Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

I recently participated in the European Association of Geographers conference in Belgium.  There, I had the pleasure of interacting with energetic and knowledgeable young professionals promoting the European Geography Association for Students and Young Geographers, the EGEA. Some members of the European Geography Association, with Karl Donert above left, President of the European Association of Geographers. It is an honor for Esri to partner with and support this organization, along with our colleagues at the University of Utrecht and elsewhere.  The goal of EGEA's network is to exchange knowledge and information for geography students and young geographers. To achieve this goal, EGEA organises congresses, student exchanges, hosts foreign students, and publishes a newsletter. As all of us in the field of geotechnology are well aware, networking is critical for success.  But what is also critical is empowering students and young professionals as they begin their careers in this field.  How can we as the geography and GIS professsional community best do that? Associations such as the EGEA can help grow an effective geo-workforce of tomorrow through development of skills, confidence, and, in short, cultivating lifelong learning and career growth.  Also playing a key role are resources such as the new GeoPivot and the Geomentor program.  But I also think effective nurturing starts at earlier ages, reflected in the efforts that we and others are making in such programs as 4H, the National Girls Collaborative Project, and other after school programs, and through working directly with primary and secondary students and educators.  We have numerous complicated issues to solve in the 21st Century, and most of these issues have a geographic component that can be understood through the use of geotechnologies.  These young people with whom we are working are skilled, committed, and eager to make a positive difference in our world. Are you involved in any of these efforts to help build the next generation of geo-minded professionals?   What other efforts do you think our community needs to make? ... View more

In my last post, I made the case that Jukes, McCain, Crocket, and Prensky's book Understanding the Digital Generation holds key lessons for those of us who are involved in teaching with GIS and teaching about GIS.  Yet the characteristics of these digital learners that I described in that post are not the only instructive elements of the book.  The authors' discussion of changes in the 21 st  Century world of work I believe are helpful for curriculum developers, instructors, and administrators who seek to embed the geographic perspective, spatial content, and geotechnology skills into instruction at all levels. Jukes et al. say that to prepare for the 21st Century world of work, while we will continue to teach many traditional skills, there will be a shift in emphasis on the importance of those skills.   The authors go on to say that we must adjust teaching to match the new world of technology.  New skills must be considered as part of the basic literacy skills of any student.  Why have these skills received a promotion? Quite simply, because of technology. Student discussing GIS based project. The authors prefer the word "fluency" over literacy because for them it conveys a sense of lifelong learning, such as becoming fluent in a language--in this case, the language of technology.  There are five types of fluencies that are important:  (1) Solution fluency:  This is whole brain thinking, including creativity and problem solving applied in real time.  (2)  Information fluency:  The ability to access digital information sources to retrieve desired information and assess and critically evaluate the quality of information.  (3)  Collaboration fluency:   This "teamworking proficiency" is the "ability to work cooperatively with virtual and real partners in an online environment to create original digital products."  (4)  Creativity fluency:  The "process by which artistic proficiency adds meaning through design, art, and storytelling."  (5)  Media fluency:  The ability to look analytically at any communication media to interpret the real message, determine how the chosen media is being used to shape thinking, evaluate the efficacy of the message, and the ability to publish original digital products to match the media to the intended message. Space does not permit me to make all of the connections between these fluencies and what students do when they use GIS and geographic inquiry to grapple with problems.  However, in short, I have witnessed thousands of times over the past 20 years that students doing so engage in all five of these fluencies.  Using GIS has never "just been about the tools" but rather engages and depends upon creativity, collaborative problem-solving, accessing and using data online and in the field, working with a wide variety of media from spreadsheets to geodatabases to image files to HTML and JavaScript, assessing an increasing array of spatial data sources, and communicating process and results.  Jukes et al.'s statement that "Students must be able to artistically create stories using technology" seems to capture a large part of what students do with GIS.  The communication may include verbal and written descriptions of the problem tackled, the creation of a story map, ArcGIS Online presentations, embedding a map as part of a descriptive web page, and a myriad of other methods.  All of this prepares students well for the 21st Century world of work. My question for instructors:  How have you observed students acquiring these five fluencies when you have taught GIS?  My question for students:  How has using GIS enabled you to prepare for the world of work? ... View more

