Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

Important updates to the Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM) document have just been published by the US Department of Labor.  This article summarizes the updates and reminds the reader what the GTCM is and why it is important to the GIS education community.  This is the most extensive revision to the GTCM in 15 years and was much needed given all that has changed in GIS, society, and education during that time.  Esri has been proud to serve on the advisory board for over 15 years to the GeoTech Center, a initiative of community colleges that was instrumental in creating the original GTCM and for maintaining it.  I and my team's longstanding collaboration with the GeoTech Center has led to fruitful research and instructional opportunities, most recently a week-long GIS DEI institute for educators, held in Gettysburg Pennsylvania.  The model provides a structure or framework for developing the personal effectiveness, academic, and workplace competencies required by an industry or an occupation, in this case, GIS.  The Building Blocks Model is portrayed as a helpful graphic to help users quickly grasp the key features of the competencies required. The pyramid shape conveys the increasing level of specificity and specialization of the content on the upper tiers of the graphic. The GTCM describes how GIS occupational and industry competencies build on a foundation of personal effectiveness, academic, and workplace competencies.  is represented as a pyramid with nine tiers.  Each tier consists of blocks representing the skills, knowledge, and abilities essential for successful performance in the GIS industry.  At the base of the model, competencies apply to a large number of occupations and industries. As a user moves up the model, the competencies become industry- and occupation-specific. In the case of the GTCM, it specifies competencies required for worker success in the geospatial industry, from the most general “Personal Effectiveness Competencies” (Tier 1) to the sector-specific competencies presented in Tier 5.  How could you use the GTCM?  Instructors can use it to provide career guidance, as a guideline to plan their future curriculum, courses, and programs, to assess existing GIS courses and programs, for recruitment and hiring, as criteria for professional development or for voluntary certification, and to frame outreach efforts intended to communicate characteristics of the geospatial technology to the wider community.  I use it frequently in presentations that focus on where GIS is heading, and also in career discussions with students.  My favorite part of the GTCM might be the bottom tier, the personal effectiveness competencies, where I focus on these questions:  Are you organized?  Are you ethical?  Can you deal with data?  In short I have cited the GTCM more frequently than just about any other document over the past 20 years, along with the National Research Council's Learning to Think Spatially report.  GTCM users should keep in mind that the pyramid framework is not intended to suggest a sequence of competency attainment or that certain competencies are of greater value or higher skill than others. The body of the GTCM is a table that contains definitions and associated key behaviors for each competency block depicted in the pyramid. The competencies throughout the model were recently updated and published based on feedback from industry subject matter experts and public comments received on the model.   Recent updates included updating existing competencies, deleting items particularly in terms of tools that are no longer applicable, and adding competencies that have appeared with the rapid evolution of GIS tools and workflows. For example, the competency 2.6.2.2 of "Express information to individuals or groups taking into account the audience and the nature of the information (e.g., explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences)." was tightened to:  Communicate effectively to any audience.   This critical work function was deleted:  4.1.4.4 Compare the capabilities and limitations of various sensor types in the context of project requirements.   And now reads as 4.1.4.6:  Compare the capabilities and limitations of various sensor platforms such as satellites, terrestrial, aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The revised GTCM can be found here: https://www.careeronestop.org/CompetencyModel/competency-models/pyramid-download.aspx?industry=geospatial-technology Here, you can also the model in the following worksheet formats: PDF and Excel, and access the Credential Competencies Worksheet, the Curriculum Analysis Worksheet, the  Employer Analysis Worksheet, and the Gap Analysis Worksheet. On a related note, Rodney Jackson and I recently published an article in Transactions in GIS where we examine the perspectives of practitioners toward the GTCM, as a result of a survey we conducted of 61 GIS professionals and others, here:  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tgis.13087  I look forward to your feedback! --Joseph Kerski     ... View more

