Latest Contributions by BrianBaldwin

“Building web applications,” “updating dashboards,” “automating geospatial processes,” “performing data collection,” “implementing enterprise-wide GIS projects,” “maintaining layers,” “creating maps,” “managing servers.” While each job posting alone doesn’t tell us much, after a few hours of perusing, one can get a clear sense of the core skills and knowledge that employers are seeking in today’s job market. As it turns out, the fundamentals haven’t shifted all that much. There is still a strong requirement for data management and a solid understanding of core geospatial concepts. Employers are still seeking applicants with strong cartographic skills and the ability to collaborate across various teams and departments. Yet, the shift in platforms, tools, and technology, is hard to miss. The question this always leads to is: “based on these changes, are educators meeting the needs of the next generation of GIS professionals?”   So – What Should Educators Focus On? It can be easy to be overwhelmed by the ongoing changes in the technology landscape and the compounding need to update labs, lessons, curriculum, textbooks, etc. With these changes, what should GIS educators focus on? Modern GIS can mean different things and the conception of what ‘modern GIS’ is will continue to evolve. As of today, the best definition is the shift of GIS to ‘the web’. In the graphic below, not all the changes represent a desktop/server to a web-based transformation – but it is the over-riding theme. Image showing the technology changes in GIS.   With all these changes in technology and platforms, with the basics staying the same, what are the impacts for faculty and students? Over the past few years, Esri’s Education team have been discussing the technology shift and the need for GIS coursework to move from desktop-centric patterns to those that focus on the web. Desktop GIS is still an integral part of the story – but it is no longer the focus of the story. Desktop GIS is vital for data management, advanced analysis, and cartographic production – but many of those workflows are now part of a web-based context. Desktop tools can now seamlessly consume web-based services published by authoritative geospatial agencies and individuals across the globe. Desktop GIS can publish map services and layers to the cloud – to be consumed by web-based applications and tools, and desktop GIS can edit and manage web-based data and layers.   Focus Areas So, what does a course look like that focuses on the fundamentals of GIS but adjusts to a more web-centric paradigm? This year – we wanted to put emphasis on a few key areas, specifically: Mapping & Cartography Spatial Analysis Sharing & Presenting Imagery (remote sensing) Mobile workflows Within each of these core topics, we will be providing resources, best practices, workshops, and guidance on implementing a ‘modern’ approach to teaching. We also want to hear from, and work, with you. Through webinars, events, lectures, presentations, and discussions – we want to hear about your successes and challenges. What concepts have been difficult or confusing to teach? What are the gaps in learning resources and materials that exist in this transition? Some of the questions we’ve heard from you are: Do I still have students build map layouts ready for print? What are the tenets of cartography when we are thinking about dynamic applications? When do students move from ArcGIS Pro to ArcGIS Online? And why? What are the limitations of spatial analysis in the web? The technology is always going to change. From Avenue to Python, from desktop to web, from Info to ArcGIS Pro, many of you have experienced the dramatic changes this field has undergone. What we want to ensure, is that you have the resources and tools to help your students, your courses, and your programs move forward. For the most current lesson plans, resources, case studies, and best practices, please visit our Modern GIS page. To join in the conversation with your peers, please join our Higher Education Community and comment on this blog. ... View more

Welcome to Esri’s Higher Education Community! This post will serve as an ‘ever-green’ welcome/landing page for the community and the goal is to ensure that you understand how to connect with us and all of your peers. For years now, Esri has provided discounted ArcGIS licenses to colleges and universities across the globe. We also have a dedicated team at Esri that works with and supports you. If you are a student, professor, researcher, license coordinator, facilities administrator, or other – there are folks at Esri and peers in the larger community for you to connect with. In this post – we really wanted to focus on 2 things: Let you know what applications and tools you have access to Ensure that you know how to get in touch with us and your peers   What Does Esri Offer? Esri makes ArcGIS – which includes ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Enterprise and a whole host of other applications and extensions. These links provide details on ‘what’ is provided with the Esri license and how you can utilize it.   Does My University Have ArcGIS? Search for your college/university to see if it currently has an ArcGIS license available   Your Institution Agreement High-level explanation of Esri’s Institutional Agreement.   Esri Education Institution Agreement – Global Overview of the software included with Esri’s higher education program – includes teaching, research, and administrative uses   Esri Academic Department License Overview Overview of the software included for teaching and research with Esri’s Department license   Case Studies – Teaching and Research Provides a wealth of case studies/examples of teaching and research with Esri technology   Stay in Touch / Engage Have questions about licensing? Questions about research or tools? Need a textbook recommendation? Looking to hire a new faculty member? All great questions! If it’s getting connected with your Account Manager or technical Esri staff, or reaching out to your peers, we want to ensure you know where to reach out.   