I recently read the book Understanding the Digital Generation by Ian Jukes, Ted McCain, Lee Crockett, and Mark Prensky.  I found it to be insightful but also quite appropriate for those involved with GIS in education. Understanding the Digital Generation book. What are the characteristics of digital learners according to these authors?  Digital learners prefer receiving information quickly from multiple multimedia sources, not a slow and controlled release of information from limited sources.  GIS has always been about layering of information from a variety of sources, from satellite imagery to stream gauges, from traffic cams to ecological monitoring stations, and more.  Digital learners prefer processing pictures, sounds, color, and video before text.  Digital learners prefer random access to hyperlinked multimedia information, rather than receiving information linearly, logically, and sequentially.  GIS easily incorporates audio, video, photographs, links, and text.   Furthermore, GIS has become a platform, accessible from a variety of devices--tablets, laptops, smartphones--and the maps and data sets created within a GIS are shareable. Digital learners refer to network simultaneously with others, rather than working independently first before they network and interact with each other.  Whether in education, health, natural resource management, planning, or in other fields, success with GIS is greatly enhanced by networking with peers. Jukes et al. say that while many educators prefer teaching "just in case", digital learners prefer learning "just in time."  We in GIS in education have always emphasized using the most appropriate tools for the job, and learning GIS functions in the context of solving specific problems. Digital learners prefer instant gratification and immediate rewards.  Those of us who labored through the early days of GIS marvel at how easy-to-use modern GIS has become.  From creating spatial statistics to georegistering historical imagery, the modern GIS toolkit is vast and varied, accompanied by graphics, videos, and other resources designed to aid beginner and advanced users alike.    Finally, digital learners prefer learning that is relevant, active, instantly useful, and fun.  How can GIS, which was created to analyze 21st Century issues from energy to water to migration to natural hazards and more, not be relevant and useful?  Teaching and learning with GIS is active, engaging, and yes, fun. In short, I firmly believe that teaching and learning with GIS appeals to and is relevant to today's digital learners.  Can you find additional connect points between these authors' statements and GIS in education? ... View more

Technologies that enable educators and students to map their field-collected data are rapidly evolving.  A few years ago I wrote several reports of my field test that compared the spatial accuracy of collecting tracks and waypoints with a recreational grade GPS versus a smartphone.  I decided it was time to revisit that research and recently while working with faculty at the Mt Evans Outdoor Education Lab School in Colorado, the opportunity arose. While on the school's grounds I collected data simultaneously with three methods and two devices:  (1) As a track using an app called RunKeeper on my smartphone (an iPhone 4 in my case), (2) As a track and waypoints using an app called Motion X GPS on my smartphone, (3) As a track and waypoints using my Garmin 76 GPS receiver.  In order to keep my footing on the steep terrain, I simply held these devices in front of me; I did not hold them above my head or in any way enhance the reception.  After the collection was completed, I emailed the smartphone data as GPX files to myself and uploaded them into ArcGIS Online.  I cabled the points from my GPS device to my computer using the free Minnesota DNR GPS program and mapped them as a zipped shapefile.  I saved the results in ArcGIS Online as a web map. Comparing smartphone and GPS tracks and waypoints. As expected, the RunKeeper track, shown in pale blue, was highly generalized.  RunKeeper is a fitness app that I use daily with excellent accuracy, but I suspect the generalization here occurred in the step when I downloaded the track to a GPX file and mapped the GPX.   However, both the Motion X GPS track collected with the  smartphone and the track collected with the GPS receiver were only 1 to 2 meters off from where the satellite image showed the trails to be.  And keep in mind that this model of GPS is already a decade old; the chips in the newer models can even detect GPS signals inside certain types of buildings.  In addition, my smartphone is nearly three years old. Interestingly, at certain places, such as just west of where the popup graphic is located, the smartphone results were better, but south of the graphic, where I left the trail to photograph a bench, the GPS detected my side journey but not the smartphone.  I also took photographs in the field with my smartphone and uploaded them to Picasaweb.  I then accessed the photos in Picasaweb and captured the latitude-longitude coordinates, and used those coordinates to map them in ArcGIS Online.  The photographs also were no more than 1 meter off of the location I had taken them according to the satellite image. I was very pleased with the smartphone and GPS results, particularly because the school lies in steep and heavily forested terrain in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.  If I achieved good results here, the results should be even better in flat terrain and with fewer trees.   And while there are still some advantages for using GPS receivers in education, the smartphones are a viable technology for doing so, and they too offer advantages.  I will expand on the advantages of both in future blog essays, and keep in mind that smartphone location services can use GPS, cellular triangulation, and geo-wifi, or a combination thereof, and you as the user typically do not know which one(s) it is using at any particular moment.  The takeaway here is that GPS and smartphones both do a fine job in terms of spatial accuracy.  True, I wasn't mapping fiber optic cables, but for marking trees, bird's nests, trails, and a host of other items that educators and students want to map, they are quite suitable. How do you use GPS receivers and smartphones in your educational work?  How might you use this type of spatial accuracy comparison as part of your math, science, or geography-based curriculum? ... View more

