1. THE VISION
It is 2010 and geographic information (GI) is everywhere. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) interoperability has revolutionized the way vendors, data providers and application developers deliver GI solutions. GI is embedded in a very wide range of information systems and decision support products from real estate sales through military applications to personal navigation. These all rely on a common global spatial data infrastructure that provides scale-independent data constantly updated. GI is available whenever and wherever it is needed. GIS have become so thoroughly interoperable that they have all but disappeared as distinct products.
GI education has also radically changed. The "one size fits all" GIS courses of the late 20th century have gone. In their place has emerged a diversity of courses; each targeted upon the needs of differing groups of students. There remain, of course, some true GIS modules designed for the system developers, analysts, programmers and researchers whose careers will be devoted to developing future GIS technologies. For most students, including most Geography students, the focus of their learning is upon the use of digital geographic information, not upon the technologies which deliver this information. Most students now use geographic information, they don’t study GIS.
The ubiquity of digital geographic information and the extreme ease of use of geo-processing tools have allowed geographical analysis to spread way beyond its traditional confines within the ‘spatial sciences’. Consider the following scenario…
Monday, 11 October 2010 Department of Archaeology, University Somewhere - It is two hours before Module 4 (Spatial Analysis) of ARCH 333 (Field Work in Archaeology) starts and though it is the 21st century, last minute preparation is still pretty common in academia. Some 100+ students will attend the class this week. Thirty of these will be in the local classroom on campus; the remainder will tune in through their satellite-linked home or office conferencing systems. Another 2000 will view reruns of the "lecture" over the communications network in the coming months. Of course, it won’t really be a lecture, more of a multimedia experience, but the term seems to have stuck since the bad old days of talk and chalk.
Last minute preparation is possible because most of the material for the module already exists and can be found in GERN (the GIScience Education Resource Network). This resource base is a globally distributed collection of GI educational materials created, maintained and distributed by educators, software developers, application specialists, commercial publishers, public organizations and others. It contains educational materials of many different types, including data sets, multimedia case studies, hands on exercises, self-study problems and lesson plans for different groups of learners. All the contents display a quality rating from an independent organization and are indexed by theme, education level, learning style and language. All that the educator needs to work out is what the students should learn from any particular learning experience – the difficult part of education is still curriculum development!
Our professor begins by reviewing her own course syllabus and comparing this with those for similar courses being offered by other education providers around the world. After making decisions about what the students need to learn, the professor selects a learning framework appropriate for her students' level and the selected learning objectives. She then begins to fill in the elements, choosing:
This vision may or may not come true. It is clear, however, that a paradigm shift is occurring in GIS technology. The monolithic GIS packages of today are giving way to new forms of geo-processing based upon interoperable principles. In a few years time, GIS simply will not be like it has been for the last twenty years. This presents an enormous challenge for GIS educators. There is a need to reconsider what is taught, how it is taught and who should be taught.
This chapter explores the implications for GIS education of the emerging new breeds of interoperable GIS. It starts by reflecting upon the unfortunate effects that the non-interoperability of present GIS products has had on traditional GIS teaching. Interoperability will ultimately remove many of these frustrations but the pace at which the new technologies are being introduced will mean that the transition period for GIS teachers will be difficult. This problem is explored by reviewing four current approaches to GIS education. The chapter concludes by suggesting that 'interoperability' itself provides an apt metaphor for the new collaborative methods of teaching that will be necessary to cope with the demands of introducing interoperable GIS to future students.
2. GIS EDUCATION IN THE NON-INTEROPERABLE PRESENT
The non-interoperability of GIS products during the last two decades has imposed a number of unfortunate characteristics upon GIS education: -
Conceptual diversity: During the last twenty years the Relational and Object models have provided common conceptual bases upon which students of conventional database technologies could ground their understanding ‘Tuple’, ‘relation’ and ‘method’ have a universal meaning. SQL has provided a universal language across RDBMS products. Contrast this with the position of GIS students. The wide diversity of GIS products means there has been relatively little commonality to which GIS students could cling. GIS products have differed in their models of space, their terminology, their storage structures and their application languages. For GIS students, and their teachers, this has meant that GIS education has been built upon an insecure, shifting framework of ideas and terminology.
