I have been lucky enough to organize a GIS Day ‘09 career event at the university of Washington, joined by Harvey Arnone of city of Seattle, Marty Balikov of ESRI Olympia and Dane Springmeyer, freelance geospatial developer. The discussion was titled “What are the essential skills to succeed as a GIS Analyst”, and I have compiled some notes to help with all aspiring GIS Professionals out there. Feel free to add more details in the comments section as you see fit.
Oct 02
Many people out there insist that Google Maps and Google Earth is killing the GIS industry. I had a number of students circulate that idea with me, always wondering if there is still a future for GIS. In a short simple answer, Google Maps/Earth is not a GIS, and GIS will be around for the foreseeable future.
Jul 22
Everyone that creates maps has to deal with color, some way or another. While there are many different ways of going about it (refer to any textbook on cartography), few online resources seem to be up to the tasks. Well I recently stumbled upon NASA’s Color Usage website. Apart from the excellent articles and resources provided (thank you NASA), they also include a Color Tool (Java Applet) that allows one to explore colors in a very beautiful way. I hope you find the information there as useful as I have.
Feb 19
Continuing the map series of International Students at the University of Washington. This is for the year 2005.
As you may notice, this map looks strikingly similar to the map for 2006. While the numbers have changed slightly, the trend remains the same for all countries, making the classification scheme used (Jenk’s Natural Breaks Algorithm) to produce a similar categorization. This will need to be address by either changing the classification scheme or normalizing the data.
Feb 19
This is a map I put together of Internation Students at the University of Washington. The complete series (1999 to 2006) will be published on my webpage soon, if anyone is interested. I will discuss issues when the series is completed within the week.
Enjoy!
Feb 18
A very interesting interview (as a podcast) by David DiBiase on the issue of the GIS&T Body of Knowledge by UCGIS. The UCGIS website was hacked and the documents are not around, but the interview does cover some history and justification for the GIS&T Body of Knowledge. Perhaps you can enjoy it at some later stage.
It is interesting to hear about recognition of Geography and GIS outside the discipline, how the taskforce managed to accomplish its goals and once again, the help provided by ESRI (requiring products was, according to me, a great help). Enjoy listening to it, especially if you are familiar with the NCGIA Core Curriculum Project.
Please note the following golden quote:
Academic Geographers were severely over-represented in this first edition and the reason is quite plain. Academic geographers are paid to do [...] service… My hope is that now that this effort has received some attention. [...] I think we will be able to do a good job recruiting a more deverse number of people from industry as well as academia[...]
This may actually be key to one of my upcoming posts on GIS and education.
Feb 18
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have seen a tremendous rise in university curricula around the world. It is no surprise as the usefulness of spatial data manipulation is becoming more evident when studies escape confined boundaries that can be easily represented by a Cartesian plane and require further consideration of the geoid characteristics. The realization that the Pythagorean Theorem cannot produce accurate results in a non-flat world (see this mirror of a US Census discussion on the issue) by disciplines that did not, traditionally, have to deal with such issues, has raised awareness of software systems (and hence knowledge) that specifically accommodates such intricacies (software was mentioned specifically, as usually a “black-box” solution to problems is sought, rather than the more time- and money-consuming method of investigating, mastering and implementing solutions by ones self). This, among many other reasons where spatial knowledge and analysis skills are needed, has lead to a demand of a number of specially educated people that can identify, explain and solve problems of geographic nature. A need that Universities across the world are trying to serve through GIS curricula introduced within multiple disciplines (the University of Washington has courses in the Department of Geography, Forest Resources, Ecosystem Science, Urban Design and Planning and Earth and Space Sciences). Each of these courses deals with issues of representation of data (in the form of points, lines, polygons, etc), data storage, manipulation/analysis and presentation to a varying degree, as well as including a hands-on experience in the form of lab assignments and projects.
The question raised is whether teaching GIS in such a setting and format is ideal or not, and how can it be improved.
What is GIS?
Geographic Information Systems rely on a multitude of disciplines to build a system of “software, hardware and procedures to facilitate the management, manipulation, analysis, modelling, representation and display of georeferenced data to solve complex problems” (please see Nicholas Chrisman’s excellent lecture covering what GIS is). While this definition of a GISystem is not universally accepted, everyone agrees that it is a multi-component system. A complete and all-around curriculum on GIS needs, in essence, to tackled those multiple components on two levels: theory and application.
Teaching the Theory
In educating people about GIS, curricula throughout universities cover the theories behind GIS. From mathematical representations of data (as vectors for discrete and raster for continuous data), mathematical (geometrical) operations, to computational methods to store, retrieve and analyze data, to statistical and systems modeling techniques and even the art of representing data either as pictographs, charts or even text using visual hierarchies and the like, curricula are in need to cover expose students to a plethora of disciplines to allow them to understand what happens behind any “black-box” GIS implementation (i.e. the software application).
Teaching the Software Application
All these theories and knowledge are what the software package uses to manipulate, analyze, model, represent, display and manage spatial information. How would that then translate into teaching students how to use software. The traditional approach is to show students how operations are performed through instructional sheets and requiring students to follow directions closely, leaving little room for exploration. But most importantly, leaving little room for students to bridge the theory taught in lecture with the press of a button required by the applied portion of the curriculum.
Problems in the Current GIS* Teaching Methods
Through my own personal experience, as well as discussion with other students and educators within the realm of GIS* (GIS* symbolizing the GIScience and GISystems together), I have come to the conclusion that there is a rather large gap between the theory (or what some like to call, GIScience) and the application to perform what the theory teaches (GIS in the traditional sense). The gap seems to arise from the fact that the software system does not require any prior knowledge of its inner workings (and hence, theories) to run, while the curriculum requires students to learn both, simultaneously.
The problem is, therefore, a disconnect between theory and application, lecture and lab, what the educator feels is needed to be taught (the theory) and what the students feel they need to learn (the software).
Solving the Problems
How one can proceed to solve the problem stated above depends on whether there is an agreement that this is indeed and the case, and whether one believes that this is a problem. Universities are institutions that mainly want to push a more academic agenda (as theory is born and raised within universities) than what is sometimes needed in the workforce. An emphasis in theory is therefore understandable, even desired (if no one develops and challenges new theories, there would be no progress). But the need of students is (usually) to learn the software in greater detail, as it is unlikely that outside a university setting they will need to recite the fundamental levels of measurement (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio according to Stevens, or adding graded memberships, cyclic ratio, derived ratio, counts and absolute according to Chrisman). How can then one proceed, especially when one considers the student body which includes students from multiple fields and with different needs?
I have pondered the question multiple times so far and I have not yet come into any conclusion. But I do believe there is a need to change the way things are taught, either by separating classes into theory and application, or changing the current curriculum to look more closely into the issue of what the students want and need to learn, as well as what the workforce the University prepares them for needs.
Notes:
A Very Spatial Podcast Episode 77 covers the issue as well.
