White paper
Interoperability for GIScience Education:
Building a flexible knowledge and resource base
by Ian Heywood and Karen Kemp
(posted 18 December 1997)
The motivation for this meeting comes from a recognition that GIS educators
in the private and public sectors are faced with both an opportunity and
a dilemma. As the GIS vendors move to open systems which can be integrated
with many traditional operations, the use of spatial data and analysis
will become widespread throughout business, government and education.
Hence the need for GIScience education is expanding rapidly. However,
at the same time, rapid changes are occurring in both GIS technology and
the structure of higher education. These shifting foundations make it impossible
for individual GIS educators to stay on the leading technological edge
where their students need them to be. Collaboration in education
is now essential.
The opportunity
GI and its associated technologies are migrating outward from the specialist
niche markets in which they have been embedded over the last 20 years.
This can be seen in
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Growth in off the shelf GI products packaged with data for specific applications
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The move by vendors towards an Open GIS environment
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Creation of on-line open access Web based GI products
This means that a greater number of individuals are going to need to work
with the technology in their everyday lives. Eventually this interfacing
will be seamless, as users are able to perform high tech spatial tasks
via intuitive interfaces. However, that points lies some time in the future.
In the meantime the education community will need to provide a broad based
education strategy to deal with this growth in demand.
Many educators in both the public and private sector are already responding
to this challenge in their own individual ways by providing
The dilemma
However, all of this is being done against a background where:
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A significant percentage of GI knowledge, particularly as it relates to
the technology, becomes outdated within less than 6 months.
-
New GI products, services and ideas are appearing at a rate beyond any
one individual's ability to keep track.
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It is impossible for an individual educator to stay at the technological
leading edge in their field and to keep their learning materials up-to-date.
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The model of higher learning is changing from a traditional, one-time-through
university education experience to a flexible lifelong learning environment.
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Mature, busy students are are demanding effective and efficient learning
opportunities.
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Many students are no longer satisfied with the talk and chalk approach
to university education.
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Professionally designed education products now compete against traditional
one-off materials.
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Central support for traditional education institutions is shrinking while
for-profit education institutions are beginning to compete for the growing
number of mature students.
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An increase in demand for just-in-time education is apparent in both academic
and industry settings.
-
Concern is increasing over how the quality of educational GI programmes
can be maintained in light of decreasing budgets and rising student demand.
Workshop aim
The aim of this workshop is to explore how the GI community can work together
to develop an Interoperable or Open environment in which educators can
exchange resources and add value to these resources for use in their own
unique educational settings while at the same time retaining intellectual
(and commercial) copyright. Can such an enterprise provide a framework
for collaborative education which allows GIS educators to stay on the leading
edge of both the technology and the changes happening in higher education?
Both technical issues, such as metadata, data formats and technology, and
educational/institutional issues related to collaborative education and
sharing of resources will need to be considered.
Themes for workshop discussions include:
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Why is this a GIS question?
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Creating knowledge bases
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Finding knowledge in a distributed resource base
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Building and promoting learning resources
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Developing futureproof learning resources and systems
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Strategies for meta GI education infrastructures
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Challenges for curriculum development
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Lessons learnt from TLTP type projects
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Metadata for education resources
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Accreditation of distributed learning
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Assessing and controling quality of distributed resources
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Localization of global materials
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Developing value added products from global resources
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The role of publishers and other commercial enterprises
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The role of data providers/vendors
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Academic credit and financial return for contributions to an education
resource base
-
Foreign language issues
Related projects
Advanced Distributed
Learning Network
The purpose of the ADL initiative is to ensure access to high quality
education and training materials that can be tailored to individual learner
needs and can be made available whenever and wherever they are required.
The initiative is designed to accelerate large-scale development of dynamic
and cost-effective learning software and to stimulate an efficient market
for these products in order to meet the education and training needs of
the US military and workforce in the 21st century. It will do this through
the development of a common technical framework for computer and net-based
learning that will foster the creation of re-usable learning content as
"instructional objects." ADL is a collaborative effort with the public
and private sectors launched in November 1997 by the US Department of Defense
and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
Instructional
Management System project
In November 1994, Educom
launched a new initiative in the US called the National
Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII). The NLII identified 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 and to integrate 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 instuctional
software, the creation of an online 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. The IMS project will support an open architecture for learning
by developing a technical specification and designing a reference implementation
for enabling the creation of quality learning environments and materials.
The nature of the IMS's open architecture was derived from two main assumptions:
successful software is modularized and industry standards support software
development.
Workshop Deliverables
The Workshop Leaders will prepare a meeting report immediately following
the close of the workshop. This report will contain a record of the
discussions and will outline the proposed research and development agenda
as well as a suggested action plan. Based upon this report and the
outcome of the meeting, presentations will be made at various GIS education
meetings to be held during late 1998 in order to involve the entire GIS
education community in discussions about the proposals outlined.
Possible Research Questions
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How to formalize GI knowledge for educational purposes?
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What kinds of resources are needed in a GIS education resource base?
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What are the fundamental components that can be served as resource objects?
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What are the metadata requirements?
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How can we categorize resources according to different learning modes?
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What kinds of functionality are needed to support access to, use of and
knowledge discovery in such a distributed resource base?
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How to handle obsolescence of GI knowledge? Do we need a system of
archiving and versioning?
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What are the copyright issues? Do we need to construct some new mechanisms
for sharing private resources?
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What are the institutional and organizational issues related to collaborative
education?
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How can we teach locally using global resources? What are the implications
of using materials developed in other countries or different disciplines?
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How do we express quality in education products and what mechanisms can
assist individual educators to assess it?
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What are the accreditation issues involved in collaborative education and
flexible learning based on distributed education resources?
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What is the relationship between our vision and related projects for the
development of systems for distributed student-oriented materials?
Workshop Co-Leaders
Ian Heywood, Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
and Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Karen Kemp, NCGIA, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Derek Reeve, UNIGIS, University of Huddersfield, UK
Steering Committee
Hans Bestebreurtje, HP Europe, The Netherlands
Antonio Camara, New Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
Kenneth Foote, University of Texas, Austin TX USA
William Miller, ESRI, Redlands CA USA
Mark Resmer, Sonoma State University CA USA
Henk Scholten, The Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
David Unwin, Birkbeck College, London UK
Go to the next section of
the report - List of Participants
Go back to the Table of Contents