GIS Education Community Blog

2010 ESRI Education User Conference - Call for Presentations Nov 13

tbaker — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:47:00 GMT

Whatever your field, position, or GIS experience, be part of the knowledge-sharing and submit an abstract for possible presentation at the event. Communicate with your peers about your successes and inspiring student projects, teaching resources, and innovative GIS applications. User presentations enrich the experience of both attendees and presenters. The sharing of insights and lessons learned, as well as the networking these sessions lead to, is unbeatable. We can't wait to hear your GIS story. View the presentation tracks.

Deadline: November 13.

Learn More.

Fun with GIS #30: GIS = Powertool for STEM

tbaker — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:06:00 GMT

I spent last week at the annual conference of the State Educational Technology Directors Association. Participants and speakers talked about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) to the point that I wished I had a nickel for every time it was mentioned. STEM content is indeed key to the future of our nation and planet, and I'll be heading to a STEM conference in Virginia in a week. I just wish it were a little easier for people to see what, to me, shines like a supernova -- that "GIS = STEM."

Educational challenges today include contextualizing content, chunking information, scaffolding skills, and doing it for more kids, with fewer resources, against a backdrop of increasing distractions. How do we help students understand fundamental tools of math, the power of models for planning, the complex interrelationships in the world, the world of data from the world AS data, and the myriad other concerns we have for youth heading toward a future filled with challenges?

Integrate real-world content about issues local to global, requiring accumulation of background information and analysis of data, to reach a conclusion. Attack an ill-structured problem by laying out significant elements, exploring the characteristics, seeking the relationships, and modeling solutions, to solve a problem. GIS is a perfect tool for doing that. But using any "powertool" takes practice. "Starting small" is a good idea.

It can begin easily, even at a young age, if approached sensibly. Most folks would not recommend "War and Peace" as the best primer for early readers. Young minds should begin exploring problems and analyzing data with appropriately-sized tasks. Where are the ant colonies most dense on the playground, and why? Is there a relationship between tree health and proximity to roads in our community? I wish I had a nickel for every educator who said they wanted to do GIS so they can have their students model the complex relationships between global politics, economic production, energy consumption, climate systems, population, and food production, in order to figure out how to deal with climate change. Many seem surprised when I suggest it will take them more than an afternoon to get comfy with tech tools, reams of data, analytical processes, and the background content from multiple disciplines needed to address this.

If we truly want youth to develop STEM capacity, they should begin at an early age, integrating and analyzing data from diverse fields and using the power of the computer to expose relationships. Track butterflies, map the local watershed, analyze the location of a midfielder through a soccer game. There are countless STEM-related topics for which GIS should be the "powertool" of choice.

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, ESRI Education Programs

Children Map the World, Volume 2

tbaker — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:44:00 GMT

Children Map the World, Volume 2, showcases one hundred favorite world map drawings submitted to the Barbara Petchenik Children's World Map Competition 2005-2007. The map competition, sponsored by The International Cartographic Association, was created as a memorial to Barbara Petchenik, a cartographer who studied how children comprehend maps. The vibrant collection of maps in this volume presents varying perspectives on the theme "Many Nations-One World" from young artists, ranging in age from four to fifteen and representing 37 countries. Cartographers, geographers, educators, and children will take interest in the colorful maps presented in this book.

More information.

Corny Geography: Mapping Corn Mazes in ArcGIS Explorer

tbaker — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:11:00 GMT

Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere means exploring mazes cut into fields of corn (maize) whose intricate patterns and shapes are created with GPS and a creative imagination. In a recent electronic newsletter from Point of Beginning, a resource dedicated to serving GPS, surveying, and GIS professionals, the editor discussed my article entitled “Teaching Geography Using Corn Mazes.” In this article, I created 10 lessons using corn mazes in the geography classroom that consider wayfinding, GPS, land use, mathematics, products from corn, soils, and more.