I recently developed and gave a presentation about the value of geography and GIS education to a state legislature. It is my hope that this presentation and the perspectives and links contained within it will be useful to many in the community.  I gave the presentation in story map format, in part because I wanted to demonstrate the utility of web GIS tools, including in this very context.  The story map is here:  https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/02d8f1118ae04f44acf98457fd1cf791  The presentation I gave using the above story map is in video form here:  https://youtu.be/z_uUq4fPKxI?si=Ey7WhJF9XiRbpdYB    The presentation begins with a 3D scene with some key "stops"--why use location as a framework for study?  What is geography? What is geography not?  What are examples of geographic questions?  What are maps? Why are maps representations of reality?  What are the implications of maps as representations?  Next, I make the case that mapping and spatial analysis give students "superpowers" for their career and to empower positive change.  I then anchor maps and spatial analysis in real people, places, and issues.  Next, I salute my audience for their leadership in this area but encourage them to think BIG -- and to consider what it would take to infuse geographic thinking and GIS into all levels of education and in all disciplines. After describing my own background and why I believe I am qualified to make statements and recommendations in these areas, I ask the audience:  What do you care about?  What do you want to see in society? I then make the case that we feel empowered in these modern times with data, an expert community, and powerful tools, but we also feel challenged and vulnerable.  How can we move beyond discouragement into action and positive change?  I believe that applying GIS to solving problems helps us chart a positive, resilient, sustainable path forward. I then asked, Why do this here, and why do this now?  I describe  5 reasons why GIS is relevant to education and to society. I make the case that all societal issues affecting our communities, our regions, our country, and our world are spatial issues, and hence GIS can help us understand and solve those issues.  I state that GIS helps us understand the present - the way things are - but also helps us envision how things could be.  I then show relevant case studies and web maps and apps that people have created to envision that change.  I provide guidelines for learners, career pathways, descriptions of leaders in GIS education, and student-created projects.  I give an overview of the extent and subjects in which GIS is taught.  I close with what I believe to be the 6 most important skills for students, and 5 recommendations for moving forward.  Can you guess that these skills and recommendations are?  See the above story map and video to find out! I look forward to hearing your reactions to this story map and video, how you might use this research in your own work and advocacy, and any recommendations for how this resource could be even more useful for you in the future.        ... View more

How did interactive, dynamic web maps and apps created with modern GIS tools evolve?  What ways of thinking, technological innovations, and knowledge about the Earth had to advance to bring us to our current amazing geospatial tools and content?  I recently taught an online short course entitled "The Road to Modern Mapping" and here share the course contents, as an ArcGIS StoryMap, with the community.   The ArcGIS StoryMap is here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/1814eac43ab0478cafaf7dc7c1442411 Because the short course was for the general public, rest assured that it is not laden with jargon or that you need to be a GIS expert to understand it.  Rather, my aim was to present this content in an interesting way that anyone would be able to appreciate and understand.  Given the time constraints of the course and to heighten interest, rather than a straight chronological timeline of the history of mapping, I organize the content into these 6 categories.   In my view, advancements had to take place in each category to get us to today's modern GIS-based maps.  For example, the Earth's shape and size had to be understood, we had to understand our position on the planet and how to map things on it.  Maps had to be reproducible so that they could be consumed en masse.  We had to understand and map place and space, and how to symbolize and represent those places on maps.  Finally, we had to think about how we could use maps to understand, to plan, to manage, and to chart the way forward.  In each category, I select specific stories that got us to where we are today: The Earth’s shape and size. Position on the Planet. Reproducibility. Knowledge of Places. Representation:  Projections, Symbology, Classification. Environmental Stewardship. For example, under #1 above I delve into the innovations of Anaximander, Al Biruni, and Eratosthenes.  I discuss how geodesy evolved and the big silver map made by Al Idrisi.  Under #2, I cover the evolution from the cross-staff, sextant, compass, to modern GPS, with a healthy dose of latitude and longitude.  Under #3, I discuss maps on silk, wood, wood blocks, and the Polynesians' maps using sticks.  I also delve into the role of mapping and science agencies.  Under #4, I mention figures such as Pliny the Elder, Von Humboldt, and Zheng He, and dig deep into the western USA surveys that led to the establishment of the USGS.  Under #5, I focus on detailed city maps.  Under #6, I make the case that the notion of environmental stewardship led to innovations in field work, field tools, and modern mapping.   I then dispel a few mapping myths, answer the question "haven't all the maps been made by now?", and discuss my favorite maps and my favorite map books.  The next section covers 3 frontiers of mapping--medical mapping, planetary mapping, and AI/Deep Learning.  I then describe the 6 most important skills that I believe are important to learn more about mapping, and conclude with 5 recommendations for moving forward in your mapping journey, with resources that you can use to learn more. I am hopeful that this resource will be useful in the following ways: 1.  To supplement course content for those teaching mapping, geography, and GIS. 2.  To explain to colleagues or family members how modern mapping evolved. 3.  As ice-breaking topics of conversations at parties or to the person next to you on the airplane! For more on this subject, see my book Interpreting Our World. I look forward to your reactions.  ... View more

