The three driving forces behind growth of GIS: 1. Technological Change, 2. GIS Demand, and 3. Organizational Change
Why is this important? US Dept. of Labor is one indicator that GIS&T is a growth industry.
Requires rethinking GIS education
What efforts have been addressing this issue.
Marble’s conception of the GIS pyramid of education
Eventually led to the formation of the Model Curriculum Task Force
Meant as a multi-path approach to GIS education
Also meant to interact with, but not necessarily replace other disciplinary specialties. Suggested additional education.
AfterDiBiasi’s entry, the first product from the effort. Published by the AAG and the UCGIS jointly
Divided the knowledge into 10 major “Knowledge Areas.” Not necessarily mutually exclusive. Some considered “overaching” themes
Each Knowledge Area broken into units. Each unit into topics.
Topics eventually parsed into individual learning objectives, with an attempt to incorporate behavioral indicators of success.
Also based loosely on modified version of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning.
How effective was the coverage of learning objectives relative to content and Bloom’s levels.
Action verbs related to Bloom’s levels of knowledge.
Using text analysis (basically a count of action verbs related to learning objectives), this research showed the following results. Notice that DA, design aspects, is the only one that achieved an average of 3.5 or better.
Most knowledge area coverage is in the low end (1-3) rather than the upper end of the learning taxonomy. Indicates a need for more work on learning objectives related to the topical content.
What about the actual delivery of the GIS&T content. Evaluation of European university delivery.
Interesting that while only 40% of the universities responding had heard of the BoK but many still seemed to cover the major knowledge areas. Look at the tables in the next three slides.
The table (bottom) summarizes the results. Basically only CV (cartography and visualization) and GD (geospatial data) were thoroughly covered. Actually a fairly close reflection of the coverage suggested by the BoK. Does this mean that it has achieved its goal?
There are continuing efforts at defining a GIS curriculum, such as this model developed by Joseph Berry
Notice that it differs somewhat from Marble’s original pyramid model. Still based on geospatial coursework.
There is also a need to understand exactly where the learning will take place. This is a basic conceptual model. Fairly traditional.
The idea of course, is to find how to educate a diverse set of learners with different backgrounds to potential widely varied outcomes.
One effort to link the BoK to a competency based approach is the Geotech Center, funded by NSF and supported by the US Dept. of Labor
The model is far reaching and includes a high degree of non-geospatial content. Are GIS faculty responsible for non geospatial competencies?
What about the BoK? Is it dead? It is static, dated, and limited.
Foundational research is ongoing to develop a new platform to develop visualization and virtual environments in with to keep the next generation of BoK vibrant, current, and collaborative.
Here is BrendonPlewe’s original visualization of the Body of Knowledge in total.
Here is Brendon’s model as compared to a single course. Note the white areas are those not included. The lighter the color, the less intense the coverage of the topic.
Part of the current research process is to develop other more interactive visualizations such as indented lists…
Here’s the indented list in action
Or as a tree graph… in this case expanded from a single topic.
Or a tree map, that takes yet another visualization approach. Each of these is designed to allow people to examine the BoK.
The ultimate goal of this project is, as this picture illustrates, is the development of the BoK2.