Let’s say you want to map the distribution of corn mazes. While corn maze websites abound, it is difficult to find a truly comprehensive one. What criteria would you use as a guideline to evaluate this or any site offering spatial data? I settled on The Corn Maze Directory. The issue then was a familiar one to GIS users—formatting. Because no text file or spreadsheet of maze locations existed, I visited each state’s link, copied and pasted the locational data into a text file, and inserted commas between the fields: Maze name, address, city, state, zip, telephone number. Next, in ArcGIS Explorer, I “added content” and pointed to my text file. The geocoding required 10 minutes for my 429 corn mazes, but considering that geocoding is performed in the cloud, with some addresses only indicating street intersections, this is amazing. Once finished, I could examine the corn mazes spatially:

Next, to analyze the relationship of where corn is grown to where mazes are located, I created a layer package from agricultural census data showing corn acreage by county; darker green indicating more corn. I added it along with a political boundaries base map from ArcGIS Online. I packaged up the data and placed it on ArcLessons. Interestingly, more corn mazes exist in New York and New Jersey than in the western corn belt states of Iowa and Nebraska, though the eastern corn belt states of Illinois and Indiana are well represented. Clearly, market population is also an important factor in locating corn mazes.

- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager

Improving public library services through market segmentation…

tbaker — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:49:00 GMT

…is the topic of a webcast sponsored by CIVICTechonologies and LibraryJournal that explores how the Topeka & Shawnee County (KS) Public Library gained a better understanding of their customer needs using GIS-based market analysis. A recording of the webcast is available from the LibraryJournal website at no cost.

Market segmentation combines demographic data with lifestyle information to create profiles of the population within different neighborhoods. Public libraries can use this information to better understand who their customers are and what services best meet the community’s need. For example, neighborhoods with lots of school-aged children expect different services (children’s books, reading programs, homework help) than neighborhoods with primarily empty-nester couples (best sellers, classic literature, travel books, resources for job seekers).

Presented by Gina Millsap, Director of the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library; Marc Futterman, CEO of CIVICTechnologies; and Alice Kavanagh, Market Segmentation Expert at ESRI, the webcast provides an overview of market segmentation principles and the Tapestry Segmentation system, and a case study showing how the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library used this information in their strategic planning.

- Angela Lee, ESRI Education Programs

My National Parks and ArcGIS Explorer (Part 10): What We Learned

tbaker — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:44:00 GMT

Recently PBS aired The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The series has inspired this sequence of blog postings about aspects of my personal park explorations over the years. I’m using ArcGIS Explorer (AGX) in the investigation. See other national park blog posts for more.

Over the past few weeks we have explored some of the nation’s most important geographic jewels and we have used AGX to move us into and through these places. In the process, we have begun some earth systems science-focused investigations and used a range of AGX features, functions, and associated skill sets along the way. In these 400ish word postings it was not always possible to fully describe the steps taken to accomplish some of these. That issue has prompted me to construct a matrix that identifies AGX and related activities tackled in each of the ten postings (yes, we will add one more new skill here).

Here is a downloadable spreadsheet that not only indicates the actions taken in each blog posting but also links to them and most importantly links to the AGX Online Help discussion for the AGX and related activities. (NOTE: Some of the AGX Help discussions are broader than the specific item tackled in a particular park posting. For this reason, it also is very good to explore the park posting for links to AGX blog entries that tackle particular activities.)

As a last tweak to my favorite parks project, I decide I want to add my own symbol to indicate that the seven parks we have explored are simply the best…at least for now. A right click on one of the current park symbols allows me to browse to an image file on my hard drive or add a Web pathway to one. Earlier, I discovered a royalty-free clip art site, www.clker.com. At the site I find several new symbols I wish to add including the new icon for my fav parks. Here is the outcome of that work, including the addition of the new “thumbs-up” symbol to my map shown as a presentation slide.

I hope my AGX national park series and the reflection on what we have done and what skills we have built will help inspire you and your students to conduct your own geographic research with AGX and share your own geostories.

Remember: It’s great to gain a rich set of geographic visualization and analysis tool skills but don’t forget why you are doing it—because you’re inquisitive. Use AGX and companion geotools to indulge and grow your curiosity.