In a recent essay, I asked “Is Everyone a Geographer?,”given the advent of easy-to-use geotechnologies that have enabled the general public to use many of the same tools and data that were formerly only used by GIS specialists and geographers.  I received some intriguing responses as did a book in which my colleagues and I asked this same question, entitled Practicing Geography.   In the essay I contended that geography is a three-legged stool, with supporting legs representing content knowledge, geographic skills, and the spatial perspective. The advent of geotechnologies has elevated the importance of geography to a level unprecedented in the history of the discipline, reinvoking inherent tensions between the integrity of the field as a discrete academic discipline, on the one hand, and its generalist appeal on the other hand.  Although this tension within geography is not new—William Morris Davis reacted to it over one hundred years ago—some say that geography has never been more prominent within the everyday human experience than it is today. Personally, I’m not so sure about that.  We spend so much time indoors these days.  At one time we were all directly depending on the landscape for food, water, and shelter, we were very much attuned to local geography—where to plant, where not to plant, where the safe drinking water was, where we could set animal traps or fishing lures, and other actions that our very lives depended on.  That has changed for many, though certainly not all, of the planet’s inhabitants.  In the past, the ability to use “geographic data” depended on one’s five senses.  I suppose we could have a lively debate on whether geography is more prominent in the human experience now or in the past.  What is clear that the 21 st Century certainly has seen society’s valuing geographic tools in everyday life.  This is different in many ways from the previous 100 years, where the ability to use geographic data, in the form of increasingly sophisticated paper maps, and later, databases and software, did require extensive geographic training.  Now, many of these tools are as common as the smartphone or the Internet itself. The rise of geographic tools such as web GIS, GPS, data collection via smartphone, and easy-to-use GIS software means that we now have the capability of making decisions more rapidly and more wisely than ever before, and most importantly, use the spatial perspective in making those decisions.   Geotechnologies have no curricular “home” in most educational systems at the present time.  Thus, one challenge in education is convincing educational authorities and organizations, and even individual educators and parents, that these geographic tools enhance teaching and learning at all levels.  They are valuable tools with which to learn history, earth and environmental science, biology, geography, mathematics, language arts, and many other subjects, encouraging holistic and critical thinking.   However, they are also valuable to learn for their own sake, as technologies for an ever-expanding array of careers, from medicine to marketing, from engineering to ecology, from business to biology, from public safety to planning. How can we connect the rise of geographic tools to the need to be using these tools throughout the educational system? -Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

