Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

GIS is changing, and perhaps the tools and workflows changing GIS the most these days is Artificial Intelligence, or AI.  I conducted a hands-on AI GIS (or "Geo AI") workshop recently and am using this space to share the contents with the wider community.  The overview slides are posted at this location as a PDF and the more focused slides containing the activities are posted at this location as a PPTX, and at this location as a PDF, and contain: 1.  The definitions and concepts around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Large Language Models, and Geo AI.  2.   How GeoAI is changing GIS and workflows in organizations, and related career pathways. JosephKerski_0-1717789348206.png JosephKerski_1-1717789371959.png 3.  Why instructors should be teaching with AI tools. 4.  How instructors can teach with AI tools inside the ArcGIS ecosystem.  I advocate starting with Gen AI Survey123 tools and continuing with ArcGIS Online, and then to ArcGIS Pro.  Start with the pretrained models; plenty of them exist, are compelling, and are important for all of us to understand.  5.  How students can learn with AI tools inside the ArcGIS ecosystem. 6.  Two activities - GenAI Survey123 field survey generation, and feature extraction from imagery, are included in this workshop, with links to many more. 7.  Updated for Fall 2024:   I now have 3 activities, including the above two plus a business analyst web app, with an additional set of slides. Included in the workshop are points of discussion about the benefits and the concerns related to AI, such as below: JosephKerski_0-1717788758180.png AI presents us amazing capabilities and has already transformed decision-making and the makeup of much day-to-day GIS work.    We don’t get to go backwards in technology: AI tools are here to stay and are remarkable.   We never have been able to go backwards in GIS or other tools; there is no "click here to run this tool in ArcInfo Version 6" or "click here to do this overlay with scribecoat and peelcoat" (to date me even further!). Use AI tools wisely: Understand what goes into each model and algorithm.  Read the metadata.  If you are a creator of these tools, make sure you populate the metadata for others to use. Also, as AI tools can be quite complex, make sure you explain them as clearly as possible.  Metadata doesn't help if nobody understands it. I created a video reflection on the topic of AI in GIS education, here:  •  https://youtu.be/rnofTJEGw_0?si=FBKhlEWc9zjEidmW On the Spatial Reserves data blog,  https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com, my colleague and I have been writing about where can I find geospatial data, how do I know if it is any good, and societal implications for many years. These implications include copyright, location privacy, ethics, and AI.    I have recently written about an AI powered open data portal:  https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2024/05/13/aipowered-open-data-portal-for-washington-dc/  and reviewed Dr Dawn Wright's work and writings about Why AI needs to be digitally resilient: https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2024/04/15/reflections-on-why-ai-needs-to-be-digitally-resilient/ In the workshop, I include resources on how to keep learning in this rapidly advancing area, such as one that I consider to be an excellent first one-stop for GeoAI in education, the resource my teammate Canserina Kurnia created, entitled "Unlocking the power of Geospatial AI": • https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/resources-for-unlocking-the-power-of-geospatial-ai/bap/1293098 Several Learn ArcGIS Lessons already exist in the lesson library at https://learn.arcgis.com. These include classifying objects using Deep Learning in ArcGIS Pro:  • https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/6410c0524d750615175c0b58/classifying-objects-using-deeplearning-in-arcgis-pro/  I thank my colleagues inside and outside Esri who are blazing pathways in this field, and to those at Esri who helped me prepare the contents for this workshop.  I trust that this will be useful to the readers of this education community blog.  ... View more

I created 16 new lessons to support a fundamentals of GIS short course.   I have rigorously tested, taught, and refined these lessons over the past few months and wanted to make them available to the wider community so that you can use or modify them for your own purposes.  The lessons are aimed at undergraduate-level learners, but I have also used them for the GIS professional community, and one could also use them for upper secondary school students.  The content covers are wide variety of themes (water, population, hazards, more) and scales (local to global), and is focused on web-based Software as a Service (SaaS) GIS, specifically, ArcGIS Online. The tools used include the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer, ArcGIS StoryMaps, dashboards, Survey123, instant apps, and other tools. The goal is that working through these activities, you will gain confidence in mapping, spatial thinking, working with spatial data, spatial analysis, saving, sharing, and communicating the results of your work. To access all content, see this ArcGIS StoryMap collection: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/b9292c1494224ff8bf8ebd31424ff917    A StoryMap collection was the perfect tool to use to allow learners to quickly and easily access the activities, which are accessed through 3 story maps that you will see in the collection.  A collection also allows me to easily update the content as needed.  