- George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager

Call for Papers: GIScience Research Track, ESRI International User Conference 2010

tbaker — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:54:00 GMT

Call for Papers:

GIScience Research Track
ESRI International User Conference
12-16 July, 2010
San Diego, California

ESRI invites you to present a peer-reviewed paper in a GIScience Research Track for the 2010 ESRI International User Conference and Educational User Conference. Papers in this special track must focus on cutting-edge research in GIScience. Full papers will be included in a special issue of Transactions in GIS to be distributed at the 2010 Conference. Abstracts (500 words) must be submitted to Dr. John Wilson, University of Southern California, by 15th December, 2009.

The Transactions in GIS editorial team will review abstracts based on their GIScience content and select nine abstracts to become full papers. Notice of acceptance will occur by 22nd December, 2009. Full papers (maximum 6,000 words plus figures, tables, and references in appropriate format for publication) must be submitted to Dr. Wilson for independent review by 15th February, 2010. Reviewed papers will be returned to authors by 15th March, 2010 and final manuscripts must be returned by 8th April, 2010, to be included in the special issue of Transactions in GIS.

For questions or guidelines on this GIScience Research Track, please contact Michael Gould at mgould@esri.com.

Abstracts should be submitted via email with a subject line “ESRI GIScience Abstract, Authors Last Name” no later than 15th December, 2009 to:

Dr. John Wilson, jpwilson@college.usc.edu

Mappy Halloween!

tbaker — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:12:00 GMT

To get in the Halloween spirit, I created a layer package of data from the 2007 US Census of Agriculture about pumpkins, and shared it on ArcGIS Online [view layer package here (181 KB)]. You can explore where pumpkins are grown using this data and ArcGIS Desktop or ArcGIS Explorer.

I was inspired by Chris Kollen, a librarian at the University of Arizona, who created maps of potential Trick-or-Treaters (based on the population of 5-13 year olds) and the distribution of bats in Arizona.

What other Halloween topics could be mapped? The US Census Bureau issued a press release of Halloween facts and figures (which they do for several holidays each year); perhaps you’ll find inspiration there. Personally, I’d like to research the production of chocolate next…

- Angela Lee, ESRI Education Programs

Exploring Data Using Cartograms within ArcGIS Desktop at the County and State Scale

tbaker — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:38:00 GMT

In a recent ESRI EdCommunity blog, I described how to download and use a script to create cartograms in ArcMap. While I examined total CO2 emissions by country, the same tool can be applied to any data at any scale. Because I consider cartograms to be an excellent research and teaching device, I then examined a historical county data set from 1900 to 2000. I was interested to see what cartograms would reveal about historical population trends for specific areas and discovered that they serve as a springboard for discussion about the forces responsible for such changes.

I created a cartogram for the past 100 years for Colorado. I joined the resulting cartogram feature class with the original data on the field “ObjectID” so that I could examine the population attributes. The maps comparing 1920 with 2000, below, show differences and similarities.

As expected, Denver County dominates in population each year. Was it natural to locate the state capital there, or did its capital status encourage subsequent population growth? Denver’s population, at 256,000 in 1920, doubled to 527,000 by 2000, but the state population more than quadrupled, from 939,000 to 4.3 million. Consequently, the cartogram’s “area” represented by Denver’s population decreased from 47,000 to 32,000 square kilometers as Denver’s share of the state total dwindled from 27% to 12%. Pueblo and Weld also decreased in relative size between 1920 and 2000, but for different reasons. Pueblo County’s share decreased with the decline of its iron and steel industry. Weld County’s share decreased due to the rise of agribusiness until 1980, but then experienced rapid suburbanization along with much of the High Plains. Agricultural counties outside of this zone decreased in size on the cartogram and in absolute population, evidenced in the shrinking of counties like Cheyenne and Prowers along Colorado’s eastern border. Also noticeable is the rise of suburban counties such as Douglas, Jefferson, and Arapahoe.

What do you think your state will look like over the past 100 years? Use the cartogram tool to find out!

-Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager.

