Interest in participating

I completely endorse the comments made by yourself and Ian Heywood in your white paper. As someone with eight year’s experience of running GIS courses, I am very familiar with the difficulty of developing new teaching materials and keeping material up to date. In developing my own courses I have made considerable use of teaching materials developed elsewhere, including:

• The NCGIA Core Curriculum
• IDRISI practicals supplied with the software
• IDRISI lab classes developed by the NCGIA as part of an early version of the curriculum.
• Introduction to ARC/INFO funded by the ASSIST program (in which I played a part).

It seems to me that the key issues which the meeting will need to address are:

• What teaching material is it most useful to develop collaboratively?
• What mechanism should be used to keep material up to date?

Position statement

Lecture notes to support an introductory course on GIS.

From my own experience, the NCGIA notes are excellent for an advanced course, but provide too much detail for an introductory course - in effect they serve as a ‘reference manual’, giving detailed accounts of specific topics. The problem here is in deciding what should go into an introductory course, and at what level of detail. One option might be that, rather than develop full 50 minutes lectures, develop a series of materials for smaller topics, designed to be delivered in 10-15 minutes - these could then be combined together more flexibly by lecturers. This approach could be used with many of the pieces of basic GIS functionality such as overlay, buffering, the various types of map algebra operation etc.

Practical exercises

Practical lab classes are a vital part of teaching GIS in my opinion, and pose two sets of problems for the lecturer.

Developing exercises. A key issue here is access to data. It is very time consuming to assemble a set of data which is suitable for illustrating a particular GIS topic. There is a clear case here for sharing effort - a question which will need to be addressed however is whether it is possible to design materials in such a way that lecturers can substitute datasets relating to their own area. For example, is it possible to design a practical that requires the following data:

• A DTM
• A landcover map containing forest, urban and agricultural land.
• A road map.

An alternative would be to use some of the global datasets available from UNEP with lecturers using the part relating to their ‘region’ (or even develop practicals which look at global issues).

Keeping material up to date. A key element in designing practicals is striking the correct balance between teaching GIS concepts using a particular package, and teaching students something about the package itself. In the early stages of a course, the former is more important but this means that handouts for the work need to be quite detailed and very closely tied to the particular version of the package. It is no good telling students to ‘open the layer called VEG’; explicit instructions are needed including details of the commands/menu options needed. My experience is that if this is not done, students become confused trying to learn the software and this gets in the way of learning the concepts. One of the implications of this is that the handouts must be changed every time a new version of the package is obtained.

A great advantage of developing shared teaching materials is that some of this updating can be shared out between different groups.

Mechanism for updating materials

I think a major issue which will need to be addressed is a mechanism for keeping material up to date. If we consider the potential market for GIS teaching materials, I believe two types of user can be identified:

• Those who will be happy to purchase material, including regular updates.
• Those who will be willing to contribute to the development of some material in exchange for access to the whole set.

Curriculum Vitae

Education
 

1973-1976	University of Bristol	B.Sc. (Soc.Sci) Hon. Upper Second Class in Geography
1976-1979	University of London, King's College	Research towards Ph.D. in Geography. Thesis not completed

 
Previous Employment
 

Dates	Post
1979-80	Research Assistant, London School of Economics
1980-85	Analyst/Programmer, University of London Computer Centre
1985-90	Computer Officer, University of Bath

 
CURRENT POST

Lecturer in Department of Geography, University of Sheffield. Teaching duties include GIS courses (2nd, 3rd year undergraduate, postgraduate), Level 1 skills course convenor (course includes tuition in IT skills to all Level 1 students in Geography), Organiser of Level 2 Physical Geography field class.

Research Interests

1. Analysis of effect of DTM errors on results of analysis.
1. Development of spatial analysis tools linked to GIS.
1. Environmental modelling and GIS.
1. Use of GIS for the analysis of health data.

• Chair of IUSC committee which selected ARC/INFO GIS for purchase by CHEST on special terms for whole UK Higher Education community.
• Established a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Geographical Information Systems from scratch (subject not previously taught in the department). Courses attract approx. 60 students from Geography, plus students from TRP, Archaeology, APS, Law, Engineering. Teaching material now forms basis of courses provided by SCGISA.
• Took a lead role in two re-designs of first year skills teaching:

1994 - Introduction of new course to teach basic IT skills. Responsible for overall course design, writing many new practicals and lectures, and coordinating a team of staff and postgraduates.
1997 - Inclusion of a broader range of skills, including study skills taught via tutorials. Part of small team involved in redesign of 2 modules, and then responsible for overall design, presentation and coordination of one of the new modules.
• Two successful applications to University of Sheffield Curriculum Development Fund

£2000 for purchase of INFO-MAP mapping package for use in first year practical course.
1995. £4500 for purchase of MapInfo mapping and GIS package, now used in courses at all three undergraduate levels and at RTP level, and in research activities.
• Successful bid to Television Services for resources to make a video illustrating the principles of data capture for GIS. Video will be used on GIS courses, and may have potential to be marketed outside the University.
• Invited to form part of the team which designed a short introductory course on ARC/INFO. Materials were later marketed to other universities and form the basis of one ofthe courses run at MIDAS.

"Back to basics". A series of monthly article in GIS Europe, introducing the basic concepts behind GIS to a non-specialist audience:

• "Where topography meets technology", 5(9), 20-21, 1996.
• "Reading between the lines",5(10),16-17,1996.
• "Teaching the system to second-guess",5(11),18-19,1996.
• "Algorithms ad infinitum",5(12),18-19,1996.
• "Boxing clever", 6(1),14-15,1997.
• "Beyond the bounds of possibility",6(2),16-17,1997.
• "How long is a piece of string?",6(3),16-17,1997.
• "One and one is (almost) two",6(4),18-19,1997.

Wise S.M. (1991) Setting up an online service to access the Postzon file. Wales and South West Regional Research Laboratory Technical Report 32, Dept. of Town Planning, UWCC, Cardiff.

Wise S.M. (1990) Evaluating GIS software for use in Higher Education. Mapping Awareness 4(7), 41-43.

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