Meeting outcomes - Overview of tasks
draft by Derek Reeve, June 29, 1998
Participants at the meeting were of the opinion that the technology
to allow the delivery of interoperable educational objects via the Web
will become available very soon. Furthermore the support for online learning
programmes from governments and significant higher education bodies is
such that it is inevitable that such programmes will expand dramatically
in the short-term. The view of the meeting, therefore, was that we should
work to ensure that GIScience educators are as well placed as possible
to take advantage of the opportunities, and avoid the pitfalls, which the
shift towards online teaching will generate.
From a range of possibilities, the participants decided that three major
tasks should be given initial priority :-
Task 1 : Metadata for GIScience Education Materials
A major concern must be to ensure that the interests of GIScience
are strongly represented in the super-disciplinary projects which are presently
laying down the ground-rules for online, educational interoperability.
Just as the OGC are presently acting as a lobbying and technical development
group to ensure that 'geography' is properly accommodated within emerging
Distributed Computer Environments, so too GIScience educators need to lobby
to ensure that GIScience' is properly represented in emerging online educational
initiatives. It was decided, therefore that an immediate task for the group
will be to work with educational metadatabase projects such as IMS, the
WWW consortium, the Alexandria project and similar initiatives within the
library community to explore how readily GIScience-relevant metadata can
be embedded within their structures.
Task 2 : Prototype Knowledge Base for GIScience Education Materials
The participants believed that it would be desirable to generate as
quickly as possible a prototype GIScience knowledge base, in order to learn
what workloads are involved in creating such a structure and to create
an exemplar which can be used at conferences and workshops to generate
wider awareness. The meeting was impressed by the potential of the work
already done by the ESRI knowledge base project. Rather than create an
entirely new structure, it seemed appropriate to take advantage of the
existing ESRI software. The second major task for the group, will be to
generate an exemplar GIScience online knowledge base using the ESRI model.
Task 3 : Incentives for interoperable GIS education.
There was a consensus within the meeting that the move towards online
GIScience education should not be viewed purely, or even primarily, as
a technical issue. For online GIScience education to be successful, academics
will need to feel that it is worthwhile to spend their time writing educational
objects. Higher Education institutions will need to be able to see how
revenue might be generated from online teaching. Students will need to
feel that online teaching represents an advance in their learning programmes.
There was a feeling within the group that the incentives which might
make online GIScience teaching take-off need to be explored. The third
task the group set itself, therefore, is to research the motivations which
lie behind current online teaching initiatives and to try to anticipate
what incentives might be necessary in future to encourage GIScience
interoperable education to develop strongly.
The intention is that these three tasks will each be completed within an
eighteen month period after which the technical and institutional requirements
which need to be fulfilled to make interoperable GIScience education successful
will be much better understood.
The meeting agreed that within each of these tasks an emphasis should
be placed upon disseminating as widely as possible the outcomes of our
activities.
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- Metadata task
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