Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/living-on-water-reflections-on-data-collection-and-quality/ In the Spatial Reserves blog. --Joseph Kerski ... View more

Hope everyone had a terrific GIS Day! www.gisday.com What did you do for GIS Day? I visited and presented at 3 universities and 2 schools in New Mexico--Albuquerque Academy, Santa Fe Indian School, NMSU, NM Institute of Mining and Technology, and Western New Mexico University.  Great places, great people! Respond below or tell your story via the form on the above website! --Joseph Kerski ... View more

 Happy GIS Day 2016!  See resources on www.gisday.com that you can use this week and throughout the year to explain WHY and HOW GIS is making a positive difference on our planet. Promoting GIS Day on the beach !  My video:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX_aPxGfayY  --Joseph Kerski ... View more

Folks: www.gisday.com  - GIS Day, an annual celebration of the people and tools that are helping our world become smarter, more sustainable, and healthier, is 16 November 2016.  Visit the above page for more information. Thank YOU for being a GIS champion! --Joseph Kerski ... View more

A recent article in eSchoolNews by Dianne Pappafotopoulos, school district instructional technology specialist, posed the question, "What should we teach students about the future of technology?"  She reflects about the ways that humans are increasingly relying on programmable devices and robots for their everyday lives, and in a sense "becoming" technology or at least a part of it.  Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is an important enabler of these technological changes as the "where" question becomes ever more important.  GIS has undergone a series of massive paradigm shifts in its 50 year existence, and with the advent of Web GIS, the rate of change not only is increasing, but is attracting applications for nearly every aspect of society, from health to business to engineering and beyond. Beyond the technical innovations that technology brings to our world and the workforce skills to our students, teaching about technology offers many societal and life lessons.  I think that the points Ms. Pappafotopoulos raises in the article about critical thinking, safety, privacy, ethics, and copyright connect well to what I believe we should be incorporating into our GIS instruction.  In fact, many of these topics are central to the themes in the Spatial Reserves blog that Jill Clark and I have been writing for nearly 5 years, along with the book we wrote on the same subject for Esri Press.  It is also a topic that we frequently write about in this GIS education blog. Geospatial data are often personal, because they reflect the locations where individuals live, work, and travel. Collecting spatial data and creating and analyzing maps requires students to ask questions such as:  Where did these map layers come from?  Who created the data, and can I trust it?  How does the scale of my analysis and the parameters I use for the buffer or intersect tools affect the results of my analysis?  Do I have permission to use this photograph in my story map?  Should I share the location of where I live or where I took my morning fitness run with the world on a map?  Will I compromise the privacy of individuals who participate in my crowdsource map? The recommendations for educators in the article have natural connections to GIS.  The creation of required courses that focus on these issues, inviting guest speakers (who could be from the GIS community via the Geomentors program), and project-based learning activities (such as SpatiaLABS, the Learn GIS library, and GeoInquiries) are excellent starting points. Teaching with GIS is an important part of teaching about technology and its implications. ... View more

The GIS Day story map is a great way to start your event you are hosting: http://www.gisday.com/discover-gis.html   - about 15% down on the page. It includes a short video, too. You can discuss what story maps are, for example, and how to create one like this (this is a Map Journal story map). --Joseph Kerski ... View more

Nathan Heazlewood of Eagle Technologies wrote a very useful essay about “garbage in, garbage out” in relation to geospatial data.  In it, he not only ties this oft-heard phrase to the importance of GIS data quality, but he also details the checks that GIS analysts should go through when they are assessing a data set.  I would argue that this checklist is also useful for educators and for students as they document their own work for two reasons:  (1)  Paying attention to data quality is even more important now than ever (as I described recently in this blog), and (2) nowadays, with the advent of Web GIS, everyone working in GIS is a potential data producer. The list of 30 items is grouped under checks for positional accuracy, topological logic, geometric considerations, projections and coordinate systems, attribute and data structure checks, and attribute and data structure checks.  Extremely helpful are Nathan’s diagrams showing tables lacking null values for non-null attribute data, values outside permitted ranges, and orphan records in related tables. Nathan includes many considerations that are not often discussed but can lead to enormous problems, such as the different standards and formats of dates being used around the world, from year-month-day to day-month-year to month-day-year (which Nathan dubs the “super dumb American date format”).  Another consideration is one I can identify with that was a significant challenge for me during a GIS workshop I taught in Turkey–the numbers in my data set were formatted such as 100,000 for one hundred thousand, but the software in the university lab, given its location, was naturally configured for one hundred thousand to be coded as 100.000. How might you be able to use this data error checklist in your own instruction?  What checks would you consider adding to this list when you are teaching GIS? A section of Nathan Heazlewood's very useful 30 checks for data errors. ... View more

Looking for a new way to teach geography and geospatial technology, its foundations, and its implications, with many ties to environmental and conservation issues?   I have written a new book, named:   Interpreting Our World – 100 Discoveries that Have Revolutionized Geography: https://blogs.esri.com/esri/gisedcom/2016/10/28/interpreting-our-world-new-book-on-100-revolutions-in-geography/   For more information, see the above and the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S_Acc0yLB0&list=UUdShBEYmIgoDn34bi1vVA9w   Joseph Kerski ... View more

