September 13

Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week, as the academic year is starting, I discuss university-level GIS education with Professor David DiBiase, lead editor of the Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge, and Mike Phoenix, Ph.D., ESRI's Manager of the Education Sector. Plus, fourteen press releases.

— Matteo Luccio

University-Level GIS Education

With the start of the academic year, university-level GIS education is gearing up across the country. I discussed developments in the field with two of the people best positioned to monitor it: David DiBiase, a professor of geography at Penn State, and Mike Phoenix, ESRI's Manager of the Education Sector and a former professor of geography. DiBiase directs a distance-learning institute, manages his department's GIS certificate program, and led the editorial team for the first edition of the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge www.aag.org/bok/ published last year by the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS).

The Body of Knowledge (BOK) is the result of more than a decade of effort by many leading GIScience researchers and educators, including important early work by Duane Marble, and represents an initial effort to compile the wide range of skills and concepts that comprise the field of geographic information science and technology (GIST). A community-developed inventory of the knowledge and skills that define the GIST field, the BOK is designed as a reference work for use by educators, curriculum planners, and evaluators; current and prospective students; certification and accreditation bodies; human resources personnel; and geospatial professionals. Besides DiBiase, the editors were Michael DeMers, Ann Johnson, Karen Kemp, Ann Taylor Luck, Brandon Plewe, and Elizabeth Wentz, of the UCGIS Education Committee, assisted by an advisory board of more than fifty individuals.

Interview with David DiBiase

1. How are spatial concepts and technologies being incorporated into academic disciplines other than geography?

   Those of us in the field help people learn that there is a basic science in which you can do research and development, but for most people it is simply an aspect of their practice. The Department of Anthropology here at Penn State is looking to hire an anthropologist with some expertise in GIST, to help infuse that mode of analysis into their discipline and their students' education. Similarly, at the College of Agricultural Science, GIST has for some time played a significant role in agriculture. One of the exciting areas in that field is "agro-security" — the idea that there is food security, not just against terrorist threats but also against pandemic diseases and such. We're developing a new master's degree in agro-security and certainly GIST will play some role in that. Another example would be landscape architecture. It has been more of a CAD-based, rather than GIS-based, enterprise, but nowadays landscape architecture departments are looking to hire people with the skills to make their students more competitive.

2. How has the concern about security affected GIS education?

   It has ramped up the interest in geospatial across the university, because GIST is fundamentally a surveillance technology. Many of the new program developments at many large universities are security-related. We just launched a geospatial intelligence program.

3. What are the origins of university-level GIS education?

   In the late 1970s, people who took computer cartography would use computer mapping programs that pre-dated GIS and, generally, gave you the ability to create very crude thematic maps. As GIS began to emerge as a category of software and then as an aspect of the practice of applied geography, there began to be seminars and then courses. By the late 1980s, there were plenty of courses related to GIS. When ArcView and comparable products appeared that were relatively inexpensive, micro-computer-based software packages — so that university departments could afford to offer a laboratory experience — GIS education really started to take off, as did GIS in the regular marketplace.

4. Where does the bulk of GIS education take place?

   The degree programs and the critical mass of GIS education has until recently resided primarily in four-year institutions' departments of geography, but that is changing rapidly now. It is really complex and it does not reside just in universities. It is also in government agencies and the software community. ESRI plays a huge role in software education. With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Labor, much of the growth and the energy right now in GIS education is happening in technician-level programs in two-year institutions, which more than 42 percent of the undergraduates in the United States attend. Those are the institutions that are most responsive to perceived needs in the marketplace. On the other hand, four-year institutions are producing the next generation of leaders in the field, the ones who take these technologies further and actually transform the way organizations do their work.

5. What is the difference between programs that prepare people for very specific GIS jobs and research-oriented, graduate-level programs?

   Many educators, especially in four-year and graduate institutions, make the distinction between training and education, which does not entail the details of using tools within a particular software product. That distinction no longer holds up. Professional practice can't really be distilled out into a set of core principles that are divorced from it. This gets at a really fundamental thing about how GIS is taught in U.S. higher education: probably about half of GIS education resides in geography departments. Unlike engineering or planning, geography is not a professional discipline — it is an academic discipline. There are very few undergraduate programs specific to GIS and there are only a few master's degree programs that are specific to GIS. What is new is the emergence of professional degree programs in GIST, akin to an engineering degree. GIST needs to be taught as a professional program, not an academic one. For most of the young people who are aspiring to a profession in GIST, the kinds of things to which they need to be exposed are similar to what engineers, physicians, planners, and lawyers need to be exposed to. For example, required courses in professional ethics; much more emphasis on the connection to business and interpersonal skills in communication — the kinds of things that you would not expect to find in an academic program. When I see the popularity of the few professional programs that have emerged, my expectation is that that is very rapidly going to turn into a trend in GIS education, but it is a little too early to say for sure.

6. What are the demographics of returning students in GIS programs?

   When we opened up here a distance education program — a master's program that is all available on-line — we found that the average age of our students was 34. About 65 percent of them are male and 35 percent female. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the students in our on-line masters program are experienced, practicing GIS professionals who really lack a formal credential in the field but went through the subject methodically and learned more than what they had to do to be proficient on a particular job. There is a tremendous unmet need there and a sector that has moved most energetically to meet that need is the two year institutions. We are also beginning to see a growing emergence of distance education programs. All of the major, national curriculum development activity related to GIST has been directed toward undergraduate education — that is, the four-year baccalaureate degree. One of the assertions in the BOK is that the biggest need is really for people who are in the field but do not have a formal education. That is the sector of the GIS education infrastructure where you are seeing the most new programs and the most innovative programs.