I encourage you to create a StoryMap collection to support your own instruction.  Alternatively, attached to this essay are 3 PDFs containing the 16 lessons.   JosephKerski_0-1717165593343.png   The short course content is as follows: Part 1:  Spatial is Special!                                                              Ways to define and conceptualize GIS                                                            What are maps?  Why are they relevant to 21st Century decision making?                                                            GIS software and organizations                                                            The whys of where                                                            Activity 1:  Spatial and attribute characteristics                                                            The modern GIS platform:   Maps, layers, apps, data services Part 2: Let’s Get Mapping!                                                            Activity 2:  A field survey, map, dashboard, and story map                                                             Activity 3:  Symbology:  Single symbol, graduated symbol, predominance                                                                maps, pie charts, ring chart maps                                                            Activity 4:   Creating expressions; analyzing change over space and time                                                            Activity 5:  Filtering data and working with isolines Part 3:  Investigating Relationships                                                            Activity 6:  Bivariate and relationship mapping                                                            Activity 7:  Analyzing relationships with scatter plots and maps  Part 4:  How to get Data into a GIS                                                             Activity 8:  Mapping a spreadsheet.  Discussion:  Vector data, imagery,                                                                      raster data                                                             Activity 9:   Creating a field survey and online map                                                             Mappy Time!  Discuss favorite maps and map-related books.   Part 5:  Communicating Your Results                                                              Demonstrate:  Web Mapping applications including Living Atlas of the                                                                      World apps                                                            Activity 10:  Creating a dashboard                                                            Activity 11:  Creating a story map                                                            Activity 12:  Spatial Analysis I:  Natural Hazards                                                                                                                        Discussion on sharing – when and how to do it   Part 6:  Spatial Analysis                                                             Activity 13:  Spatial Analysis II : Invasive species                                                             Activity 14:  Deep learning feature extraction from satellite imagery                                                             Activity 15:  Land Records Mapping, analysis, and visualization                                                             Activity 16:   3D visualization and analysis  Part 7:   GIS Workflows and Considerations                                                              GIS content organization                                                              ArcGIS Pro and GIS tools                                                                      Data quality and the ethics of mapping.                                                                Continuing your GIS journey:                                                               Resources for moving forward:                                                              Books, organizations, tutorials, associations, networks, events. One of the things I like most about using StoryMaps as teaching tools is the sidecar capabilities.  For example, in Activity 15, and in many other activities, I place the directions on the left and the interactive web map in ArcGIS Online on the right, so the student can see the instructions while they are working through the lesson on the right (or, alternatively, popping the right side into a separate tab so they will have more space in which to work).  JosephKerski_0-1717165750471.png Lastly, like many other rigorous sets of curriculum, developing the above was aided by collaboration and networking. For example, my work with the Wisconsin Land Information Association (WLIA) connected me to the wonderful Washington County Wisconsin GIS staff, who have created an amazing data portal, the data from which I used, with their permission, for the above Activity #15.   Below is a screen shot from the lessons themselves.  I look forward to your reactions. --Joseph Kerski JosephKerski_0-1717168656499.png   ... View more

