prepare for natural and human catastrophes and how to handle them. Being able to literally map out and analyze this range of tasks is a key to public safety because geography is part of all of them. Geographic thinking is a critical skill regardless of the specific public safety occupation.

While we all carry maps around in our heads and have paper ones, public safety officials make use of high-tech tools and approaches. GIS and other geospatial technologies are providing firefighters, emergency managers, safety inspectors, and a host of other positions with the abilities to answer questions noted above and many more.

Learn more:
* Career Corner TV video profiles > Helicopter Pilot
* ESRI Map Book Gallery > Search = Public Safety, etc.
* ESRI Public Safety Program
* ESRI Homeland Security Program
* ESRI Law Enforcement & Criminal Justice Program

Stay tuned for the next installment. Note:

The Career Clusters icons are being used with permission of the States’ Career Clusters Initiative, 2010, www.careerclusters.org

- George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager

I was in northern Virginia for a storm this past weekend described by local and national weather-casters as "epic," "Snow-pocalypse," or "Snowmageddon." As a native Minnesotan, I knew the steps necessary to prepare myself. As a geographer, I was delighted to see the degree to which maps were a part of the public awareness campaign. Everyone, from the educators I was working with to politicians to "regular citizens," was paying heed to the maps, in anticipation of snowfall amounts exceeding 24 inches in the Washington DC area. Everyone referenced the maps in discussing the preparation necessary.

Weather events can be dangerous, especially when people try to lead normal lives under abnormal circumstances. The proliferation of computer applications, up-to-the-minute web maps, animated displays, and broadcast streams focused on weather all help demonstrate the power of maps for understanding everyday phenomena and variations from one's vision of "normal." The lives lost and hardships experienced during these events make me want to re-double the attention to geography education. Congress concluded their events early this week, in order to let members get away before the storm; clearly, they understand that it can be perilous to ignore geographic information.

The NOAA storm summary for this past event includes a list of snow totals from across the region. Scanning down, those with good mental maps of the area can interpret the data and build a picture. Those without a good mental map must look for a familiar name, and get a much less powerful view of the data. Seeing even just the raw numbers on a map makes a huge difference. Having the data interpolated to form a general pattern would be even more powerful.

NOAA/NWS page showing snowfall data

Stay safe this winter. Long-term climate change, shorter term El Nino events, and random combinations mean conditions will shift, relative to what people "know" about the weather. And keep pointing out to educators, administrators, and policy makers the staggering degree to which geography matters.

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, Co-Manager, ESRI Schools Program

This new decade seems a fitting time to reflect upon the past and anticipate the future. Few other things in GIS have changed as much over the past decade than Web GIS. During the first year in which I used the World Wide Web (1993), one of the things that most captured my attention was the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center’s (PARC) Map Viewer. It retrieved interactive information on the Web, rather than simply providing access to static files. I remember what a marvel it was to zoom, select layers, and even change the map projections all through a web browser, displayed on my screen, a large 12-color Tektronix terminal connected to a Unix minicomputer. My web browser, Mosaic, sent an HTTP request to the Web server at Xerox, which generated new map and sent it back to my browser.

Since then, Web GIS has greatly expanded in the themes it covers, the scales it offers, and the tools it provides. In education, Web GIS can be used effectively in instruction, administration, and policy. In GIS instruction, students use Web GIS to investigate invasive species (such as the origin and spread of zebra mussels with the National Atlas, on http;//www.nationalatlas.gov), precipitation patterns (via the Geospatial One Stop on http://www.geodata.gov/), or below, the median age of their community versus those of a college town or a retirement community (via creating choropleth maps on ESRI’s Mapping For Everyone, on http://www.esri.com/mappingforeveryone).

In Computer Science and GIScience programs, students can create maps in ArcGIS Desktop and serve them using ArcGIS Server, or they can create web pages showing mashups created from easily-accessible APIs such as JavaScript, Flex, or Silverlight. In administration, Web GIS can support campus needs in infrastructure, campus safety, recruitment, and more, serving staff, faculty, and students. In policy, Web GIS can be used as a decision support system to gather stakeholder input and to show results of where funds and programs are targeted.

I invite you to explore the endless possibilities of Web GIS in education.

--Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager

The Kansas City metropolitan area is considered to be the “Heart of America”, the city of fountains, bar-b-que, and boulevards! With a population of over two million people, this “Paris of the Plains” crosses the state line, extending nearly 8,000 square miles in Kansas and Missouri.

Who are the people of Kansas City, you ask? Using the new “Make A Map” tool, in just a few seconds we can discover valuable demographic data – even compare to other metropolitan areas. The data layers include: population density, population change, median household income, median home value, unemployment rate (July 2009), and median age. Beyond exploring data, this tool will also allow you to share the map you create – embedding the link in your webpage or email!