As we enter a new year, we on the Esri education team look forward to working with you, the global GIS education community, on supporting the use of spatial thinking and geotechnologies to foster deep learning experiences throughout the world.  A Chinese proverb, “Ji Hua Mei You Bian Hua Kuai” or “Ji hua gan bu shan bian hua” seems appropriate to quote as we move forward as a community.  Ji hua refers to plans, bian hua to changes, and mei you means “not”.  The meaning of the proverb is, therefore, “Plans Can't Keep Up with Changes.” Many nuances associated with this proverb seem to me to be particularly meaningful with regards to GIS in education.  First and most obvious is that change is a constant part of our lives.  The world of public and private education at all levels is rapidly changing in terms of priorities, learners’ demographics, and available technologies and methods.  Teaching and learning with GIS is also rapidly transforming as GIS becomes viable on mobile devices and web-based maps, apps, and services continue to open doors through which students can enter for learning opportunities in schools and universities and career opportunities once they graduate from those schools and universities.  The open data movement, citizen science, and cloud-based GIS all expanded many-fold last year and will continue to do so.  The recent upgrade to ArcGIS Online, including the viewing and filtering of tables and the ability to create time-enabled feature services, is a perfect example of the expanding array of tools that can be effectively used to teach in and about a wide variety of subjects, students, and settings. But I believe there are subtler aspects to this proverb that are appropriate to GIS in education as well.  While things may happen that are out of our control, we still need a plan to keep us focused.  We on the Esri education team will continue to develop courses, curriculum, data, and other resources, conduct and foster professional development opportunities and research on GIS in education, and communicate through a variety of face to face and online methods and a variety of stakeholders about the need for spatial thinking and GIS in education.  We do all of these things in partnership with you, the GIS education community.  Adhering to the proverb also means that we need to prepare for and predict upcoming changes as we create our plan, and so we need to keep close watch on and anticipate changes in technologies and education.  Finally, following the proverb also means that our plan needs to include long-term and short-term  goals, and include step-by-step details to deal with the changes that will surely come.   We need to hold fast to our “big dreams” of spatially literate societies, and yet take concrete steps to help us get there. What plans do you have for GIS in education over the next year? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

 Earlier this year, I created a map in ArcGIS Online showing the location of selected abandoned buildings in Detroit.  A book entitled Lost Detroit features stories that the author, Dan Austin, wrote to accompany each of the grim but fascinating photographs of these modern day ruins taken by Sean Doerr.  These include the Grand Central Railroad Terminal Building, the Michigan Theatre that is now a parking garage, the Grand Old Army of the Republic building, the Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church, and many more. Why did I create this map?  I have always been fascinated by maps and believe that mapping is a natural way to tell a story.  Detroit, and indeed all cities, are dynamic entities that have a unique and interesting story to tell.  ArcGIS Online also allows for the easy integration of multimedia elements to tell a story, and I created popups from online photographs of the selected buildings that ArcGIS Online easily geocoded.  Lastly, I wanted to see the spatial distribution of these buildings, which I could only do by mapping them.  As expected, many of them are downtown, but the Vanity Ballroom and others are scattered throughout the core metropolitan area.  This project illustrated the dynamic nature of the built landscape:  Since the book was published, I discovered that one of the buildings featured in the book, the old Cass Technical High School building, had been torn down. Earlier this month, I went further and created an Esri StoryMap that allowed a rich integration of maps, text, and images.  The StoryMaps templates are easy to modify to suit your objectives.  I created this StoryMap, and another one that shows changes in landscapes, climate, and land use along 40 Degrees North Latitude, by modifying just two of the Esri-provided files, and then moving these two files along with the other required files and folders to a web server. What places in your community are important enough to map?  What buildings or other landmarks in your community do you believe are important enough to protect, and why?  How might you use ArcGIS Online or Esri StoryMaps to tell a story about your community and its landmarks? -Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