A continued state of change From their inception, educational institutions have always been in a state of change.   From the founding of what are widely considered to be the oldest universities in the world, the University of Al Quaraouiyine in Fez, Morocco, founded in 859, and the University of Bologna, founded in 1088 in Bologna, Italy, and the University of Oxford (1249 to 1264)(which I finally visited this year!), to the thousands of institutions in existence today, universities have always been responsively reinventing themselves to best serve the needs of their students and the needs of the greater society.  Today, community colleges, technical colleges, tribal colleges, and universities must grapple with societal, educational, financial, and technological forces that are changing more rapidly with each passing year, particularly in the geo/enviro/geotechnology sphere.  How can faculty, administrators, researchers, and facilities managers understand and respond to these changes so that their institutions will be relevant and vibrant for decades to come? My colleagues and I on the education team greatly value the work we are privileged to be involved in with the education community.  This work occurs at all levels, from primary to university level, all around the world, and across multiple disciplines from anthropology to zoology and just about everything in between.   We do this through making sure that GIS software is inexpensive or free, that tools are widely available, that spatial data is accessible, so that faculty and students can be successful.  We do this through a variety of means, including the provision of curricular resources, through technical and pedagogical assistance, through highlighting success stories in Esri and other publications, through face-to-face and online webinars, presentations, and workshops, through networking opportunities for the community, and in other ways.  We also do a lot of listening to the community's challenges and concerns. One Challenge One challenge facing higher education that we hear from faculty and read about in articles that is perhaps more acute now than a generation ago, or even a few years ago, is the stagnation or decline of some longstanding GIS programs.  This situation includes the geography programs where some GIS programs are housed.  Certainly, many others are growing and thriving.  However, I wish to respond here to what some of our educational colleagues have been asking me to write about, which is why this is happening, and if I have any advice moving forward.   Selected reasons for the challenge Over the past 3 years alone, I have visited 110 campuses face to face and have, along with my colleagues here at Esri, conducted hundreds more online short courses, presentations, and workshops.  Therefore, I am no educational expert, but I have amassed, thanks to conversations with you, the education community, a deep and broad understanding of the reality of the culture and institutions of teaching and learning.  I believe that the stagnation and decline of some programs is due to a variety of factors:  1.  In the past, institutions of higher education represented the only major way, other than on-the-job training, that people could learn GIS.  While one can argue that many people in the past learned GIS "on their own" apart from in higher education or apart from on the job, the point is that many ways exist today to learn GIS tools and methods.  These include thousands of videos, dozens of Esri and university MOOCs, thousands of self paced lessons, certificates in a wide variety of forms and styles, hundreds if not thousands of face-to-face and online college and university programs that one can choose from, and other ways.  Certainly the rise of online programs is another factor competing with your specific institution:  A student can enroll in and take courses from many rigorous, well-respected programs, offered from a university that could be halfway around the world from their own location and not requiring them to enroll in your college or university.  Thus, there are more options available to everyone.    2.  GIS software is easier to use nowadays than ever before.  Certainly the world is a complex, dynamic planet, with 8 billion humans impacting it, and therefore, GIS tools, which were created to model and understand that world, are by their nature going to be numerous and complex.  That said, though, learning GIS is vastly more accessible than it was a few years ago.  Its evolution into a cloud-based environment and ecosystem nature mean that people can learn specific components of it, rather than the entire platform. They can do so with contextual menus and wizard-driven, AI-enabled tools that are more intuitive now than ever before.  In addition, they can access imagery and vector data sets as data services, and even collect their own data via field surveys, UAVs, and heads-up digitizing.   3.  "Traditional college demographics" in many parts of the world have changed:   In certain regions, there are fewer people in their late teens and early 20s; ages which traditionally have been a key audience for college and university enrollment.  That said, many institutes of higher education attract those who are mid-career or even late-career, and my view is that it is never too late to get into GIS.  4.  There is some GIS saturation in the market, where many government agencies, nonprofits, and industries have a stable GIS-savvy workforce.  5.  Sixty years after its creation, GIS is not seen by some as new or cutting edge any longer.  In my opinion, however, today is the most exciting time to get into GIS--with the advent of web mapping applications, a wide variety of problems to solve from the global to local scale, and AI-driven workflows, just to name a few.   6.  In some parts of the world and in some regions, changes in the economy and in the unemployment rate affect some college enrollment.  Traditionally, when economies are doing well, technical college enrollment declines as those segments in the population are already gainfully employed. 7.  