Using the “Make a Map” tool, last weekend local Girl Scouts (ages 10-17) created their own demographic maps of Kansas City to better understand their own community. The girls used maps they created to investigate the truth in their assumptions about where wealth and population growth existed most prominently in the city. The “ah-ha”s and “oh”s clearly signaled that this approach to meaning-making is valuable to a wide range of learners. The girls also created short demographic profiles of their city (based on criteria the group decided was important) and then applied this same set of criteria to other US cities, just to compare and contrast Kansas City. Some easy-to-explore questions with “Make A Map”, include:

* Where is wealth concentrated?
* What are parts of the city have grown or even declined in population?
* How does the population’s age vary across the city?
* How does population density vary geographically?
* How does one or more of these data layers correlate across geography? For example, does “median household income” appear to correlate with “median home value”?

“Make-A-Map” at the Mapping for Everyone website.

-Tom Baker, ESRI Education Manager

After 13 years, ESRI Higher Education Program Manager, Ann Johnson, is hanging up her ESRI spurs for a life of…well…ongoing GIS education promotion and development in higher education. Yes, there is no stopping her from following her passion. While Ann will continue to be based from her home in the wilds of Nevada, she will spend a significant portion of her new found “free-time” supporting the ongoing activities of the national GeoTech Center Program headquartered in Corpus Christi, TX. She will be active elsewhere too and promises to keep us informed of her whereabouts via periodic GPS coordinate blasts.

We, her ESRI Education Program colleagues wish her well and we look forward to our ongoing collaborations…including the occasional field trip, rock hunt, and geosightseeing.

You can stay in touch with Ann via her new company, Bare Mountain Consulting, ann@baremt.com.

The US Department of Labor/Employment and Training Administration's Occupational Information Network (O*NET) now lists five new geospatial occupations: "Geospatial Information Scientists and Technologists", "Remote Sensing Scientists and Technologists", "Geographic Information Systems Technicians", "Precision Agriculture Technicians", and "Geodetic Surveyors".

You can find descriptions of most of these new occupations by doing an "Occupation Quick Search" on "geospatial" at the O*NET site http://online.onetcenter.org/ (Geodetic Surveyors seems not to include the keyword "geospatial.")

For ten years, ESRI has promoted the Community Atlas as a program through which teachers and club leaders could get kids engaged in doing GIS. The project is simple: Kids put together a profile of their community, consisting of 10-20 original maps and 1000-2500 original words, and post it on the web. By filling out a little form about the group, the preparers create "metadata," so the projects can be searched and compared. Viewers can search according to age of student, location, environment, calendar year, or any combination. And, in addition to seeing their project published, schools or clubs that submit an approved project earn free software.

Initial map from 1999-2000 Year "Model Project" from Barrington (Rhode Island) Middle School

Over the last decade, hundreds of presentations were created, and we had model projects each year, but many more projects were begun than completed. The hardest part for most groups was creating web pages in the strict setup required by the Community Atlas structure. So, with the new decade, we have shifted to a new design. Instead of web pages with lots of little files, Community Atlas projects now consist of a single PDF file. These files are easier to create, and this new format opens the door to a little more creativity in design, but there are still guidelines to follow. The guidelines give a starting structure and some critical consistency within the wide-open universe of community presentations possible.

Initial map from 2008-2009 Year "Model Project" from Lost Arts 4-H Club in Gray, Maine

To get a good idea of what kids can do, take a look at all each year's "Model Project," including last year's project by a 4-H Club in Gray, Maine. We encourage schools and clubs to begin working on a document to submit this year! (The submission page will open in spring.) Check it out at www.esri.com/communityatlas!

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, Co-Manager, ESRI Schools Program

Mapping Forestry offers a look at current and cutting-edge approaches to forestry from aroung the world and describes how GIS software supports the business of forestry in today’s era of economic changes, increased global competition, and diminishing resources. In real scenarios from the United States, Canada, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Finland, and Romania, foresters share how they use GIS to manage commercial operations and maintain sustainable stewardship. Forest managers describe how computer-generated maps and GIS analysis help them make important decisions about the best places to build roads, whether logging in a particular area is commercially feasible, and which fire-damaged areas should be restored first. This book contains 19 chapters, each with a full-color map, featuring detailed descriptions of the types of GIS analysis that it represents. Mapping Forestry is the difinitive GIS guide for forestry professionals.

More information.

Spend a little time with ESRI during the summer and you'll gain hands-on experience that will give you a competitive edge and an impressive addition to your resume!