Esri Higher Education Community - in Esri Community Esri’s ‘Community’ is our go-to location to post about events, answer your questions, post best practices, and work to engage with you! There are multiple ‘channels’ that you can subscribe to – so please pick your interest and then ‘subscribe’ to get notifications. You also have the ability to 'post' your questions or comments as well - so please join in the conversation!   Esri's Education Team Use this application to understand who your Account Manger is, along with the rest of the team that supports you at Esri   Higher Education Listserv Join the community of faculty and staff. Feel free to post questions and reach out to peers. The list includes about 750 individuals and posts are generally sent 1X/week.   Social In the world of ‘social’ – we manage content on 2 separate platforms. Please follow/comment/post and engage with us. Both feature training & learning resources, events, stories, and more. Facebook – Esri GIS Higher Education Community X (Twitter) – Esri GIS Education   Education Summit / Events Throughout the year – our team appears in-person at a variety of events. We would love to meet and engage with you – so please let us know if you will be attending anything! Education Summit Every year – hundreds of faculty, researchers, librarians, space planners, students, and others come together in San Diego the weekend preceding Esri’s User Conference. We would love to have you join us for one of our favorite events of the year. Events Page For a full listing of all of the upcoming webinars and events   Higher Education Chats Each month - we feature an hour long webinar with tips & tricks, product enhancements, curricular ideas, and more. Please register to receive updates and notifications on upcoming webinars.   ArcNews/ArcUser/ArcWatch – Story Submissions Have an interesting research topic? New course that featured AI+maps? Let us (and your peers) know about it!   If you have any questions - please reach out. There are a lot of people here at Esri, or your peers in the wider community that are here to help! Again - welcome to the Esri Higher Education Community! Lastly - if you have any general questions, you can always reach out to us at: highered@esri.com ... View more

Over the weekend – I saw this crazy headline that went something along the lines of ‘Workers Smash Hole Through Great Wall of China’ – let’s just say I was a bit skeptical. I’m also sure that anyone’s mental image of what transpired looked similar to mine. Credit: Brian Baldwin  I don’t know the truth behind what happened, but I do know that the ‘click bait’ headlines for this story were incredibly deceptive… but also offered a great ‘teachable moment’… where we could easily insert some geospatial tools. Oh… and here’s what the hole really looked like: Credit: Youyu County Public Security Bureau If I wanted students to go and explore this issue on their own… they could… but the results might be a bit mixed. When you search across ArcGIS Online for layers, we all know what can turn up. There are also a lot of great datasets in the Living Atlas… but which ones are the most relevant? Do they have the right symbology for the task at hand? You have probably already seen the National Geographic MapMaker application, but what if you want to create a guided experience with your own maps, layers, and data?  This is where the Atlas template in Instant Apps comes in. In my case, some of the things that I was curious about exploring was ‘where’ the hole was. How long is the Great Wall? What is the relationship of the Great Wall to the physical geography or Northern China? What is the relationship of the Great Wall to China’s historical growth? There are so many different questions that one could start to explore, and the Atlas give you the ability to cue any of these up. While not perfect by any means (there is a lot I will probably update/edit), here is my Great Wall of China Atlas. (Please note... some of these layers are from the Living Atlas, so you will need to sign in to load the maps. I'll work on updating this to make it easier to access.) I just put an update into the application - so there is a lot more that you can explore. I even went a little crazy and cleaned up an amazing dataset (source KMZ) of the Great Wall that was built by Tom Hammond at Lehigh University. The following video shows you how to set up your own Atlas using data from the Living Atlas, ArcGIS Online, or your own data. It’s a really nice way to build a guided mapping and data exploration lesson. Setting up your own Atlas The steps are outlined in the video, but the process is pretty simple: Create a group in ArcGIS Online Add content to the group. This can be in the form of maps or layers. Content can be sourced from the Living Atlas or ArcGIS Online, or your own data. Go to My Content, Create App, Instant Apps, then choose Atlas. Now – you just need to point the application at your new group. Tips & Tricks You can share your Atlas app with Everyone – so that students can use it without logging in to ArcGIS Online. The caveat with this – is that you need to ensure that all of the maps and layers will be accessible as well. If your map has subscriber or premium content, then users will get a ‘sign-in’ prompt. If you enrich content or layers from the Living Atlas... they become yours! So - if you want census tracts with population, or boundaries, etc. - you can start with the Living Atlas, use the analysis tools, and then have your own layer to share (with your own symbology). There is a lot of great data in ArcGIS Online… but the thumbnail, symbology, descriptions, etc. might leave a lot to be desired. To create a really captivating application, you need to go the extra length and create your own layers and maps. ... View more