The means by which the results of your field investigations can be displayed in maps and story maps continues to expand.  How can you guide people through the results of your investigations on tree species, water quality, weather, historic homes, and others so that your audience may learn about what you collected and why what you are studying matters? ArcGIS Online Maps In my work with educators and students, I often use the most straightforward and easiest method of all--making an ArcGIS Online map from a feature service. The feature service, or "map layer", can be generated from a field investigation from ArcGIS Field Maps, ArcGIS Survey123, or ArcGIS QuickCapture, or even from manual input methods from a CSV or from a non-ArcGIS tool such as iNaturalist.  This involves simply accessing the feature service item page in ArcGIS Online, and in the upper right, specifying "open in map viewer".  Once in the map viewer, you can symbolize and classify the data, create popups, labels, and do other work designed to increase the engagement and readability of the map, and when done, save the results in an ArcGIS Online map.  This map can then be shared with your researchers, students, or even with those who are not a part of your project.  For example, here is a web map from one of my surveys, on walkability: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=fd54348d6d784d6f9179fd7342e6b8f1 A portion of a web map in ArcGIS Online showing the results of a field investigation. Dashboards One of the most intriguing and again easily-implementable ways to display your field survey results is in a dashboard.  I frequently use dashboards to display field results with the added benefit of interactive maps, graphs, charts, a legend, graphics, and other elements that show the real-time status of the field investigation.  Below is an example of one of these from the same walkability survey that I mentioned: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/501bfe8b835745d4bd29a857a2bf32ba A dashboard showing the results of a field investigation. Instant Apps However, there are other intriguing ways to display your results that are powerful and yet straightforward to implement.  Try, for example, a few of the many choices available to you via the ArcGIS Instant Apps.   In education I make frequent use of the Exhibit app, because it most closely emulates a standard slide deck yet offers the interactivity of web GIS as manifest in ArcGIS Online.  Story Maps Another way to display your results is in a story map.  Since a story map can contain multiple multimedia elements, you could easily include not only an interactive map in it, but also your field survey and a dashboard.  Thus, the story map could serve as a one-stop shop for collecting, displaying, and assessing the results of your field investigation.  Again taking my walking example, the resulting story map is here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/1e4847f78ec94fd89e960adfabb5ac5c A section of a story map showing the results of a field investigation. Besides simply embedding a web map from ArcGIS Online into a story map, story maps feature other capabilities - map types - that can also be effectively used to display your field work results.  See the next section's discussion for a few of these--and give them a try!  Map Tours A map tour inside a Story Map, for example, can effectively "step the map reader through" your investigation by displaying each of your collected points, with its attributes, location, and photograph.  Perhaps best of all, if your field sites are constantly updating as new data points are being added via crowdsourcing, you don't have to edit and republish your story every time there is an update.  Rather, as the survey points are collected, the feature service updates, and the map tour in your story map automatically updates.  Once you have created your field survey, and have some data in the survey, the next steps are:  1.  Create a story map:  In your story map > insert map tour block > select feature service.  2.  Configure your attribute fields to display, where the media is coming from, the sort order, the layout, and other aesthetic enhancements.   An example I created for a campus litter survey is here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/6bc3e1bb09a74a2d813d5cdee9548674 Another example I created for mapping vegetation is below.  You will note that for added interest I used a 3D scene instead of a 2D web map: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/02228d6f7ea04eaebe33276e334387dd Notes:  1.  These techniques only work for point data (not line or polygon) at the moment.  2.  The descriptions in your tours work best for text and numeric data (tree type, tree height, and so on), and not for multiple-choice survey questions.   Sometimes the field data is simply a photograph.  Many ways exist to get those photographs into a map.  The photo with locations tool is one of the easiest ways to do so, explained by my colleague Bern Szukalski, here and also by me with additional examples in 2D and 3D, here. My photo layer which resulted from the .zip photo folder upload, is here, for a trip I took to the European Association of Geographers conference.  The resulting web mapping application is here.  Ah - Greece! Which of these methods that I have described here is best? It depends on your educational goals, your audience, the experience for the audience that you desire, the structure of your survey and your data, and other factors.   All of these methods have their place.  The Map Tour is a wonderful new capability that really helps your audience move through each point in your data in a guided fashion.  For full step-by-step information about how to set up the Map Tours in this way, see my colleagues' tutorial in story map form, here.  I encourage you to try these techniques, including the map tours (a review in video form is here).  I look forward to hearing about your thoughts on these methods, and to seeing your results! --Joseph Kerski     ... View more