Product specificity: As a consequence of this conceptual diversity, many teachers have retreated into a product specific view of GIS. Adopting a particular vendor’s software, terminology and models greatly simplifies the teaching process. Assuming the chosen vendor has a reasonable market presence, this approach also offers the pragmatic advantage of providing a reasonable guarantee of subsequent employment to students. The academic dangers of this approach are evident. Limitations in the functionality of the chosen system constrain what is taught. The students invest their energies in learning what is special about system X’s view of geography and its computational idiosyncrasies with the result that students often have a better grasp of specific software than of the underlying geographical principles.
Limited transferability of knowledge: The product specificity of GIS has meant that knowledge gained on one system has not always been readily transferable to another. A database lecturer could, hand on heart, tell a class that SQL knowledge gained on one RDBMS would largely be applicable to another. A GIS lecturer could not make the same claim. Transferring, say ESRI’s AML (Arc Macro Language) knowledge to a Smallworld environment would not be straightforward. From the viewpoint of society, the amount of un-learning and re-learning which GIS incompatibilities have imposed is grossly inefficient.
The software focus: Because GIS products have been idiosyncratic in their models, terminology and interfaces, many GIS have had steep learning curves associated with them. Add to this the other aspects of non-interoperability in GIS – problems with data integration and data sharing – and introductory GIS courses have a tendency to degenerate into ‘beat the software’ exercises: ‘We’ll take ten weeks to show you how to use this software and how to get data into it and at the end you might be able to do something useful with it’. This focus on mastering the system has left little time for understanding the wider business and research contexts within which GISs are used.
GIS is seen as ‘difficult’: Because of the characteristics outlined above, GIS has been seen as an ‘advanced’ topic most often taught as a penultimate or final year option at degree level and as a specialist course at postgraduate level. Rather than being presented as a tool that all students interested in spatial analysis should be able to use, it has been the preserve of specialist students. Professors now expect that students coming in to higher education will have mastered word processors and spreadsheet programs. Yet the notion that GIS should be so easy to use that it should be introduced at school level is only now beginning to gain currency.
3. GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE: GIS EDUCATION IN AN INTEROPERABLE ERA
It seems very likely that the new age of interoperable geo-processing will ameliorate many of the unfortunate characteristics of current GIS education. GIS now seems sufficiently mature that a common model of geo-processing, most probably based on the work of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC), is feasible and that it will be supported by the most significant vendors (Buehler and McKee, 1996). Based upon this common model, terminology will become standardized. Interoperability at the data level will lessen the attention that needs to be paid to this element of GIS work in courses. Standard GIS languages, such as that embedded in SQL3/MM, will increase the transferability of GIS knowledge from system to system. In short, there will be less need to concentrate upon the mechanics of GIS which will free more time for lecturers to focus upon the purposes and contexts of digital geographical processing. The Promised Land, it would seem, is at hand. The transitional phase, however, during which GIS education will need to adjust to the new demands which interoperable GIS will impose, will create a period of discomfort for teachers and their institutions. Achieving the Promised Land is often more troublesome than the prophets imply.
In addition, pressures for change in GIS educational programmes will arise not only from changes within GIS but also from external influences. If the trend watchers (Twigg and Oblinger, 1996, Denning, 1996, Tapscott, 1996 and Dertouzos, 1997) are to be believed, the new generation of GIS courses will emerge in an educational environment that features:
3.1 Increase in technological expertise of true ‘GIS’ students.
A recent discussion between representatives from the GIS vendor community suggests that current MSc GIS programmes are failing to produce graduates with sufficient technical knowledge to allow them to be appointed as software engineers, developers and researchers within their companies. The GIS companies prefer to recruit mainstream computer science graduates for such positions, appointing GIS graduates to sales and support roles: 'I'm afraid it's actually easier at the moment to take a computer scientist and teach them the geographical area than the other way round' (Coote, ESRI, quoted in Heywood, 1997:108). If an aim of GIS education has been to supply GIS vendors with technologically competent recruits, the evidence is that so far there has been only limited success. The drive towards interoperability probably will raise further the level of technological expertise required by students who aspire really to understand what goes on ‘behind the glass’ in GIS. Therefore, unless new educational arrangements are made, it seems likely that the gulf between what the GIS software companies require for their technical positions and what GIS educational programs can supply will become even wider.