There is a continued lack of awareness of geospatial technology as a viable career path.  It's still rather "hidden", isn't it?   Similar to an elevator where you get in, punch buttons, expect something to happen, and you don't think much about the technology behind it.   GIS is behind the scenes, like an elevator:  GIS powers the electricity you use, your ride share and fitness app, your package delivery, how and what you ate yesterday, supply chains that resulted in the phone you are holding and the clothes you are wearing, managing the bus you will take tomorrow morning, and much more.  8.  A related concern voiced to me by faculty is when students don't find out about GIS until halfway through their undergraduate career, posing challenges to the student in terms of time to invest and their own finances.  What if we worked on raising awareness about GIS earlier, before students even arrive on campus? My colleagues and I through our active K-12 program, in collaboration with many of you reading this, and other geomentors, are doing all we can to support and promote spatial thinking throughout all of education and society.  It is our hope that one result of these efforts will be that more students entering higher education will already know about GIS and want to pursue it on your campus.  Others I know on campuses promote GIS through "GIS Day" events, campus sustainability events, through their library, or other means. 9.  Perhaps the lack of awareness stems in part from the relatively few jobs naming GIS in the job title.  In my career, for example, I have been cartographer, geographer, adjunct faculty, and education manager: I have not had "GIS" in my job title, and the same is true for many in the profession.   That is actually a good thing, for it shows that GIS is increasingly a tool and a perspective that someone with a job title of wildlife biologist, city planner, supply chain manager, or health analyst value.  Indeed, I am seeing that GIS skills are more in demand than ever before.  But admittedly this contributes to the lack of visibility for GIS. 10.  On a related note about the lack of awareness, many GIS programs are housed in geography departments:  Geography as a discipline has always been rather misunderstood, which doesn't help the misunderstood nature of GIS any!   Some have told me repeatedly in the past that "geography missed the boat on spatial analysis years ago by not fully embracing it".  I don't want to get into a "how to save geography" discussion here, but : (1) As a geographer, I certainly want my home discipline to thrive and be healthy.  And no, I don't want GIS to be renamed to remove the "geographic" name (though I also like spatial data science as a name) because to me the geographic is fundamental to its approach to problem solving:  It is much more than "using maps in analysis".  (2)  I feel it will benefit geography as a discipline by demonstrating to other disciplines across campus that geographic thinking is more important now than ever before, and that the "whys of where", which many disciplines want to teach, is a set of perspectives, tools, and ways of thinking that geographers can take a leadership role in on their campuses.  (3) More people will be getting into the field of geotechnologies from outside geography, as part of the widening recognition that "why where matters", the spread of GIS into other IT tools and organizational workflows, and the advent of GIS to the web and requiring people with IT and coding backgrounds.  I regularly teach GIS workshops where I ask for a show of hands indicating how many participants came from a geography undergraduate or graduate school background, and the percent of attendees at these workshops indicating this background has been declining for many years.  However, I believe that this widening diversity of backgrounds will strengthen the use of GIS across education and society, and again provide those with deep knowledge about GIScience the platform to help others--those who don't have time to take GIS courses, but want to use the tools.  Those GIS folks with a deep background can help these other folks to thoughtfully consider the choices they must make about database design, projections, symbology, classification, analysis tools, and how to most effectively communicate with GIS tools such as web mapping applications just to name a few ways they can assist. GIS is a disruptor! In education, GIS has always been a disruptive, barrier-breaking way of thinking and toolset.  This makes it extremely valuable for encouraging critical and holistic thinking, but also sometimes presents a challenge to GIS. Why?  Because GIS does not have one standard "home" in the curriculum, in departments, or in institutions.  It can be effectively housed in many different programs and schools and can even be called different things (location analytics, geomatics, geotechnologies, geomedia, GI systems, GI science, and by other names). Saluting the faculty In short, none of the stagnation and decline that is occurring in some institutions has to do with faculty not being innovative or forward-thinking.  To the contrary, the faculty I have been working with in the geotechnology space over my career have been some of the most creative people I have ever met.  I salute you all!  You are making a positive difference; you are leaders; you are helping students to become positive change agents in their future workplace and in society.  With the challenges come great opportunities for us and you to show leadership of why this all matters, now more than ever before, given the challenges we face in the world. Selected advice and food for thought I have been asked to provide some advice on these important matters.  