What is spatial thinking? GIS can be more than just something you do as a professional; indeed, mapping could involve activities you engage in outside work hours.  With your GIS skills, you can bring energy and knowledge to these activities, and conversely, these activities could even help you be a more valuable employee.  Moreover, these activities can encourage development of spatial thinking—a key skill for the Young Professional.  I define spatial thinking as the recognition, consideration, and appreciation of the interconnected processes and characteristics among the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, anthroposphere (human impact), and biosphere at a scale and time period appropriate to the phenomena under study.  For an expansion of this definition, see my essay in ArcWatch. Do you take time to observe with all 5 senses when you are in a city or in a rural area, thinking about what is in the foreground, middle-ground, and in the far distance, and the interaction between the physical and human-created environment?  Spatial thinking in everyday life One way to foster spatial thinking is to draw a map from memory of a place from your childhood--your neighborhood, your walk to school, where you played in the riparian zone or vacant lot, your grandmother’s house, and so on.  Draw it free hand, from memory—on paper, a napkin, or something else, using whatever physical markers, pencils, or paints you wish to use.  Isn’t it amazing that your mental map of your childhood roaming spaces are at such detail?  These large scale maps reflect geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of topophilia–that as humans we have an affinity for and a deep connection to place and space.  Compare your map to those of your friends or co-workers:  What are the similarities and differences in terms of scale, symbols and colors you chose, cultural vs. natural elements on the landscape, whether north is at the top, and so on. Sketch maps from our childhood neighborhoods.  I regularly ask my own GIS students to draw these, and here is a small collection of these wonderfully detailed maps from memory that illustrate how tied we are as humans to place and space.  We all practice spatial thinking on a daily basis – where we put our keys, how we arrange clothes in our closet or dishes in our cupboards, how we arrange app shortcuts on our phones, how we organize our files on our computers and in the cloud.  Click here for 10 ways of thinking spatially each day. Where are your keys?  Do you always put them in the same place so you can more easily find them? Consider how you have arranged the objects that you use every day.  For example, I always put the hotel key on the corner of the desk everywhere I lodge so I will know exactly where it is.  This is important since I am on work travel about 1/3 of the time.  I once had the opportunity to hear Giorgia Lupi speak at a university.  She and her colleague Stefanie Posavec authored a book documenting their lives in a series of very compelling infographics called Dear Data.  This book focuses on how to effectively communicate the spatial and temporal arrangements of our day-to-day existence using infographics.  For more on the day-to-day theme, read the spatial perspectives on our travel day that Barbaree Duke and I wrote about, here, as we each left our homes, traveled to the airport, and how and where we met before a geography conference (with a dashboard shown below). Dashboard from an open survey about geography in everyday life. Why not make maps for fun? You make a lot of maps at work.  A lot!  But do you make some maps just for fun?  You could even create fantasy maps.  Have you uploaded your cycle rides, runs, or hikes to ArcGIS Online or a 3D Scene?  As one interesting example, I mapped my colleague’s paragliding route in Alaska in the ArcGIS 3D scene viewer, here and shown below.  The route of a paraglider that I mapped in the ArcGIS 3D Scene Viewer. Storymaps.com. Have you considered getting a personal subscription to Storymaps.com to document your favorite places around the world, the trip you took last year, or what makes your neighborhood special?  Some of your fun maps could be hand-drawn.  Consider Anton Thomas, who has spent 5 years creating an enormous hand-drawn map of North America, and a metropolitan area map that I made as a teenager, here. GIS and GPS. You can have some fun with GIS and GPS in the field, as well.  One of the earliest GPS-enabled field activities, which remains popular today, is geocaching.   It is basically the world’s largest treasure hunt.  My colleague and I found a tiny one here in an urban area, and I found one here:  This one was larger but still challenging to find as it was in the desert and under a pile of rocks.  When I worked for USGS, I set up an educational-related geocache, called an earthcache, on the San Andreas Fault in California, called “Gazing Across the Plate Boundary, with a series of geographic and geologic questions that I ask visitors to that cache to answer.  I also receive a fun email whenever anyone visits the point!    Map your adventures. Many of us keep track of the number of countries or political areas within countries (cities, states, provinces, districts) that we have visited.  You could use ArcGIS Pro or ArcGIS Online, or MapChart.net to digitally keep track of these.  I know GIS professionals who seek to visit political boundaries or even “tri-points” where 3 countries, provinces, or states “meet”, those who search for benchmarks, those who climb as many high points in countries or states as they can, and other activities that rely on maps and data.  