If GI Systems Science is defined as the body of knowledge that is necessary to master the technology of GIS, a critical question for the next few years therefore will be what are the most efficient arrangements for teaching this body of knowledge? The trend within the technology itself perhaps hints at the answer. The technologies upon which interoperability is based – object-orientation, distributed computer platforms, three tier architectures, middleware, etc, - are mainstream technologies which are being driven forward by major IT companies such as Microsoft and Oracle. The GIS vendors, via organizations like OGC, are importing and adapting these technologies for geo-processing. RDBMS vendors such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix and IBM now provide spatial data extenders that can be plugged into their mainstream DBMS products. It seems clear that GIS, as a technology, is being incorporated into the mainstream IT industry: ‘You could go so far as to say that the GIS industry as it has been historically defined is going to be gobbled up by the mainstream IT infrastructure… I get the sense at the moment that Microsoft have bigger fish to fry than spatial data but it is only a matter of time.’ (Stafford, CEO Smallworld, quoted in Anon, 1997:15).
If GIS, as a technology, is moving into the mainstream of IT, perhaps teaching GI Systems might also be efficiently relocated into Information Systems degree programs. Locating GIS as a sub-discipline of Information Systems would attract a different student intake than present GIS programs and would provide a computer science, rather than a geographical, milieu. Perhaps, in future, Information Science professors might teach the technology of GIS, with a few guest lectures from Geography Faculty, rather than the other way round as at present? Already some GIS programs are emerging which are based in Computer Science departments, for example, Texas A&M University in the United States, Keele University in the UK and Curtin University of Technology in Australia.
Clearly an issue for the next few years will be to determine the institutional arrangements that will most efficiently produce the GIS programmers and developers which vendors will need to help them develop interoperable GIS products. It will be interesting to watch the turf wars that will emerge between the disciplines that currently claim GIS as their own.
3.2 Develop ‘GI Analysis’ courses.
Kuiper (1992) observes that by the late 1980's a divergence had emerged within the mainstream database industry between 'information specialists', i.e. people who could analyze the information needs of their organizations and use databases to provide information products, and the 'computer scientists' whose role it is to work at the systems and code level. He estimated that the ratio is probably about 20:1 in favor of the 'information specialists' and argued that separate educational programs needed to be developed for the two streams of students.
Clearly the GIS courses discussed above will provide the hard-core, technically competent GI computer scientists required by the GIS developers, but Kuiper is probably correct when he suggests that this will be a minority specialism. Most students, who choose to study GIS, as a specialist subject, will probably follow a 'business analyst' approach. The curricula for such GI analysis modules will emphasize the 'human' aspects of GIS, understanding organizations, understanding project analysis and project planning skills, as well as providing a basic grounding in the technologies and their applications. The emphasis in many 'GIS' courses in future will be upon implementing GI strategies for organizations and specific application areas, not on the core technologies.
3.3 Embedded geo-processing for the majority.
As GIS technology becomes ever more integrated into desktop computing, for most students, ‘GIS’ as an optional module title will disappear. They simply will not need to 'do' GIS. A wide diversity of courses which have geo-processing embedded within them will emerge. Rather than spending time studying the mechanics of using GIS packages, students will focus upon the value of geographical analysis in their own domains. In such courses, there may be a need to devote a few lectures to outlining the basics of geo-processing as an enabling technology but the focus will be upon the usefulness of the technology and the ‘do’s and ‘don’ts’ of working with geographical data, not the technology itself. Nobody suggests that all students need to understand the algorithms and data-structures that are built into spreadsheets before they can use them. It is expected, however, that the student understand the nature of the application for which the spreadsheet is being used and the underlying mathematical and statistical principles that an application might employ. If the hope is that interoperable GIS products will eventually become as ubiquitous and easy to use as spreadsheets, soon there will be little justification for dragging many students through the mysteries of geo-processing. Most students in the future will use GIS products, they won’t study them. Most students do not need to know what goes on ‘behind the glass’. If GIS interoperability needs to be taught, other than to specialist students, then GIS interoperability will have failed.
The market for ‘GI’ based courses will extend far beyond the traditional 'spatial sciences'. If accountants, lawyers, managers and advertising executives are going to have interoperable GIS functions on their desktops, someone will need to teach them why they should want to press their 'geographical analysis' buttons and what the results mean from having done so. Having a spreadsheet on your computer does not make you an accountant. Equally, having map-based functions will not automatically make accountants and managers into geographers. Interoperability might well mean that the demand for geography professors to act as conventional GIsystems trainers declines within the next few years and the market for professors to act as geography trainers increases. These professors, however, may not be plying their trade within geography departments.