My National Parks and ArcGIS Explorer (Part 9)

tbaker — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:51:00 GMT

We’re moving through my Fav 7. Today, Redwood…the last stop. In exploring my other top parks, a theme rings out—geology and related threads. In a trip to this park, the geologic setting is very much evident but in my view, it’s impossible to not be humbled to silence and awe not by the landscape, but what’s on it—living things, the Redwoods. These trees, Sequoia sempervirens, represent the tallest and are among the longest and oldest living entities on planet Earth…and they only live in one place—along the US Pacific Coast from southern Oregon to Big Sur, California. In preparing for this entry, I did a bit of Web research on the trees, the park(s), and aspects such as the importance of fog as a key part of the overall water supply for the trees. Also, I was excited to see that the redwoods (range, threats, sustainability, history) were the October 2009 cover story of National Geographic magazine.

Using AGX, I do several things I’ve not covered in this series so far: Download and add a park boundary shape file from the National Park Service Data Clearinghouse (NOTE: Not all NPS data are ready for immediate direct use by AGX), plan a trip to a few key park sites, and check the weather for our trip.

To start, I create a Redwood folder for content (layers, Web research, views). Next, I add the NPS Klamath area parks boundary file and zoom to the Redwood NP extent. Where to go next?

A great place to stay in Crescent City, CA is the Hampton Inn. Using its address and ZIP (100 A St, 95531), I locate and add it to my map. The places I want to visit include the Hiouchi Information Center, the Stout Grove (by way of the Howland Hill Scenic Road), and the Klamath River Overlook. I use the Notes feature to pinpoint the places I want to explore.

Using the AGX Route function, I add the route sequence and execute the multistop route and derive a useable map for my day’s travels.

What’s the day’s weather like for the Redwoods? Check out the AGX Weather Forecast Add-in.

Stay tuned for the final installment in this series.

- George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager

Creating Customized Maps for Classroom Use Using GIS

tbaker — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:21:00 GMT

We tend to focus on the analytical capabilities of GIS, and rightly so, as that is its major strength. However, GIS can also be used to quickly create customized maps. These maps can be used by the instructor to support a lesson, or by the student to support an oral or written report. Frequent requests such as, “Does a map exist that just shows rivers and countries of Africa but without the country names?” have frequently appeared on listservs and blogs over the past 15 years. Such a map may not exist online or in a textbook, but can easily be generated with GIS.

Consider the map I recently created below showing some major Amish communities in the northeastern part of the country.

While this map supported an article authored by a colleague for the Journal of Geography, it could just as easily be used to support a classroom discussion on the Amish in the USA. I started with the data packaged in the population change lesson on ArcLessons: http://edcommunity.esri.com/arclessons/lesson.cfm?id=457. I unzipped the data, started ArcMap, and added the data layers. I zoomed to the study area, labeled three states, exported my counties of interest to a separate data layer, symbolized them as black, and added numbers and leader lines. For the inset map, I created a new data frame, copied the state lines into it, and drew a study area box. I created a layout, inserting the northeastern USA and 48 states data frames. I exported the map as a grayscale image. In a short amount of time, I had created a customized map.

What sort of map do you or your students need? Central Asia ecoregions? Michigan lakes and rivers? Phoenix median age by neighborhood? Using data sets from ArcLessons, data portals, or from the ESRI Data and Maps DVDs, allows for you and your students to create exactly the maps you need in ArcMap.

Upon further reflection, even these customized maps in turn support critical thinking, so we are right back to analysis!

- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager

The Geospatial Semester

tbaker — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:54:00 GMT

The Geospatial Semester is a unique project where high school seniors in Virginia study geospatial technologies and do locally-based projects as they earn college credit from James Madison University. They learn cutting edge 21st Century Skills as they begin the transition from high school to higher education or the world of work.

The project's brand new website is available at http://www.isat.jmu.edu/geospatialsemester/

It features student projects, a map of participating schools, prize-winning maps and more. For more information, contact Dr. Bob Kolvoord (kolvoora@jmu.edu).

Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship

tbaker — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:47:00 GMT

The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library will host two rounds of an NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, on the theme of Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. A first four-day event (November 2009) is geared toward 20 library, museum, and digital humanities center professionals, and aims to shape policy and build the technical capacity of the institutions they represent to support boundary-pushing geospatial scholarship.

