Geographic Information Technology Training
I recently found this GIS education material at an organization called GITA. They have just released under a Creative Common licence. It looks quite good and GIS is an interesting tool for education, this material might be of use for anyone who wants to learn more about using GIS or is teaching GIS?
The steadily growing global interest in spatial information and its presentation in the academic, administrative and managerial sector asks for qualified personnel to cope with termGISTGIST: GIST is the abbreviation for Geographic Information Systems Technology. in order to form an overall pleasing and beneficial final GIS product, especially in economically challenging times of competition. This reason was decisive to establish the e-learning course termGITTAGITTA: GITTA is a Swiss e-Learning project about GIS and it is the abbreviation for Geographic Information Technology Training Alliance. For more information about GITTA have a look at www.gitta.info. giving better and more coordinated access to educational material covering comprehensive and in-depth information over spatial distances using up-to-date technology.
I have been fascinated by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) an their huge pedagogical potential ever since we developed a prototype of a Web-based GIS system for use in schools back in 1994-96. This project was run at IML (called MDC at that time) at Umeå university.
Our idea was that pupils should go out in the woods, collecting lichens, comparing them to a “reference surface” and using them as environmental indicators to determine certain environmental pollutions. This method have been used in environmental education for many years and is a good example of how pedagogical methods can be enhanced by the use of technology - hence, by combining advanced technology development and pedagogical method development it is possible to provide ICT tools that add a pedagogical value that would not have been possible otherwise. In our GIS-lichen case, the pedagogical value was:
- adding calculation support to help young children deal with the quite advanced maths involved,
- adding a geographical dimension as it became possible to combine results from several classes and schools in a broad geographic area. Suddenly it was possible to analyse and visualize a class results in a broader perspective, putting it into a geographic context.
- adding the time dimension - instead of ending up in the trash the result was stored in a database for use by others and,
- adding additional GIS layers - it became possible to combine the layer containing pupils (lichen data) data with other GIS data layers, such as roads, industries, weather etc. in other words: endless possibilities for presenting problemsan, alysis, and discussion.
It however never left the prototype stage since the Swedish “Lantmäteriet” (the governmental agency for geographic information) told us the we should not have such ridiculous illusions. Their maps (in fact no GIS at all) would ever be avaliable on the web! This also ment that they would not allow us to use thir maps (which we are financing through taxes by the way). Instead we made up a map of the forrest of Utopia for testing purposes. A couple of years later Lantmäteriet (or Metria which is now their commercial name) had their own (quite limited) system on the web…
Anyway, I wrote an article on this project in 1996. A revised version can be found here. Only in Swedish though.