As for me, I have been “collecting” as many of the 3,142 counties in the USA that I can visit over the course of my lifetime Not lost!  I am active in visiting full degree intersections of latitude-longitude lines.  Here I am in the middle of a field in Iowa where the lines of 43 North Latitude and 93 West Longitude cross!  I have also done a bit of “drawing” on the landscape with my fitness walks and runs, called “GPS drawing.”   Use caution though since location can be personal:  Some of my activities should not be mapped.  For example, I am a caver, and there is a USA federal cave resources protection act that among other things discourages the publishing of cave locations, so that these beautiful places can be as well conserved as possible.    Spatial thinking as observations. Through these activities, I do some experimenting and have learned some skills in these activities that I bring to my GIS in education job.  But your spatial thinking for fun does not have to be an activity—it can simply be thoughtful observations:  Consider, for example, the spatial patterns in everyday things—food, vegetation, architecture, landscapes, roads, animals, and more, as I illustrate in this video discussion. Get started. What activities and thoughts do you like to engage in that are related to spatial thinking and mapping?  Certainly “balance” in all things is wise, so don’t feel that you need to make all of your non-work activities geo-related!  But I encourage you to think about incorporating some of the above ideas, or, think of your own, and feel free to share them in the comments section below! ... View more

Explore how to enhance your meteorology instruction with GIS tools, methods, and data with this new set of resources.  These resources, presented as an ArcGIS Story Map, here, includes both core content and hand-on activities that you can use in upper primary schools, others most suitable for secondary instruction, and others that are perfect for college and university level.  The goals of this resource are three-fold:  (1)  To teach core meteorology content (air masses, temperature, weather-related hazards, pressure, cloud observations, and more), (2)  To use GIS to enhance content knowledge and skill building, to increase interest using a wide variety of fascinating data in problem-solving contexts, and (3) To empower students and foster career pathways via students using some of the same geospatial tools that meteorologists use everyday on the job.  These include spatial analytics, data services including live weather feeds, symbology, classification, image analysis, dashboards, field surveys, storymaps, graphs and charts, and expressions.  I created this content for educators enrolled in a summer program sponsored by the American Meteorological Society (AMS), with whom Esri has a longstanding good relationship and taught this workshop in an online virtual mode.  However, the resource can be used by any educator teaching about weather, climate, or geography.   It can also be used by educators teaching GIS as there is plenty of GIS skills embedded in the course.  It can be used in face-to-face and online settings.  All of the activities use ArcGIS Online; some can be completed even without signing in to ArcGIS Online. I structured the story map, which could be considered an e-book and mini-course given the breadth and depth of content,  as follows: 1.  Goals and philosophy of the mini-course. 2.  Why teaching with GIS matters, and why GIS matters to our planet. 3.  Definitions of maps and GIS. 4.  Activity 1:   Analyzing 70 years of tornadoes.  Filtering data by intensity, time of day, width, fatalities, and considering time of year and proximity to cities. 5.  What is the ArcGIS Platform? 6.  Why teach with GIS?  With reference to a e-book I wrote on this topic. 7.  Activity 2:  A course survey, online interactive maps, and dashboard. 8.  What is Esri?  How is GIS tied to all the sciences? 9.  Activity 3:  Mapping a spreadsheet.  This spreadsheet represents low and high temperatures across the USA for January and July of a specific year. 10.  Activity 4:  Symbolizing, classifying, and charting data.  These tools are used to examine patterns on maps, assessing the affect of coastlines, landforms, latitude, air currents, and other factors on extreme temperatures.  11.  Activity 5:   Creating expressions to analyze change over space and time.  The focus here is on current hurricanes and typhoons. 12.  Activity 6:  Examine current weather:  Temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, precipitation, satellite imagery, and more, from live weather feeds. 13.  Activity 7:  Measuring central tendency:  Use spatial analysis tools to filter weather data to determine the mean center and standard deviational ellipse of weather data on maps. 14.  Activity 8:  Interpolating surfaces:  Create an interpolated surface from weather data.  Consider data quality as you do so. 15.  Activity 9:  Creating a weather field survey, map, dashboard, and story map:  The data includes date and time, cloud cover, cloud type, temperature, location, and a photograph of the sky. 16.  Activity 10:  Teaching approaches.  These include the 10 core GIS skills that if you gain confidence in, you and your students truly have superpowers.  They also include ways that educators start using GIS:  Using Esri Geoinquiries, ArcGIS Learn lessons, Living Atlas apps, and other ways. 17.   Keep learning:  How to continue your journey with GIS.  These resources include links to key data sources, courses and lessons, including the new Esri Climate Action MOOC, an essay that I co-wrote with Dr Michael Gould about using WebGIS to teach climate resilience, and more. A section of the story map linked above. I truly hope this resource is useful and I look forward to your reactions. --Joseph Kerski ... View more