ESRI internship applications are being accepted until March 17, 2010 and ESRI Summer User Conference Assistantship applications are being accepted until April 2, 2010.

Information on both student opportunities available online.

The early 21st Century is an age of contrasts. Opportunities for recreation have never been more numerous. During my childhood in western Colorado, not one person went mountain biking or jet-skiing, and yet those activities are enjoyed by the thousands each month. However, an intimate connection to landscape and place is less likely to be a part of a part of our common human experience than ever before. We laughed in the movie Vacation after Chevy Chase reached the edge of the Grand Canyon, took a breath, and said, “OK, kids, back in the car!” Yet how often do we fail to allow ourselves to really experience a place? How often do we take a photograph and then quickly plot a course for the next waypoint in our GPS receivers? Do we even have the skills to experience place any longer? Why is it important to do so?

A new book entitled Putting Interpretation on the Map by Heidi Bailey, published by the National Association of Interpretation (NAI), explores how we connect with places, particularly through maps and geographic tools. I wrote the Foreword to this book because after participating in several NAI conferences and projects, I was struck by the close alignment of the everyday tasks of park, museum, and historical site interpreters to the discipline of geography. Indeed, holistic thinking has always been a part of both interpretation and geography. As environmental scientist David Orr said, “We need people to think big picture, to pick apart the trivial from the important.” For decades, interpreters have been geographers in action, applying the geographic themes of movement, region, human-environment interaction, location, and place to real places, real events, and real people. Interpreters can and do make a difference. In the wake of widespread, documented declines in student fieldwork and general public connection to the landscape in this electronic age, interpretation not only enhances experiences but also can reconnect the general public to landscape, history, and place. And interpreters are turning to GIS technology as a key tool to help them in their important work.

--Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager

I'm often asked "Of what value is GIS in education?" It's a question that really "cuts to the chase." Does using GIS matter? Could kids be as well educated without it as with it? Does GIS do anything for educators? Do we have any proof?

What we know anecdotally is that, given the opportunity and an effective introduction, kids engage with GIS. Wildly. Hook, line, sinker, and boat. Teachers and club leaders from elementary thru college report that, once kids get beyond the basics, if they have a chance to engage effectively, many kids spend a lot of time investigating and analyzing data. As kids are wont to do, they go exploring far and wide, integrating this and that, building and pulling apart, reassembling, trying this capacity and that. This keeps kids engaged in school, helps them build knowledge, and promotes integration of content across disciplines. There have been some research projects that, in a more or less regimented way, try to explore this, but it seems a bit contrived, like studying whether "paint by numbers" creates true artists. The short answer is that educators of all ages, in all kinds of facilities, report the same thing: With an "effective intro" and license to explore, kids engage GIS with gusto.

One of my favorite poems of all time is "The Fence or the Ambulance". I have seen it attributed to two different authors -- Malines and Hurty -- but it's a delightful poem, whoever wrote it. It elegantly portrays the debate between "prevention" and "cure." It's probably not hard to guess where I end up ... on the cliff, looking over the edge, then looking around, and being baffled by evidence of insufficient foresight.

It is often heart-rending to take in the news and analyses of events and conditions, near and far. As a geographer, I keep looking at how things here relate to things over there, and how things in this place relate to other things in this place. As I explore data -- globally, regionally, locally -- integrating elements of demographics, economics, history, environment, politics -- I weep for those who suffer, frequently through no fault of their own, and wonder "How hard was it to see this coming? How much must be spent now to recover from this trouble, so visible in advance? How long will people focus on minutiae and ignore key data and relationships?"

The world is stunningly complex. The magic of maps is that they allow people to see this staggering complexity in chunks, little bit at a time, and thus see patterns, explore relationships, ask questions, and integrate additional information. The power of analysis with GIS is that, by focusing on a single phenomenon at a time, but also by using the tools to cast a wider net, users understand more deeply just how complex the world is. This knowledge fosters informed decisions, from personal to global scale, which help us all to set fences where they belong, station ambulances where they belong, and discuss intelligently why scarce resource should be allocated so.

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, ESRI Schools Program Co-Manager

From The Japan Times:

"The geographic information system is playing an important role in helping global efforts to preserve the environment as well as responding to major disasters, and the program is evolving to be more sophisticated with real-time data sent from billions of sensors and mobile phone users, a provider says."

"Michael Gould, director of higher education and [in] industry solutions at the Environmental Systems Research Institute, a leading provider of the GIS software, said in a recent interview that the system is aiding relief efforts in quake-hit Haiti by providing the latest maps of the affected areas."