I have written a new book about geography and geographic technologies, its foundations, and its implications, entitled:   Interpreting Our World – 100 Discoveries that Have Revolutionized Geography: https://blogs.esri.com/esri/gisedcom/2016/10/28/interpreting-our-world-new-book-on-100-revolutions-in-geography/   For more information, see the above and the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S_Acc0yLB0&list=UUdShBEYmIgoDn34bi1vVA9w   Joseph Kerski ... View more

Looking for a new way to teach and learn about geography?  I have written a new book entitled Interpreting Our World:  100 Discoveries that Revolutionized Geography, described in this video.  This book demonstrates why geography matters in the modern-day world through its examination of 100 moments throughout history that had a significant impact on the study of geography—which means, literally, "writing about the earth" or "describing the earth." Geography is not simply accounts of the lands of earth and their features; it's about discovering everything there is to know about our planet. This book shows why geography is of critical importance to our world's 21st-century inhabitants through an exploration of the past and present discoveries that have been made about the earth. It pinpoints 100 moments throughout history that had a significant impact on the study of geography and the understanding of our world, including widely accepted maps of the ancient world, writings and discoveries of key thinkers and philosophers, key exploration events and findings during the Age of Discovery, the foundations of important geographic organizations, and new inventions in digital mapping today. The book begins with a clear explanation of geography as a discipline, a framework, and a way of viewing the world, followed by coverage of each of the 100 discoveries and innovations that provides sufficient background and content for readers to understand each topic. Students will gain a clear sense of what is truly revolutionary about geography, perhaps challenging their preconceived notion of what geography actually is, and grasp how important discoveries revolutionized not only the past but the present day as well. It is my hope that the book clearly provides readers with an understanding of why geography matters to our 21st-century world and an awareness of how geography affects our everyday lives and is key to wise decision making. I have also ensured that the book addresses and explains key themes of geography, including scale, physical processes, cultural processes, patterns, relationships, models, and trends.  The book also integrates time, space, and place in geography, documenting how it is not only the study of spatial patterns, but also the fact that many discoveries in geography came about because of the particular time and place in which the discoverers lived. The book was published by ABC-CLIO and is available from the publisher and via Amazon. And yes, the book includes plenty about geotechnologies that we discuss in this blog, including GIS, GPS, remote sensing, web mapping, UAVs, and other technologies from astrolabes and compasses to theodolites and the Internet of Things. Interpreting Our World: 100 Discoveries that Revolutionized Geography. ... View more

Finding map content can often be a challenge, even nowadays when so much content is available in ArcGIS Online.  Recently, Charlie Fitzpatrick and I taught a a workshop entitled "Key Strategies for Finding Content and Understanding What You've Found."   The goal of this activity was to enable GIS-using educators and their students to understand what spatial analysis is, effectively find spatial data, use spatial data, and become familiar with the ArcGIS platform in the process.  Based on discussions that take place in GeoNet and elsewhere about this topic, we would like to share it with the broader GIS community.  The document is located here. The document makes it clear that we are still in a hybrid world, where people still need to download data for some work in GIS, but increasingly they are can stream data from cloud-based data services such as those in ArcGIS Online.  But these concepts make much more sense when one actually practices doing this--hence the activity. In the activity, we ask the user to first practice search strategies in ArcGIS Online, using tags and keywords. Then, we guide the user through the process of downloading and using a CSV file with real-time data.   After a brief review of data types and resources, we guide the user of the activity through the process of downloading data from a local government agency to solve a problem about flood hazards.  The next step asks users to compare this process of downloading data with streaming the same data from the same local government's site (in this case, Boulder County, Colorado) in ArcGIS Online.  The activity concludes with resources to discover more about these methods of accessing data. Other hands-on activities focused on this theme of finding and understanding data exist in the 10 activities included in the Esri Press book, The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data, shown here, and in selected SpatiaLABS and LearnGIS lessons.  I look forward to hearing your comments and we hope the activity is useful. Accessing data from the Boulder County local government GIS portal through the lesson described above. ... View more

Not long ago, obtaining data for a GIS-based project was an arduous task. Because great time and effort was involved with either creating your own data or obtaining data that someone else created, you had to think carefully about the quality of the data that would go into your project. While it can still be cumbersome to obtain data at specific scales for specific areas, cloud-based data services, crowdsourced maps and databases and real-time streaming make it easy for anyone to obtain vast amounts of data in a short amount of time. In such an environment where so much data is available, is data quality still of concern? I believe that yes, data quality does matter. In fact, because data is so easy to obtain data nowadays, and with the advent of crowdsourcing and cloud-based GIS such as ArcGIS Online, I submit that data quality considerations actually matter now more than ever before. And for those of us who are GIS, STEM, and geography educators, I believe this topic merits inclusion in many courses. In fact, I have found that discussing this topic connects well to critical thinking, spatial thinking, location privacy, and other relevant themes that we need to address in our courses.  In these three examples, I illustrate in an article I wrote for Directions Magazine, I focus on why data quality matters both now and in the future. The first example describes my mapping of a GPS-collected track in ArcGIS Online.  The second example focuses on mapping health data for Rhode Island towns.  The last example is entitled "Walking on Water?" - and it has to do with resolution and scale.  But I won't spoil it for you - read the article, and then below this essay, I look forward to hearing how you teach about data quality. Why Data Quality Matters - Now More Than Ever. Examples. ... View more