During a workshop I attended at the Esri User Conference this past summer, my colleague Charlie Frye stated that “a good map teaches you to ask a better question.”   I love this statement.  It fits well with the mission of the GIS education community, don’t you think?  Isn’t one of our main goals in teaching and learning with GIS to use maps and data to investigate our communities, our regions, our countries, and our world?  A question is the first step in an investigation.  It is the first step in the geographic inquiry process.  Whether the question is “What is the relationship between birth rate and life expectancy around the globe?” or “How did the construction of the breakwater change the rate of coastal erosion along this stretch of beach?” or “Why were communities along the path of Superstorm Sandy affected differently?”, these questions form the foundation of our investigations.  Good questions inevitably get refined and modified along the way and usually lead to other questions.  They may not be fully answered, and oftentimes have no single correct answer.   This may be puzzling at first to students but emulates real-world decision-making. In this activity, students determine the optimal route for a tourist bus through Manhattan given specified points of interest and the location of the tour bus garage. As important as good questions are, it is sometimes amazing how little time we spend in our educational system helping students practice asking good questions.  Perhaps it is because in this age of standardized testing, we are so focused on good answers.  Yet many educators are indeed helping students ask questions, and not just any questions, but thoughtful questions that can lead to increased understanding, skill building, and critical thinking. Teaching with GIS and teaching about GIS foster good questioning.  One of the core functions of a GIS is to allow for real-world issues to be examined, questioned, and probed with real data.  Maps in a GIS environment allow for the many spatial and temporal dimensions of our world to be examined, at multiple scales.  Not only are the questions able to be grappled with using rich sets of maps and data, but they are tied to real-world events past and present.  They are interesting, but they are also important and relevant for our future, including such issues as sustainable agriculture, natural hazard management, smart city planning, and much more.   Maps inside a GIS environment help students of all ages to ask better questions in part because during the inquiry, they allow for the scale and symbology to be changed, for additional layers to be added, and for powerful queries and statistics to be run on the data.  The “what if” questions can be explored, such as:  What  if I changed the scale?  What if I added this variable?  What if I ran a different query?  What if I examined a different area with the same variables?  What if I classified the data differently?  ArcGIS provides a platform for asking and analyzing questions. What questions do you have about our world?  How can GIS help you grapple with those questions, find answers, or ask additional questions? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

I recently gave presentations at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee for GIS Day, and took the opportunity,  as most geographers would, to get out onto the landscape.  I walked on the Lake Michigan pier at Manitowoc, enjoying a stroll in the brisk wind to and from the lighthouse there, recording my track on my smartphone in an application called Runkeeper.  When my track had finished and been mapped, it appeared as though I had been walking on the water! Map of my walk from Runkeeper.com. Photograph of my destination:  The lighthouse at the North Pier, Manitowoc, Wisconsin. According to my map, I walked on water.  Funny, but I don’t recall even getting wet!  It all comes down to paying close attention to your data, and knowing its sources.  Showing these images provides a teachable moment in a larger discussion on the importance of scale and resolution in any project involving maps or GIS.  In my case, even if I scrolled in to a larger scale, the pier did not appear on the Runkeeper’s application’s base map.  It does, however, appear in the base map in ArcGIS Online.  In the book that Jill Clark and I wrote entitled The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data, we discuss how scale and resolution can be conceptualized and put into practice in both the raster and vector worlds.  We cite examples where neglecting these important concepts have led not only to bad decisions, but have cost people their property and even their lives.   Today, while GIS tools allow us to instantly zoom to a large scale, the data being examined might have been collected at a much smaller scale.  Much caution therefore needs to be used when making decisions when the analysis scale is larger than the collection scale. What example have you used in class that well illustrates the importance of scale and resolution? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