Read more at The Japan Times

Mashup challenge—Map Your App

Create an innovative mashup using ArcGIS Online and Web Mapping APIs for the chance to win one of four cash prizes. Awards will be based on originality, creativity, and analytic process.

Cash Prizes 1st Place: $10,000 2nd Place: $5,000 3rd Place: $2,500 4th Place: $2,500

Getting StartedBuild a mashup using ArcGIS Online and ESRI Web Mapping APIs Shoot a video of your application and post it on YouTube Submit your mashup. Deadline: March 5, 2010

More information.

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in BETT—touted to be the largest educational technology conference on the planet. With colleagues from the ESRI UK GIS in Schools Programme, we hosted a booth and engaged with a richly vibrant international crowd interested in learning about the use of GIS in the classroom.

Going all the way to London, I couldn’t pass up a couple of days of post-conference exploration. On the list for this trip: The Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre and a tour of the Cocoon—a 7-story, futuristic, seed-shaped building housing a gently winding exhibit, 400 years of plant and insect collections (20 million specimens), and research labs where museum science staff further scientific knowledge and action through ongoing field and onsite investigations. Even without going inside, it was compelling to “get” what it is.

Upon entering, you are immediately invited to read the first of a number of large posters and along the way interact with other display components. Here’s the initial sign and its message—Wanted: Curious People. Not just scientists but visitors too.

This image and its text struck me. Discovery is about being curious. Asking “why” is about being curious. Life in its full sense is about being curious. The people at this museum and the things they tackle require inquisitiveness and creativity—nuances of the same gift.

What is it that sparks and feeds a person’s curiosity? What is it that permits (fascinates) a person to see the world through a lens of wonder? To be comfortable to say “I don’t know” and be hungry to discover more? Whether manifested in studying spiders or investigating a global geographic phenomenon, this quality is vital and needs to be nurtured in students/people of all ages.

The importance of this characteristic is identified as an essential skill in Tony Wagner’s book—The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—And What We Can Do About It. Likewise great minds such as Albert Einstein have pointed to the importance of curiosity; others have been driven by it such as Alexander von Humboldt. But is curiosity the realm of only some people? I don’t think so. To me, everyone has the capacity. It is switched on at birth and it is a part of critical thinking and problem solving. I believe it can be helped and hindered by the people and events with which we interact as we move through time. Now is not a time for hindrance. We need to feed these personal engines of inquiry and make them insatiable.

The geographic world which includes everything under investigation in the Cocoon and much, much more is perfect for fostering curiosity in ourselves and those around us—geocuriosity. Likewise GIS through its integrative and interdisciplinary nature offers a structure through which to propel and support geocuriosity. GIS is about exploration, investigation, analysis, what-ifs…it’s about being inquisitive. Sustaining curiosity is vital to our future—imagining it, creating it, living it.

…and yes, I am Curious George—always was, always will be.

- George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager

With a myriad of tools at a teacher's disposal, knowing which ones offer the most bang for the buck is essential. I recently read some online discussions and articles on the benefits and challenges of interactive white boards that got my attention, wouldn't it be nice to have that a similar tool without the extra equipment and training necessary! Sketch-A-Map is a free web-based mapping tool that allows you to interact with maps and data. You only need your internet browser to access and use this tool. We all need maps in our classroom discussions...they bring the real world, quite literally, into the classroom and offer great connections for kids to see purpose in their learning. As an English Language Arts teacher, I'm always in the market for tools that make "dead authors and dusty books" more relevant to a Facebooking, Tweeting, technology-laded generation of students.

Using the Sketch-A-Map tool allows us the ability to quickly demonstrate something on the map and save it (as a *.png) and easily shared later. As a result I have a tangible reference for class discussion, not just a list of notes. I can include it as a handout for anyone who missed class that day, email it to a parent that wants to know "what's going on" or offer it as a review tool on the class blog or wiki for students that need visual clues to remember content. Students can even use the tool at home since it's freely accessible online. Being able to draw on the basemap, include text, offers a great interactive experience for your students as they make connections to the curriculum.

By district requirement, my students are studying Mark Twain and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He grew up in Hannibal, MO. The teenagers in my classroom say, "So what!" Using the locate tool, with a topographic base map, I find Hannibal, MO. Again, they say, "So what!" Now, I say, "Can anyone find some proof that he might have lived here?" We English teachers are always talking about proving your arguments, so this makes sense. Right there in the middle of the map view, Mark Twain School and Huckleberry Park! A slight zoom out reveals Mark Twain Memorial Bridge. Now my students are engaged and intrigued! What else can we find? Can we find proof of his importance or presence anywhere else?

Explore your curriculum for opportunities to show students “why they need to know this.”

- Barbaree A. Duke, Language Arts Educator