Why Gis Matters

If you're just getting started in Geography 482, it's likely that this is your first course in Penn State's online Post Baccalaureate Certificate or Master of GIS degree programs. We started the Certificate Program back in 1999. The master of GIS degree program followed in 2004. Why, Simon Sinek would ask, did we create these programs? Four reasons. First, we sought to attract new students. Online learning - which was a new and somewhat suspect practice in those days - enabled us to connect with students like you: adult learners seeking to advance their careers, or start new ones that involved GIS. Second, but most important, we're here to help people succeed. GIS work is knowledge work. Learning is a way of life for GIS pros. We are here to help. Third, we got into this because it was a chance to create something new and something great. There were no established best practices for online GIS education back then. We got to help invent it, which was a gas. We're still inventing it, and you are inventing it with us. A fourth goal was to help Penn State University prosper. Higher education is an increasingly competitive industry in the U.S. Penn State Online was meant to expand the University's reach geographically and demographically. Our challenge then, is to do well by the university - while doing good for you. This is David DiBiase speaking and these fine folks are my fellow instructors and designers of Geography 482. We take turns leading the class. You'll find comments to this VoiceThread from whichever instructor is leading the course this semester. There's also a trusty team of grading assistants who you will meet in the course discussions. We hope you'll add your own comment to the VoiceThread, though you should save your personal introduction until the last task in this lesson. We're going to do map introductions there. Although our certificate and master's degree programs are in GIS, we all know that geographic information systems are just one part of a larger field. The U.S. Department of Labor calls the field the Geospatial Technology Industry. We could argue about the name, but let's go with it for now. Around the same time we were starting up our online programs, the Department of Labor started to get excited about geospatial technology. At one point, they compared the field to nanotechnology and biotechnology as high-growth fields with strong and employment potential. This was exciting, to say the least, for educators like us. But the DOL also expressed two concerns. One was that the Geospatial Technology Industry was not clearly defined. The second concern was that most people remained unaware of it. One effort to raise awareness was a series of videos produced by Penn State Public Broadcasting called the "Geospatial Revolution". The videos have attracted hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. In my travels to universities around the world, it seems that students everywhere have seen it. I appeared for a few seconds at the end of the series trailer. The producers caught me saying that making geography "ordinary" for people outside the field was the most revolutionary thing of all. What I meant was that interacting with maps on mobile phones has become commonplace. When you consider that map making was a highly specialized craft not that long ago, that's revolutionary. For us, however, the act of mapping remains extraordinary, even if it happens millions of times a day. Mapping is revelatory in the sense that it reveals valuable insights about people, the earth, and their interactions. In this course, we attempt to share geospatial revelations - case studies that explain why GIS matters, while revealing the technologies and methods that GIS pros need to master. Mapping and GIS has been a continuous revelation for me, since I discovered cartography as a student at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1980s. Yes, that's me in the University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab in 1986, drafting a map with pen and ink. And no, the "Robinson" in the title isn't Anthony Robinson, the leader of our Geospatial Education Programs. It's Arthur Robinson, one of the founders of the discipline, with whom I had the honor of collaborating a little. In the article, my boss in the Cart Lab observes that "computer use in cartography has been limited to large, expensive systems", and that "there is very little microcomputer software specifically designed for map making at this point." I recall being assigned to evaluate the potential of ArcInfo3.2 - which then ran on Prime mini computers - to create maps for an atlas. I concluded that the technology wasn't ready. Yes, that seems pretty ironic today. In those days, cartography was conceived and taught as a mode of communication. This is the generalized model of communication systems developed by Shannon and Weaver in the mid-twentieth century. The model theorizes the transmission of a signal, which to some extent is corrupted by noise, between a sender and receiver via telephone or radio. As cartography was conceived back in the day, map makers transmitted information to map readers via maps and tried to minimize "noise" by perfecting map design. The problem with this conception is that it marginalized cartography as practically an afterthought to problem solving. By contrast, geographic information systems of the time emphasized analytics over presentation. By the time I came to Penn State as a cartographer in the 1980s, cartography and GIS were quite distinct - not only technologically, but culturally. Some GIS theorists even defined GIS in explicit opposition to cartography, stating that one represented the past, and the other the future. But beginning about 1990, here at Penn State and at a few other places, people started thinking differently about maps and cartography. In 1987 a National Science Foundation report on Scientific Visualization inspired us to believe, and soon to demonstrate, that interactive map making can facilitate data exploration and hypothesis generation, as well as the communication of research findings. Penn State professor Alan McEachran, who coined the term "geovisualization", later founded the GeoVISTA Center which has produced many compelling visualization tools, publications, and leading scholars. One of those scholars is Anthony, who famously developed the massively open online course "Maps and the Geospatial Revolution" in 2013. Having attracted some 50,000 students, that MOOC remains the largest single class on cartography and GIS, ever. The culture war between cartography and GIS is long gone. Today's GIS includes sophisticated cartography and visualization tools. Penn State has played a leading role in showing how to make better maps with GIS. Emblematic of the integration of cartography and GIS is the fact that Mark Harrower - another product of Penn State's GeoVISTA Center - is now an influential "mapping and visualization engineer" at Esri. Integration of the formerly disparate components and cultures of the geospatial technology field is an ongoing trend. By 2010, the field had coalesced enough that the Department of Labor was able to publish a Geospatial Technology Competency Model. Penn State again played a leading role in organizing and completing this document. The GTCM specifies the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to successfully perform "critical work functions" in the geospatial industry. Like other Department of Labor competency models, the GTCM is depicted graphically as a pyramid-shaped stack of tiers. The stack represents a spectrum of competencies, ranging from general to specific, not from low-level to high-level. Tiers 1 through 3, called Foundational Competencies, specify general workplace behaviors and knowledge that successful workers in most industries exhibit. Tiers 4 and 5 include the distinctive technical competencies that characterized the geospatial industry and its sectors. Tier 4, the Industry-wide Technical Competencies, includes 43 examples of critical work functions that many geospatial professionals will be expected to perform during their careers. Later in this introductory lesson will ask you to self assess your own knowledge, skills, and abilities in relation to the 43 core industry competencies included in Tier 4. And our quiz will help you self-assess your familiarity with the GTCM as a whole. Tier 5, the Industry Sector Technical Competencies, includes requirements for worker success in each of three industry sectors: Positioning and Data Acquisition, Analysis and Modeling, and Software and App Development. Later in the course, we'll ask you to assess your competence in each of the three industry sectors in tier 5. For now, let's recall why we're doing this, and what we aim to accomplish in this course. At Penn State, we do what we do because we're committed to helping you succeed. Between now and the time you earn your certificate or degree, we pledge to help you strengthen the geospatial competencies you already have, and to acquire new ones. We also want to help you draw a roadmap for your continuing professional development, because learning is a way of life in our field. Now we invite you to add a comment to this VoiceThread. But please save personal introduction until the last step in this lesson. We want everyone to introduce themselves with a map. I hope you enjoy the lesson and the whole course.