For starters, I offer this below, but largely rely on you, the community to share your wisdom in the comments section.  You are the real experts here:   While I have served as adjunct faculty in community and tribal colleges and in universities for almost 30 years, I have never been a full-time academic and thus defer to the advice of the community.  However, I will share the following. 1.  Competition and reinvention.  While deep down I want all programs to thrive and grow, I'm a realist:  Like much else in society, education is a competitive environment affected by larger forces.   I am also, though, a firm believer in the fact that some chaos and turmoil can spark innovation and positive change.  Some departments have effectively re-branded, some have merged with others on campus, and some initiatives on campus are not even a traditional department of program (such as 10 Across at Arizona State University).   Some course titles have changed, such as the Digital Earth course I have co-created at the University of Denver, and the Beautiful Maps course at Jacksonville University.  The University of Wyoming is more effectively able to infuse enterprise, coding, and development instruction after their GIS program became part of computer science.  I advise some regional universities to focus their GIS programs on water, energy, business, or some other area in such a way as to not directly compete as just a smaller version of their big state university, but rather, to fill a unique set of needs.  In some universities, such as the University of North Carolina Charlotte, GIS is increasingly seen as key to an emerging Data Science program.  GIS can serve as a key component in what some universities are pursuing in the social implications of technology, such as the ATLAS institute at the University of Colorado.   You can read more about innovations in GIS education in this education blog space and in other Esri blogs and publications.   I think the days of a university or college saying "we've existed for 150 years and we will be around for another 150 years" and coasting on past laurels are over:  Innovation must happen for those institutions to continue into the future.  2.  Promoting geospatial technology and spatial thinking in multiple disciplines.  I believe that the best way to increase the use of GIS is not necessarily to spend all of our energy to "save" programs that are struggling, but rather to embed GIS and spatial thinking into mathematics, economics, business, earth and biological science, geography, data science, communication and media, sociology, humanities, civil engineering, planning, design, and other departments on campus.  This is increasingly happening across many campuses, large and small, throughout the world, as I detailed here in a Fine Arts department on a campus and was our goal in writing a Teaching Mathematics with Interactive Mapping book.   Part of the challenge, though, is that most campuses are still funded and staffed on a model that is contrary to the interdisciplinary nature of GIS.    3.  Articulate the value.  Be always ready to articulate the value that spatial, holistic, and critical thinking through the application of GIS to solve problems can bring to energy, water, hazards, population, land use, health, transportation, and many other areas in society, including all the UN Sustainable Development Goals, including the value it brings to your own institution.  GIS is valuable in teaching, in research, and also in campus administration, helping the campus to attract and recruit new students, be a safer place to work and to learn, saving campus energy cost, and in many other ways.   Regularly share these messages with deans, provosts, university presidents, campus safety officers, students, and colleagues of yours in other disciplines.   Sharing the above items is not meant to mitigate some of the real pain that is happening in higher education, where layoffs, closures, and funding cuts are the reality that many colleagues are facing, but my intention is to provide some hope and encouragement.  Again I certainly don't have all the answers, therefore I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this subject. 20231109_150838645_iOS.jpg  ... 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I recently conducted a full day K-12 workshop for educators.  This essay provides the content, data, and tools that I included in this workshop.  I am posting this so that the educators who participated can dig deeper into the tools after the workshop ended, but also for other educators to use.  Tenets:    Maps are analytical tools, not just reference documents.  Interactive maps through GIS foster critical, spatial, and holistic thinking.  GIS allows "what if ..." inquiry to take place.  Teaching with GIS is active problem based learning, involving community connectedness and rich field experiences.   Scale matters! Change over space and time can be grappled with using these data sets, tools, and perspectives.  Themes:  Natural hazards, energy, water, history, mathematics, invasive species, biomes, regions, transportation, weather and climate, population change, land use, change over space and time.   