There will clearly be a segmentation and specialization within GIS education during the coming years. For the minority of GIS students there will need to be an increase in the level of technical expertise provided compared to present GIS programs. For the majority, the emphasis upon the technology of GIS will decrease allowing more time to be devoted to the use of the technology, the application of GI for broad based problem solving and the societal and organizational changes this may bring about.
3.4 Resourcing the change.
A very serious problem for institutions and individual professors is the rapidity with which new forms of geo-processing technology are being introduced. The GIS industry is one of an increasing number of high technology industries in which the conventional flow of information from academia to the commercial mainstream is being reversed. There is a real danger that the technology being proposed by OGC and being implemented now by vendors will outpace the ability of educational programs to change. While the mainstream industry forges ahead with new interoperable software, educational programs, unless capable of financing rapid change, will continue to introduce students to the concepts embedded in the last but one generation of GIS software. A significant percentage of GI knowledge, particularly as it relates to technology, becomes outdated within six months. How can institutions afford to re-equip their GIS laboratories with new products at the same rate as the vendors produce them? In this respect, it should also be noted that the specification for a lab to demonstrate interoperability may exceed those found in most present day GIS labs. Most GIS practical classes are currently based upon relatively cheap, desktop packages using small, static, pre-packaged 'teaching' data sets. To introduce students to the full vision of interoperability, as it is currently conceived, educators will need to have access to large-scale, heterogeneous geodata resources providing live data and downloadable program components. How many educational institutions will independently be able to fund such infrastructures?
For individual professors, the rate of change is impossibly fast. It is impossible for an individual teacher to keep pace with all the changes. The technologies change faster than lecture notes. On the other hand, it might be argued that university teachers in GIS should not aspire always to use the most recent software or chase the most recent trends. It is often asserted that there is a distinction to be made between ‘training’, in which the vendors introduce operatives to their latest products and ‘education’, wherein university professors focus upon the eternal truths of spatial analysis. In practice, however, many students have a keen eye upon the currency of what they are taught and, frankly, expect to be taught on the systems they that hope to use in employment.
4. INTEROPERABLE GIS EDUCATION
The expectation is that during the next decade, GIS educators are going to be faced with an enormous task. The very subject matter that is taught, GIS, is being radically transformed. GIS products are emerging at ever increasing rates. A wider range of students than previously will require GI knowledge. Some students will need to master aspects of advanced computer science: some, perhaps from the traditionally non-spatial disciplines, might need to be introduced to the basic concepts of mapping. The university environments within which professors teach will become more challenging.
The conclusion, by many current GIS educators, and indeed that of many other educationalists in other fields, is that no individual or institution will in future be able to cope independently. It is argued, therefore, that the ingrained model of competition between universities – for funds, for students, for kudos – will need to be replaced by one of collaboration. A need is foreseen to develop ‘interoperable’ educational programmes, in which educational ‘objects’ authored by staff from many institutions, and not necessarily exclusively the traditional educational institutions, can be snapped together to meet the needs of any particular group of students. Within the GIS educational community, this need for wide-ranging collaboration to meet the challenges of the next few years has been emphasized in the priorities of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (see http://www.ucgis.org) and the conference summaries from the Second and Third International Symposia of GIS in Higher Education (http://www.ncgia.org/gishe)
The vision at the start of this chapter contains one model by which 'interoperable' GIS education might be facilitated. It is envisioned that by 2010 the GERN (GIScience Educational Resource Network) will act as an online, international repository of GIS educational objects. These objects will consist of a wide range of materials – data-sets, multimedia case studies, hands on exercises, self-study problems, applets providing geo-processing algorithms, exam questions, lesson plans – all indexed by theme, education level, learning style, language etc. Just as Guenther (1997) and Gaede (1997) anticipate mechanisms by which conventional interoperable GIS applets will soon be ‘rented’ via the Web by GIS analysts, the GERN would allow GIS teachers to ‘rent’ educational objects. The role of individual institutions will be to quality assure the educational objects they adopt and to validate the qualifications their students obtain (Heywood et al. 1998). Objects will be deposited into the GERN by a wide range of authors, including conventional Higher Educational teachers, software and data vendors, mapping agencies, local and private sector GIS project developers, independent researchers, publishers, etc.