I recently created a map in ArcGIS Online and a series of videos that shows the location of what may be the biggest city that never was:  Cairo, Illinois.  During the mid-1800s, many believed that this city, founded on the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, gateways to settlement of the central and western United States, could someday surpass Philadelphia or even New York City. I created the map for several reasons.  First, like many of you, I am fascinated by maps.  Mapping is a natural way to tell a story, and Cairo has a very interesting story to tell.  For several geographic reasons, Cairo not only didn’t live up to its expectations, and has been declining by 10% to 20% per decade for the past 70 years (2010 population, 2,831).  While Cairo has a good situation on the point of land divided by the rivers, the site is flood-prone.  In addition, the rise of St Louis upstream on the Mississippi River also posed challenges for Cairo.  In fact, socioeconomically, Cairo remains one of the poorest communities in the region, which you can investigate for yourself by pulling up the “USA Demographics for Schools” layer in ArcGIS Online and investigating median income and median home value.  It nevertheless has a fascinating and unique character steeped in history and geography. The second reason I created the map was because ArcGIS Online allows for the easy integration of multimedia elements to tell a story.  In my case, I created the map only after having the opportunity to visit Cairo this year en route to Murray State University, taking videos and photographs to be sure, but also getting a “sense of place” for Cairo.  During my visit, my discovery of a tiny community just north of Cairo dubbing itself “Future City” seemed to fit perfectly with the above themes.  At the river confluence, a weathered monument in the shape of Lewis and Clark’s boat the Merrimack standing in a rather forlorn state park seemed to reinforce the fact that this was the Biggest City That Never Was.  The photographs and videos I took there were easily integrated into my ArcGIS Online map. What important places on the landscape have you visited or read about, and how might you create stories about them using ArcGIS Online? --Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

My colleague in Higher Education wrote this:  Joseph:  If you know any of the software engineers working on 10.1 SPxxxx can you  get them to make it possible to save/print the profile and 3D views that  you can open with the LAS toolbar. Had lots of discussions with folks  about how we were all having to do screen captures of these windows  because there is no SAVE feature associated with them. ... View more

My colleague in Higher Education wrote this:  Joseph:  If you know any of the software engineers working on 10.1 SPxxxx can you  get them to make it possible to save/print the profile and 3D views that  you can open with the LAS toolbar. Had lots of discussions with folks  about how we were all having to do screen captures of these windows  because there is no SAVE feature associated with them. ... View more

I have created a data set containing electoral history for the past 56 years in ArcGIS Online, so you and your students can interact with it, teach with it, and explore patterns. To accompany the data set, I wrote a lesson entitled, "Which states went for which candidate? Elections" is in the ArcLessons library. What is the difference between the popular vote and the electoral vote? What influences voting patterns at present and what influenced the patterns in the past? Why do electoral votes sometimes exhibit a regional or national pattern and sometimes exhibit no pattern? After examining the maps dating back to 1956, which election years would you say were the closest in terms of the electoral vote, and which were the most one-sided? Which states voted consistently Republican, or Democratic, in the past? When have third-party candidates been a factor? When did the candidate lose his “home state?” Which states change back and forth in terms of political party over time, and do these correspond to what are referred to as “swing states”? How does population distribution influence the electoral vote and where candidates spend their time and money? These questions and many more can be effectively analyzed by using the above maps and lesson. ArcGIS Online provides an excellent platform for learning about issues, patterns, and phenomena. Because elections data in the USA are tied to administrative boundaries, elections maps can be easily created. Examining election data in ArcGIS Online allows the data to be effectively and easily used by educators, students, and others, anywhere around the world.Another map and data set containing electoral votes by state for the upcoming election, along with demographic information and much more, was compiled by my colleague Charlie Fitzpatrick, and makes an excellent accompanying data set. These data sets can be used with an accompanying blog post describing what is there and how to use it. It is my hope that these data sets and lessons will be helpful in teaching and learning in these next few weeks, and beyond. - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