Morning:  Primary School Educators:   The NatGeo Esri MapMaker:  https://esriurl.com/mapmaker Esri Geoinquiries:   https://esri.com/geoinquiries The ArcGIS Living Atlas Apps https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/52ae78c57b3a4924bff9fd490d76ee10  Wayback, Sentinel-2, Water Bal, USGS Topo 10 lessons:   litter mapping, bivariate – lesson 3 and 4: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/an-introduction-to-gis-as-an-open-course-with-10/ba-p/1204626 Collect data in field > Map > Analyze > communicate:   Walkability example: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/how-walkable-is-your-community/ba-p/883382 Scatter Plots, bivariate mapping: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/examining-relationships-between-variables-charts/ba-p/1245143   ArcGIS Platform slide from Connecting GIS Workshop: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/new-workshop-and-lesson-on-connecting-surveys-maps/ba-p/1419582 Why Where Matters to students, faculty, and society: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/edd676b67f5f4c749ab3e6922bd9237a Including Living Atlas Apps. 10 strategies for teaching with GIS: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/what-are-10-key-strategies-for-teaching-gis/ba-p/1104782 10 skills important to teaching with GIS: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/what-are-the-10-most-important-gis-skills-to/ba-p/1079912 10 benefits of teaching with GIS: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/what-are-the-10-most-important-educational/ba-p/1094091 Ethics, Data, and Societal Implications:  https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com Resources to dig deeper:   Esri Press, T3G, Esri Community blog, Intermountain GIS conference, Esri Education Summit, and others.   Afternoon:  Secondary School Educators:   Esri NatGeo MapMaker:  https://esriurl.com/mapmaker The ArcGIS Living Atlas Apps: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/52ae78c57b3a4924bff9fd490d76ee10  Wayback, Sentinel-2, Water Bal, USGS Topo Selected activities from our new mathematics-mapping book: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/9781003305613/teaching-mathematics-using-interactive-mapping-sandra-arlinghaus-joseph-kerski-william-arlinghaus   10 lessons:   Litter mapping, bivariate – lesson 3 and 4: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/an-introduction-to-gis-as-an-open-course-with-10/ba-p/1204626 Scatter Plots, bivariate mapping: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/examining-relationships-between-variables-charts/ba-p/1245143 Connect these tools and methods: Collect data in field > Map > Analyze > communicate:   Walkability:  https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/how-walkable-is-your-community/ba-p/883382 Resources to dig deeper:   Esri Press, T3G, Esri Community blog, Intermountain GIS conference, Esri Education Summit, and others.       ... View more

Connecting components of modern GIS, including field surveys, dashboards, interactive maps, spatial analysis, and multimedia web mapping applications such as dashboards and story maps help schools, colleges, universities, and other organizations to understand important local issues and situations and inspire them to take action. In education, using these tools foster spatial thinking, critical thinking, and rigorous use of GIS tools and data.  This workshop and lesson guides you through analyzing real-world issues through surveys, maps, and web mapping applications so that your students will be empowered to use them and you will be confident as an educator that you can teach these tools and methods. Lessons:  This set of 8 lessons (linked here as a 22 MB zip file containing lesson and all images and graphics needed) (a PDF lesson without the image files is attached to this post; a PDF of a short set of introductory slides is also attached) guides you through the entire process from the creation of a field survey in ArcGIS Survey123, mapping the resulting data in ArcGIS Online, analyzing the data, creating and using an ArcGIS Dashboard, to the process of creating an ArcGIS StoryMap.  It does so through 8 lesson components:  4 introductory lessons, followed by 4 "deeper dive" lessons that are on an intermediate skill level.  Step-by-step instructions are included, but even more importantly, deeper thinking is encouraged about the insights gained through these tools. Themes:  Three key themes run through these lessons and provide the major teaching and learning objectives:  (1)  Modern web GIS is a platform.  When the components are linked together, these provide for powerful tools for data gathering, mapping, analysis, and communication.  (2)  Modern GIS platform components are approachable, able to be learned in a short amount of time, and configurable.  In this case, the components used are:  ArcGIS Story Maps, ArcGIS Online maps including visualization and analysis capabilities, ArcGIS Dashboards, and ArcGIS Story Maps.  (3)  Once key skills are learned, they can be built on for extended learning (hence the 4 'deeper dives' lessons included here).   Users:  These sets of lessons can be used by the GIS professional community in nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and private industry, and also by instructors at the upper secondary but especially in community, tribal, and technical college and university courses to foster spatial thinking, critical thinking, and rigorous development of GIS skills, using up-to-date GIS tools and spatial data.  In education, these lessons could be used in GIS courses and programs, but also in environmental or earth science, hydrology, cultural or physical geography, architecture, history, sociology, economics, or any course in which the "where" question matters and in which fieldwork is important.  Example and Extensions:  This lesson focuses on walkability, and walkable neighborhoods:  How walkable is a neighborhood?  