Developments like the GERN might presently seem utopian and indeed there remain many obstacles to overcome and issues to address. Some of these are listed in Tables 1 and 2. On the other hand some of the building blocks are already falling into place including: models for collaboration between educational institutions and between individual educators; industry provision of educational materials, and; the development of generic ‘on-line’ flexible learning environments. These are discussed in greater detail in the following sections.
| What kinds of resources are needed in a GI/S education resource base? |
| What are the required components of GI/S educational resource objects? |
| How can resources be categorized according to different GI/S learning requirements (i.e. system specific, application centered)? |
| How to handle obsolescence of GI/S knowledge? Is a system of archiving and versioning needed? |
| How to develop strategies for meta GI/S education infrastructures? |
| How to formalize GI/S knowledge for educational purposes? |
| How to establish common terminology for GI/S? |
| How can quality be evaluated for GI/S education products and what mechanisms can assist individual educators to assess it? |
| How to build and promote distributed learning resources? |
| How to develop future proof learning resources and systems? |
| How to handle the ‘not invented here’ syndrome? |
| How to handle disciplinary chauvinism? |
| How to assess and control the quality of distributed resources? |
| How to carry out localization of global materials? How to globalize locally developed materials? |
| How to develop value added products from global resources? |
| How to collaborate with publishers and other commercial enterprises including data providers and vendors? |
| How to manage academic credit and financial return for contributions to an education resource base? |
| How to handle multiple languages? |
4.1. Institutional collaboration
Within the GIS community there are already several well-established models for sharing educational materials:
The NCGIA Core Curriculum (http://www.ncgia.org) released originally in 1990 consists of over 1000 pages of lecture notes and related materials contributed by academics around the world. Over 1400 copies were distributed and the materials have been translated into several languages. Although now out-of-print and out-of-date, the continued demand for these materials encouraged NCGIA to begin work on a new Core Curriculum in 1996. Intriguingly, this new Curriculum might be regarded as a GERN in embryo. It is being developed online with contributions from authors around the world who prepare the on-line materials and act as editors and peer reviewers. With strict format and editorial control at the NCGIA, the materials are both accredited and consistent in quality (Kemp 1997). The result will be a dynamic resource base that can be used, in this case free of charge, to help determine course content and to locate educational materials for GIS courses at different levels and with considerable content variation.
The UNIGIS network of universities (http://www.unigis.org), originally launched by three UK institutions in 1992 has now grown into a network of some 14 institutions located in 10 countries across the globe which collaborate to deliver postgraduate GIS education by distance learning methods. The initial impetus behind the UNIGIS network was a recognition that individually none of the participating institutions had the resources to produce sufficient high quality learning materials to be able to mount a successful programme. By pooling materials and sharing development cost it has been possible to achieve this goal. Although initially the UNIGIS materials were delivered primarily in paper form, increasingly the emphasis is being put on developing a digital UNIGIS resource base similar to that imagined in the GERN. The UNIGIS partnership has shown that it is possible for otherwise competitive institutions to find regulatory and financial mechanisms that allow co-operation.
The Geographer’s Craft project (http://www.utexas.edu/depts/grg/gcraft/contents.html) also provides an example of the willingness of professors and students to adopt materials that are not locally authored. Traditionally, there may have been a reluctance to use materials authored at another institution, the ‘not invented here’ syndrome, but this reluctance now seems to be receding. The Geographer’s Craft materials began as an experimental introductory course in geographical techniques at the University of Texas Geography Department. The project has since developed into a comprehensive set of on-line course materials, including an electronic textbook and laboratory manual, which are linked to by faculty around the world, at no cost, for use by their own students. In autumn 1996, logs showed that over 100,000 files were being accessed each week from the Web site, only 3,000-5,000 of these by students from the University of Texas (Foote, 1997). Foote suggests that the very high level of interest in the materials and the links to the site from the homepages of other educators clearly indicate the potential for collaboration in the development of Web resources and distance education.
4.2. Industry participation
The traditional distinction between vendor ‘training’ and university ‘education’ has always been, in practice, questionable in GIS. Within the universities, many GIS modules have in effect been training courses based on a particular vendor’s software. Conversely, the vendors have long been aware of the need to promote general GIS education as a means of growing the market for their products. In future, this blurring between the two camps will need to be carried further. A GERN would depend significantly upon vendors depositing their applets, data sets and training materials as much as it will upon contributions from traditional academic authors.