A second round of the Institute (May 2010) is geared toward humanities faculty members, graduate students, and other scholars. An opening discussion will identify central questions facing the studies of space and place in the digital humanities. Martyn Jessop’s 2008 article on inhibiting factors in humanities GIS will serve as a guide, and Jessop will present his work. Participants will explore a variety of tools and core GIS concepts through hands-on activities, and discuss the challenges of applying science-based GIS tools to research in the humanities.

See the Institute’s home page for more information. Participants will be selected through a competitive application process.

-Angela Lee, ESRI Education Programs Manager

My National Parks and ArcGIS Explorer (Part 8)

tbaker — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:49:00 GMT

Recently PBS aired The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The series has inspired this sequence of blog postings about aspects of my personal park explorations over the years via ArcGIS Explorer (AGX). See other national park blog posts for more.

We’re moving through my Fav 7. Today, Acadia—the first national park east of the Mississippi River (1916). I have only been to Acadia once and then not for long enough. Regardless, it quickly got added to my list of favorites—rugged terrain, ocean, great vistas, rich woodland vegetation, and of course, geology. Touring the park you’re quick to recognize some interesting features and many of them expose a glacial past—U-shaped valleys, a North American fjord, erratics, and glacial polish and striations abound. Also, as the Pleistocene ice met the surface features, they encountered resistance—igneous, granitic objects like Mt Cadillac, the remains of an ancient caldera.

Using AGX, I tackle several things: Simply explore the park from a vantage not possible by ground observation to note some of its characteristics (including glacial features), use Web research to learn more about the park and its primary component—Mt Desert Island—and build a Background folder of Web content, identify an aspect of glacial extent in the region, and add some key Notes. (NOTE: I wanted to add an outside GIS layer or two on geology and glaciation but was unsuccessful in my initial searches. However, as I sent in this post, I remembered that the National Atlas has data on glacial limits. I will include the layer in a future expansion of this project.)

As with other parks, I begin by creating an Acadia folder for content. Next, I create contextual Views allowing roaming and easy return. My Web research nets a number of key references on the area’s glacial and bedrock geology. I add them as Links to a new Background folder. In the process, I discover that the 1 km thick ice sheet that covered the park extended, at maximum, some 370 miles into the Gulf of Maine and I want to highlight that using the Measure function to add a line of that distance to my map. I also add information in its associated Pop-up, again using lessons learned at the AGX Resource Center blog > text…HTML.

For the remainder of this first Acadian pass, I add a few photographic notes—one of mine as local content on the granitic shoreline and others focusing on glacially-influenced features using Web links.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

- George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager

Fun with GIS #29: The Joy of Joining, or "I Wanna Be a Map!"

tbaker — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:33:00 GMT

At my first ever geography teacher institute, at Macalester College in 1986, one of the leaders held up a data table and said "Look at this table! Just look at it! You can just … just … put your ear up close, like this, y'see … and hear it crying out … 'I wanna be a map!'" Ever since the dawn of ArcView2 -- long before "mashups" became popular -- I've been happily joining external data tables to shapefiles in order to make dozens of new maps.

I never tire of it. To this day, joining tables to existing features remains, in my mind, one of the most powerful capacities of GIS. It opens up vast galaxies of exploration! And talk about math! Going through banks of numbers and looking at ways to classify them, query them, normalize one by another, sort and sum and statisticalize them (huh?), is a powerful way to build understanding of a given data set, and how one item relates to another.

The other day, I saw an email from the National Center from Education Statistics, describing new data about public schools from the 2007-08 school year. The PDF document had a set of six tables about the 50 states. I downloaded it and took about 20 minutes to convert them into one long spreadsheet (Excel file). Then it was time to play with the data.

Above you can see one look at the student/teacher ratio. Below, you can see one look at the ratio of students eligible for free or reduced lunch. (It also helps to look at the original PDF document.)

There's never an end of data to explore. Joining data tables to existing features is a piece of cake in ArcView. Try it, and maybe you too will be able to look at the table and hear it crying out … just listen … it wants to be a map!

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, Co-Manager, ESRI Schools Program