At the Education Summit this year, @MichaelGould and I hosted a session titled ‘Demystifying Digital Twins’. The goal of the session was to discuss what digital twins are from a geospatial perspective, hear what the interests from the community have been, and to discuss the availability of resources for teaching about digital twins.   Some of the hottest topics of conversation at the session were: “What the heck is a digital twin?”, “What makes it different from a model?”, “Does it include real-time data?”, “Is it just a buzzword?” For some great articles that start to dive into this discussion/definition – please see: ASU – A Specialist Meeting on Digital Twins Workshop – Final Report: https://sgsup.asu.edu/node/9358 Geospatial Digital Twins Offer Unmatched Clarity for Complex Systems: https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/blog/geospatial-digital-twin-enhances-understanding/ Digital Twins at Scale: https://www.forbes.com/sites/esri/2023/03/13/digital-twins-at-scale/ From the ASU meeting listed above, the participants found little disagreement with the following definition: A digital twin is a virtual representation of the real world, including physical objects, processes, relationships, and behaviors (Esri) As was also the case at the ASU workshop, a big part of the discussion at the Education Summit was simply that a digital twin could be a lot of different things. A digital twin for Syracuse NY will differ a great deal from one for Singapore. The question for us was: For any city or location… what is the technology that students can learn about that supports the vision for building a digital twin? The goal of this post is not to dive into the definition of a digital twin – but to help those that are interested in teaching about digital twins – understand where they can get started. Not to replicate work that has already been done – here is a great summary of the technology that can be used to support various aspects of a digital twin: Esri Digital Twin Technology and Resources: https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/media/brochures/digital-twin-technology-resource.pdf The aim of the following resources is to provide a list of lessons, training, and labs. All of this content is broken down into a digital twin framework and linked to in the appropriate ‘bucket’. Data Capture: the creation of an accurate geospatial model or foundation Integration: combining information from multiple data sources and sensor networks Real time & Visualization: presenting information visually Analysis & prediction: using traditional statistics, spatial statistics, and GeoAI to interrogate the data Sharing & collaboration: building applications and tools to operationalize the resulting information Data Capture Extract 3D buildings from Lidar: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/extract-3d-buildings-from-lidar-data/ This lesson starts with lidar and building footprints (both data sets are pretty easy to come by for most locales) Construct realistic buildings with multipatch editing: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/construct-realistic-buildings-with-multipatch-editing/ This lesson walks through a process of building multi-patch/3D buildings. This is a more manual workflow – but provides some good tips/tricks if students want to ‘skin’ buildings Reality mapping with ArcGIS: https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/5ee00f8fefb9bc0b7003ae36/reality-mapping-using-arcgis/ Includes getting started lessons for SiteScan and Drone2Map Integration Create a data pipeline: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/data-pipelines/latest/get-started/create-a-pipeline.htm Data Pipelines is a new functionality that just landed in ArcGIS Online (spring 2023). It provides a great way to teach about static or real-time data ingestion ArcGIS Arcade Fundamentals: https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/60353c60303e2a7692f9da01/arcgis-arcade-fundamentals/ Arcade provides a really nice way to ‘merge/join’ data from multiple datasets Real time & Visualization Living Atlas: https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/ I like this because it provides a pretty ‘low bar’ for getting started with some basic real-time feeds. Students can easily search for data of interest and add it into a map/etc. Advanced formatting: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-advanced-formatting-in-arcgis-dashboards/ This is a good one as well – a bit more involved – but shows some of the power of real-time alerting and also combines power outage data (very relevant) Analysis & prediction Climate proof a neighborhood: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/climate-proof-a-neighborhood-with-arcgis-urban/ This has a nice lesson that takes you through getting a model setup in ArcGIS Urban. This could hopefully show students what the data needs are for building a local dataset. Performing Sales Data Analysis with ArcGIS Insights Online: https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/6448298a821bdb2fe8bc3385/performing-sales-data-analysis-with-arcgis-insights-online/ This lesson could have also been added to the ‘sharing’ section – but the emphasis on explorational data analysis is what encouraged me to include it here. Sharing & collaboration Make a dashboard to monitor wildfires: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/make-a-dashboard-to-monitor-wildfires/ This lesson is only 20 min. long – and I think it’s a great one. It could easily be expanded upon with other data feeds, etc. Share decision-ready data: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/share-decision-ready-data/ This lessons explores the use of ArcGIS Hub to share data and work with a local community Conclusion I am sure I missed a lot. If there are additional lessons or resources that you are using to teach about digital twins, please let us know! Please provide additional resources in the comments below. ... View more