7. How does the Body of Knowledge relate to the GISP requirements and possible state licensing?

   As it was originally conceived, the entire point of the BOK was to form a topical basis for a curriculum development process. However, as time went on, the need for advice on curriculum development has become much less urgent than it was ten years ago, when all this started, because so many universities have curricula or are already developing them. What is compelling now is that, as society relies more and more on GIST, particularly in the security era, there are increasing expectations about accountability. That is the context within which licensure and certification begin to arise. There is also a dimension to it that has to do with protectionism — the guild mentality.

8. How is the BOK most useful?

   Many of the applications of the BOK, which originally were considered to be peripheral, have actually become central. The GIS Certification Institute (GISCI) might develop an examination-based certification process based on the BOK. That has a potentially huge impact on the profession. Different professions that overlap in the GIST space are contesting about who really has the right qualifications to use GIST in various professional practices. Being able to argue, as the BOK does, that the field is extremely broad makes a big difference in who can claim authority over professional practice. It changes the whole argument if we have a community agreement about what the nature and details of the field are. What has emerged as being most important about that work is that, for the first time, we have a credible, community-based definition of the field in terms of formal educational objectives. The first edition is not definitive, because the surveyors and the photogrammetrists were not involved. In the field of computer science, they've made six BOKs since the first one in 1969. That is what needs to happen in our field. If we do that, that is the best and only hope for identifying the core that all of these different overlapping professions have in common and that is what I think is at stake.

Interview with Mike Phoenix

1. About how many students learn GIS in the United States?

   My guess is that it is probably close to 150,000 any given academic year. About 2,500 colleges and universities in the United States use our software. Almost 700 of them are covered by campus-wide site license agreements that allow unlimited installations in all departments on a campus. On campuses with these site licenses, it is not uncommon to have more than 1,000 copies of the software installed. Because of the unlimited aspect of our campus-wide agreements, it is difficult to track exactly how many users we have at universities. We give out a student license, which is free to universities that have our campus-wide license agreement. Worldwide, last year we gave out 50,000 of those and this year it is more likely to be around 75,000. This is an indication of the scope of what is going on at the universities.

2. You've described the growth of GIS education during your 15 years at ESRI as "pretty steady." What are some of the general trends you've noticed?

   Fifteen years ago, a good percentage of all the GIS courses were being taught in geography departments and most of the rest were in a few other departments — such as urban planning, landscape architecture, and civil engineering. What we've seen in recent years is a tremendous diversification, so that GIS is being taught in literally almost every department. You will find GIS taught in medical schools, veterinary schools, law schools. The full spectrum of what is possible with GIS is occurring out there. At NC State, there are probably 300-400 researchers and almost every school uses GIS for their research.

3. What new trends do you like the most?

   A new trend that I like is the advent of courses with titles like "Introduction to Spatial Thinking." The emphasis has been changing more to the science and away from just the software and the technology, which I think is a really good thing. If you know how to use the technology but you don't understand the science, that is a recipe for disaster. In the early years of GIS there were many failures of installations and it was probably due to a low understanding of the possibilities of the technology, rather than to limitations of the technology itself. As the universities have done a better and better job of educating people in GIS thinking, the community is doing a better job of implementing and using the technology. It is not enough to know how to push the buttons, you have to understand why you want to do that.

4. How is GIS education changing?

   Some of the big trends have to do with moving it down through the curriculum to freshman- and sophomore-level courses, and the advent of GIS in high school, which is very wide-spread around the world, particularly in Europe. Almost every European country is doing something to put GIS in high schools and middle schools.

5. What is the importance of spatial thinking?

   A report by the National Research Council, Learning to Think Spatially: GIS as a Support System in the K-12 Curriculum, makes the case that spatial thinking is important for science, business, and industry. It is saying that we need to think about putting spatial thinking in the schools, partly because it takes a really long time to really learn it, and that you need to move this down into the curriculum. People are realizing that laying a basis for implementing spatial analysis within multiple disciplines across the campus is a matter of getting people starting to think about spatial literacy as something that is important. You can see what the impact would be across the various industries, as universities start to get students coming out of high school who understand spatial information.

6. What helps most to get students to learn spatial thinking?

   Probably the biggest thing that is helping them do that right now is Google Earth. If you offer a course in spatial thinking and, somewhere in the advertisement, you say "You know Google Earth, now let's take this a step farther" you are going to get the attention of many kids and this is going to have an impact on many disciplines that have spatial information and haven't been addressing it very widely.

7. What are universities doing to integrate GIS into curricula?

   The University of Redlands has hired a Director of Spatial Curriculum and Research and her job is to integrate GIS technologies and thinking in all of the faculties on the campus. That is exciting to me. I came to ESRI because I thought the possibilities were endless for spatial thinking on a campus and I wanted to work in that direction. The biggest trend that we've seen is the diversification of GIS on the campus. There is a really nice, new master's degree in history and GIS at Idaho State University — they call it Managing Historical Resources. In the Marketing Department at Westchester University in Pennsylvania, GIS is a required course for anybody getting a marketing master's degree. ESRI is creating a series of workbooks focused on specific disciplines — such as health care, crime analysis, or business — each one featuring cases taken out of that field.

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