What sort of changes has your neighborhood, the area around your school or university campus, or even your own backyard seen over the past few years? Outside our Esri office in Colorado, a large condominium complex has been under construction for a year. Its construction invites consideration of scale, change, and geography. In my neighborhood and in yours, GIS provides an excellent toolkit to examine changes and the reasons for them. For centuries, communities changed very little, and indeed, some communities today undergo very little change. Yet in most communities, changes in infrastructure, total population, and the makeup of that population are commonplace. In my neighborhood, the hilltop site was chosen because of the excellent views its residents will have of the Colorado Front Range. These, incidentally, were formerly enjoyed by my colleagues on the north end of our building! Regionally, construction reflects population growth fuelled by the combination of high-tech industries, including GIS, and amenities such as nearby universities, the mountains, and the climate, making Colorado one of the fastest growing states over the past half century. One way to do this is to examine imagery in ArcGIS Online and add three types of basemaps: Bing maps aerials, the ArcGIS Online imagery, and the USGS topographic maps layer. These sources were created on different dates and thus provide an easy and rich data source with which to examine changes in local communities. Revisit a changing area often and capture and save the updated images as I did here. Toggle the layers on and off and/or adjust the transparency so that you can compare and contrast them. Combine this to population change data that is easily added in ArcGIS Online. Our Esri office in Colorado in the south-central portion of this image is noticeable for its blue-ish roof. Note the open space to the north of our building. Construction has begun, but note that in addition, a large office building now appears to the north of the east-west street. Construction proceeds. What other changes do you detect? What time of day were these images taken? What time of year were these images taken? What clues help you answer these questions? Go outside and take pictures and videos around your local community. Write and sketch what you see. Revisit the same sites during different weather events and in different seasons, or in the case of my Esri neighborhood in Colorado, as construction progresses. Link these photographs, videos, and text to points on your ArcGIS Online maps. What changes are occurring, and why? What will your community look like and be like in 5 years? In 20 years? What can you do to influence your community in a positive way? I invite you to use ArcGIS Online beginning with these simple but powerful ways. - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

Back in 1998, I and my colleagues were thrilled with the arrival of Terraserver. While maps and images for use in GIS on the web today are commonplace, back then it was revolutionary. Suddenly, thanks to an agreement between the USGS and Microsoft, the GIS community had access to USGS topographic maps and aerial photographs down to 1 meter spatial resolution for the entire USA. Two additional features made this service extra special. First, these images were georeferenced, meaning that they could be easily used within a GIS environment. Second, these images were online: No CD-ROMs or other physical media were required! After downloading the maps and aerials for our area of interest, we could read these maps and images into our ArcInfo or ArcView GIS software. True, the header files often needed to be edited first, but this resource gave us a huge leap forward because we had terabytes of data at our fingertips via http://www.terraserver-usa.com, later becoming http://msrmaps.com. Even better was when some enterprising folks at Esri wrote programs to automatically stream these images to ArcGIS. Now, 14 years later, Terraserver was recently retired. As the National Atlas recently wrote, “We note its passing and salute all those who developed the service. Many people were involved in this groundbreaking effort. Still, there were three individuals who largely provided the vision and hard work that resulted in this remarkable service: Tom Barclay (Microsoft), Beth Duff (USGS, deceased), and Hedy Rossmeissl (USGS, retired). The National Atlas switched over to services provided by Esri so that Atlas users can continue to link from our maps to large-scale topo maps and aerial views. This takes us full circle. The National Atlas Map Maker was the first on-line, interactive mapper offered by the Federal government. It was partially developed under a joint research effort by the USGS and ESRI in 1997.” A plethora of base maps, topographic maps, satellite images, and aerial photographs are now available to the GIS user and the general public such as via ArcGIS Online. Times have changed but the need for good base data lives on. While I don’t long for those days of tinkering with header files, I salute the early pioneers who made it all happen, and look forward to the future. The evolution of GIS data, and discussion about data sources, quality, and related issues are detailed and blogged weekly about in the book that Jill Clark and I wrote, entitled The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data. I and my colleagues frequently need old aerials for land use change studies, however, and therefore, I wish Terraserver had remained online. Why couldn’t it have done so? What are now the best sources for old aerial photographs? - Joseph Kerski, Education Manager, Esri ... View more