Collect walkability information in a neighborhood:  Is it walkable?  How walkable (rating) is it?  What characteristics of the site impact its walkability?  Where is the site located, and do you have a photograph of it?  How does walkability vary in my community and how does it compare to other communities?  How can I visualize and spatially analyze the patterns of walkability with maps and dashboards?  How can I communicate the economic, social, health, and aesthetic reasons why communities care about walkability,  the results of my walkability survey, and a call to action in a StoryMap?  Despite the focus on walkability here, the same concepts in these lessons can be used for any theme or subject, from local to global—pedestrian and vehicle counts, water quality, weather observations, housing or business type, zoning, light poles, recycling bins, invasive species, litter, and other features or issues in the natural or built landscape.  After these lessons are used, the learner can dig even deeper with the links I provide in the lesson, and with more powerful expressions using Arcade, the ArcGIS Experience Builder, and with the ArcGIS Developer Tools, SDKs, and APIs. Evaluation:  I have successfully tested this set of lessons in a wide variety of settings from the GIS professional community to students in university GIS courses over a series of years, and in multiple countries of the world. Prerequisites and Scaffolding:  The introductory lessons require no prior experience beyond the basics of understanding what a web map is, what a GIS layer is, how attributes and geography work together, and about the basic navigation of ArcGIS Online maps and user content.  The intermediate lessons build on the introductory lessons or equivalent experience, and immerse the learner into such tasks as map actions, building Arcade expressions, doing spatial analysis including clustering and hot spots analysis, using generative AI to build field surveys, and creating Map Tour and Express Map components in StoryMaps. Functions included:   Survey123:  Likert scale, single and multiple choice questions, maps, images, generative AI surveys.  ArcGIS Online Map Viewer:  symbolization (styling), classification, basemaps, transparency, create charts, clustering, hot spot, filtering, custom symbols, popups, and other analysis tools.  Dashboards:   Indicators, maps, bar graphs, pie charts, Arcade expressions, legends, images.  StoryMaps:   Map tours, popups, text, images, separators, themes, settings, videos, and more.       Requirements:     Time:   I have run the first 4 lessons of this workshop in demonstration mode in as little as one hour.  If you read these first 4 lessons (pages 1-20 of the 43 pages of content available) in an hour, you will gain some key skills.  But as is the case with so much in the world of GIS, working through the activities yourself is the best way to learn.  Plan on 2 to 4 hours to work through the first 4 lessons, and 4 hours to work through Lessons 5-8.   Add more time if you are not familiar with using GIS or Web GIS, and subtract time if you are a regular ArcGIS Online user.  Hardware:   You can run these lessons on a large tablet or a laptop computer.  A small laptop or phone will not give you enough 'real estate' screen space to operate all the buttons in the various tools.    Software:   (1) An ArcGIS Online account in which you have the User Type of Creator and the Role of Publisher.  (2)  The 21.5 MB zip file associated with this lesson, located here, which contains all necessary components:  Selected field photographs, custom point graphics, and this lesson in PDF and in DOCX formats (DOCX is included so that you will be able to easily modify the lesson if you wish).  No software is required beyond a web browser as you will be running ArcGIS Online which is a SaaS Software as a Service, in the cloud.  An internet connection is critical. Organization:  This lesson set is organized in 8 parts:   Introduction: Part 1:  Creating a field survey using ArcGIS Survey123.   Part 2:  Creating and analyzing a map from your survey data. Part 3:  Creating an ArcGIS Dashboard from your survey data. Part 4:  Creating an ArcGIS StoryMap from your field data. Deeper Dive: Part 5:  Creating a field survey using the Survey123 AI Artificial Intelligence Assistant, plus branching. Part 6:  Perform spatial analysis on your mapped data. Part 7:  Adding intermediate elements to your ArcGIS Dashboard. Part 8:  Adding intermediate elements to your ArcGIS StoryMap. Selected graphics from the set of lessons are below so that you will get a feel for the contents. I look forward to hearing your reactions!  JosephKerski_12-1715021551918.png Creating a map action for the dashboard. JosephKerski_11-1715021544685.png Creating a modified list using Arcade scripting on the dashboard. JosephKerski_13-1715021559578.png Creating a story map with the survey data. JosephKerski_10-1715021535162.png Creating a mobile version of the dashboard. JosephKerski_9-1715021527664.png Performing clustering and spatial analysis on the surveyed data. JosephKerski_6-1715021496712.png Using generative AI to create a field survey. JosephKerski_8-1715021518907.png Creating a hot spot analysis on the surveyed data. JosephKerski_1-1715021440262.png Creating a field survey. JosephKerski_2-1715021455371.png JosephKerski_3-1715021472654.png Symbolizing the mapped data. JosephKerski_4-1715021479840.png Creating a dashboard from the field survey. JosephKerski_5-1715021489138.png Adding a video to the story map. JosephKerski_0-1715021426403.png Testing survey results on the web map.   ... View more