In this respect, ESRI’s development of a ‘Virtual Campus’ provides an indication of the sort of contributions vendors might make in future to a GERN. The ESRI Virtual Campus (http://www.esri.com) has been developed to help overcome the problem that not enough people understand the concepts behind GIS, a situation which ESRI feels limits widespread use of the technology. By providing a virtual campus, ESRI hopes to overcome some of the barriers to attending traditional training courses that are imposed by cost and location. The campus is intended to provide a learning resource center for existing and potential customers as well as other interested individuals who wish to explore and develop skills using ESRI's software products. In addition to courses, this campus has "cafes", faculty who hold office hours and certificates of satisfactory completion based on student assessment. Since these courses are either free or low cost, this high quality hands-on GIS training program is being used to supplement or even replace some elements of the laboratory program in some traditional GI courses. For example, the UNIGIS program requires students to complete the ESRI accredited ARCVIEW training modules provided through the campus. Only when UNIGIS students have received their ESRI certificate will they be awarded UNIGIS credits for the ARCVIEW part of their program. In addition to building a virtual campus ESRI is also in the process of developing its own GI ‘knowledge base’ which like the GERN would be populated with lecture notes, exercises, application case studies and reading materials drawn from the ESRI user community (Miller, 1997). By 2010, it is likely that A GERN could contain links to similar ‘knowledge bases’ maintained by all the major vendors, so that course builders could download materials and applets from whichever vendor seemed most appropriate for a particular need.
4.3. Online Learning Environments
The ESRI virtual campus also exemplifies the emergence of the on-line educational environments that might be necessary for GERN like developments. Of course, ESRI is not alone by any means in pursuing the concept of a ‘virtual university’. Several state-funded virtual universities are now being developed in the US and elsewhere (see for example the Western Governor’s University at (http//www.westgov.org/smart/vu/vu.html/).
To support such virtual universities and other distance learning environments, major digital infrastructures are needed. For example, in November 1994, Educom, a non-profit consortium of higher education institutions in the US, launched an initiative called the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII). The NLII is in response to a common need among educational institutions for a non-proprietary, Internet-based Instructional Management System (IMS) to provide the means to customize and manage the instructional process while at the same time integrating content from multiple publishers in distributed--or virtual--learning environments. The IMS project was formed as a catalyst for the development of a substantial body of instructional software, the creation of an on-line infrastructure for managing access to learning materials and environments, the facilitation of collaborative and authentic learning activities, and the certification of acquired skills and knowledge (see http://www.imsproject.org). Other online learning ‘shells’ such as WebCT from the University of British Columbia (http://homebrew1.cs.ubc.ca/webct/) provide similar, though local, facilities.
Clearly by 2010, indeed possibly already, the software tools will be available for GIS authors to design and efficiently implement on-line educational ‘objects’ ranging in scope from short case study descriptions to examination questions to full course modules. The role of GERN will be to advertise the availability of these objects to the community of GIS teachers.
5. TOWARDS THE PROMISED LAND
To make all this happen there are a number of issues which will need to be pursued. There is much work to be done at a technical level. Following the OpenGIS model, we will need to focus upon developing metadata standards which will allow the authors of educational GI objects to define with some precision the objectives, contents, levels and intended outcomes of their objects, so that potential users can evaluate their usefulness for their courses. There may well need to be a testing procedure to ensure that educational objects comply to an agreed standard to enforce interoperability. The granularity at which GI educational objects are best defined - exercise, concept, topic, course, etc - will need to be established. Perhaps more than in many other disciplines, there will need to be mechanisms to allow individual objects to customize themselves to localized requirements - the educators' version of polymorphic objects! Imagine a general purpose educational object which explains coordinate systems but which, depending upon context, presents itself in English using Ordnance Survey data, or in Spanish using Spanish examples. A tracking mechanism that automatically monitors the sequences in which educational objects are commonly assembled could generate valuable, de-facto, GI curricula. Methods for handling assessments and student queries will need to be addressed.
In its important to emphasize, however, that GIS educators will not be alone in developing the technical basis for educational objects. On the contrary, as the example of IMS above suggests, there are a number of super-disciplinary projects which are already exploring the technicalities of interoperable education. Just as the OpenGIS consortium is presently ensuring that ‘geography’ is properly treated within computer industry standards such as DCOM and Corba, the immediate agenda for GIS educators should be to liaise with the educational interoperability projects to ensure that GI requirements are properly built into their specifications.
