Visioning GIScience Education

GIScience higher education is experiencing a diversity of alternative forms and content, in ways that are both responsive to and enabling of the rapid pace of institutional reform, software development, and the growth of a 'big data' culture and economy. To discuss these pressure points and opportunity-costs, I organized a panel session of the 2014 meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Tampa, Florida. We discussed a complex set of issues that transcend curricula and academic programming, to include the rebalancing of public support for and funding of higher education, the increased pressure for industrial partnership and production, and a general uptake in GISc tools and techniques across the humanities, the social and natural sciences, as well as professional fields of engineering, design, architecture, planning, public health, medicine, etc.

I called the panel to more specifically consider the:
- emerging curricula in online and open-sourced cartography and GIS,
- opportunities and costs associated with GIScience MOOCs,
- shifting compositions of faculties and departments of geography,
- tensions in the training and development of undergraduate and postgraduate learners,
- implications for 'relevance' and 'utility' amid increasingly student-funded higher education, and
- the role/responsibility of GIScience in rebuilding an enlarged and significant public image of Geography and geographic literacy and education in North America (and beyond).

Panelists:
Luke Bergmann, U. of Washington
Sarah Elwood, U. of Washington
Mike Goodchild, UCSB/U. of Washington
Werner Kuhn, UCSB
David O'Sullivan, Berkeley
Anthony Robinson, Penn State U.
Rob Roth, U. of Wisconsin
Nadine Schuurman, Simon Fraser U.
Matthew W. Wilson, Harvard/U. of Kentucky
Matthew Zook, U. of Kentucky

In the hopes that our discussion would stay informal and equitable, I asked each panelist to be provocative and brief (as opposed to the typical 5-7 minute statement from each panelist, with little cross-engagement). Each panelist prepared a one-sentence, pithy responses to the following three questions:

1. How might you summarize the pressures that currently condition GIScience education (at your institution and/or beyond)?

One exciting nexus of challenges and opportunities I see is found in internet GIS, in the returning importance of computational/algorithmic literacy in GIS, in open source approaches, and in what all this does to challenge not only the mechanics of classes organized around desktop GISystems, but also in what opportunities and reemphases it offers to GIScience.
Luke Bergmann

At time of dwindling institutional resources and diverse faculty imaginaries about the substance and pedagogies of GISci education, we need to expand our thinking about how the geographical and the technological intersect.
Sarah Elwood

How to isolate the fundamental and persistent principles from a field that is in part technologically driven, and moving rapidly
Mike Goodchild

Teaching GIS through problem solving, rather than the reverse.
Werner Kuhn

Keeping (perhaps at Berkeley putting) geography at the heart of the conversation, now that GIS is no longer central, and keeping up with the tools.
David O'Sullivan

We need to offer the best quality geospatial education to the best students while maximizing revenue in an environment that promises little in the way of ongoing investment.
Anthony Robinson

Maintaining a focus on fundamental GIScience competencies during a period of rapid change in both geospatial technologies and educational practices.
Rob Roth

The biggest pressure in my University is the push to make a profit from the Golden GOOSE of GIScience.
Nadine Schuurman

GIScience education is conditioned by an unevenly experienced series of crises in higher education marked by the rise of 'utility'- and 'relevance'-regimes across the university.
Matt Wilson

Fast changing technologies and students who want to learn software rather than ideas and processes.
Matt Zook

2. How might you summarize the role of GIScience education within the discipline of geography?

I think we have opportunities to engage not only the social and cultural side of geography, but cultural and literary studies education generally too, as many in the Academy and beyond are increasingly interested in GIS for digital humanities—yet this will require an exciting if challenging process of mutual learning and transformation on the part of both digital humanities and GIScience too.
Luke Bergmann

GIScience education remains uneasily perched between commercial/employer imperatives and disciplinary anxieties about relationships between conceptual learning and skills learning; whether it is ‘methodological’ or ‘substantive’, and our tendency toward a certain exceptionalism that silos GISci from the rest of a geography curriculum.
Sarah Elwood

To provide a formal structure and language that can form the basis for conversations and collaborations between geography and other disciplines
Mike Goodchild

GIScience education is about using spatial data to solve problems.
Werner Kuhn

I think of it now as addressing the question of how to 'do geography' using computers: we've now got a bunch of tools, how can they be used to do geography, and what are the implications of that?
David O'Sullivan

To empower learners with the ability to synthesize, analyze, and communicate all types of spatial information.
Anthony Robinson

"skills" -Jack Geographer, or Jane Provost
Rob Roth

The role of GIScience education is to make geography in every sense of the word come alive through visual communication.
Nadine Schuurman

The role of GIScience education within Geography is to provide safe/sustained harbor for experimentation with geospatial technologies, to be vulnerable to and reflective of the productivities of such experimentation.
Matt Wilson

A key part and particularly visible to non-Geographers
Matt Zook

3. How might you summarize the learning outcomes of an undergraduate student that graduates with GIScience training?

Students will gain an understanding of GIScience, not just GISystems.
Luke Bergmann

At most institutions, it is conceptual and application skills for spatial analysis and cartographic representation with conventional geographic information systems – though this is in complete flux with most places now doing both/and mix that may include things like critical GIS, open source, mobile, geoweb, web-based cartography, etc.
Sarah Elwood

Training in GIScience should transform a student who is initially intimidated by GI technology to one who treats the technology as a tool with which to answer the questions a trained GIScientist is empowered to pose.
Mike Goodchild

GIScience graduates can produce computational solutions to spatial problems in teams.
Werner Kuhn

I hope some ability to do geography using a computer, allied to a healthy skepticism about that enterprise!
David O'Sullivan

Learners should be able to make maps that make sense, provide solutions to real problems, and highlight the value of the geographic perspective to those who may be ignoring it.
Anthony Robinson

Upon completion of this program, you will be able to critically, comprehensively, and creatively apply geospatial analysis and design techniques in order to address complex geographic problems.
Rob Roth

To be able to extract geographic information and knowledge from spatial data.
Nadine Schuurman

An undergraduate with GIScience training should be able to diagram and diagnose the mechanics of geographic representation, such that the appropriateness of mapmaking is always conditioned by the implications of map interventions.
Matt Wilson

Be both a critical user of spatial data and visualization as well as a skilled creator of geovisualizations with full awareness of the power of maps.
Matt Zook