Even when the technical challenges involved with delivering educational interoperability are resolved, this will not in itself be sufficient to guarantee that GI educational interoperability will succeed. Technical standards and facilities can provide only mechanisms by which educational objects might be delivered. Without academic content, such delivery mechanisms will be redundant. It is necessary, therefore, to consider the incentives which might motivate faculty to pour their hard-earned knowledge into GI educational objects. Why should academics share their knowledge in a collaborative, interoperable manner? Why should educational institutions, whose stock-in-trade might be considered to be the knowledge of their staff, allow these staff to make their teaching materials available to other institutions? Here we enter the fascinating, and still fuzzy, area of institutional interoperability.
The phrase ‘Educational Object Economy’ (EOE) is being used to describe the bases upon which individuals and organisations might trade in interoperable education objects (Apple 1998). Possibly, a conventional market economy in educational objects might develop. As envisaged in the scenario at the beginning of this chapter, educators might simply pay a rental fee each time they borrow an object from the GERN system. Where the authors of educational objects are conventionally employed university faculty staff, the proportions of these fee payments which are retained by authors and by their institutions would doubtless be the subject of local negotiations. It is important to remember, however, that in an EOE, objects could be contributed by non-academic authors. GI practitioners could well encapsulate their expertise within educational objects and release them into the EOE. There should be no presumption that in the future EOE the generation of content will remain the exclusive preserve of conventional academics. The EOE will be an open market in which the success of an object will depend upon the willingness of others to buy it. Alternatively, a barter EOE may evolve, with authors, or institutions, gaining the right to borrow objects by depositing their objects within GERN-like clearinghouse systems.
The EOE model assumes that educational interoperability will be based upon a trading relationship of some kind. There are, however, already examples of educational materials being shared on an altruistic basis. Within GIS, the NCGIA’s core curriculum and the University of Texas’s Virtual Geography Department provide excellent examples of the willingness of academics to contribute voluntarily to projects in which they believe. As educational interoperability develops, it may be that the incentives and kudos associated with authoring an educational object increases. Being the author of one of the top ten most borrowed objects in the GERN system may well become one of the most significant achievements available to GI faculty and be recognized as such by university promotion boards.
In all probability, a mixed EOE will emerge. Within the software industry, freeware, shareware and fully commercial products happily co-exist. Similarly, educational objects might be provided with varying degrees of commercialism. The central point is that universities and individuals will need to explore models which provide sufficient incentives to them to ensure that GERN-like clearinghouses are populated with sufficient, high quality, educational objects to make them worthwhile.
6. CONCLUSION
Clearly nobody really knows what GIS education will look like by 2010. The only certainty is that it will not be at all like it is at present.
Using our admittedly cloudy crystal ball it is anticipated that present trends towards interoperability will continue to the extent that ‘GIS’ as a separate technology will disappear from superficial view. Geo-processing will be embedded within information systems almost universally. Mirroring this trend, formal teaching of ‘GIS’, i.e. the technology of interoperable geo-processing, will retrench into specialist courses, probably taught as part of Information Systems programs. ‘GIS’ as a specialism will disappear from the curricula of many degree programs. Conversely, courses which assume the availability of digital geographic information and which use geo-processing objects to explore application areas will blossom not only in the traditional spatial sciences but across many disciplines. The rapidity of change, and growing pressures within the educational system, suggest that the only way that educators will be able to keep pace will be by collaboration. Present embryonic experiments in on-line collaborative GIS teaching and learning will continue to expand develop and may possibly formalise into something similar to the vision of the GIScience Educational Resource Network (GERN). It seems to us that interoperable GIS provide an apt metaphor for the future of GIS education. Only by creating interoperational educational objects will each educator be able to keep pace with the emerging technology of GIS.
To make all this happen, there is an urgent need for a mechanism by which academics and industry partners can obtain career advancement or other rewards for contributions to projects like the GERN. By 2010, possibly the highest accolade a GIS professor will be able to claim will be that he or she authored one of the ‘top ten’ most frequently rented GIS objects from the GERN network. Equally from an industry perspective, the developers of case studies or software applets that are accredited to GERN might expect to be rewarded for promoting the activities of the company on a global scale.
But then, again, we could be entirely wrong!
REFERENCES
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