ESRI has always invested heavily into GIS education. That has included both the toolset as well as the study of geographic information as a science. The results have been impressive, not only in terms of financial growth for the company but the numerous research efforts, education events, books published and conference-workshops. Building GIS capacity and community is truly an ESRI goal. Dr. Michael Gould has recently been hired as Director of Education, Industry Solutions for ESRI. Vector1 Media editor Jeff Thurston interviews him on a number of GIS education related topics.
V1 Magazine: Congratulations on your recently appointed position at ESRI. Can you explain your new post and what it involves? How do you see your future efforts unfolding through the position and what would you like to do?
MG: My new position is director of the so-called education team at ESRI, within the Industry Solutions department. Our team should not be confused with another group, Educational Services, which handles software training and oversees the ESRI Press.
We are liaisons within ESRI and advocates for educators at all levels: schools, universities, museums, libraries, informal youth groups, etc. As such, our goal is to help them be successful in teaching and research using GIS. My own specialty is Higher Education and also international activities. It is an exciting position to be in because we work with a huge installed base of GIS educators, and with their help we have a real opportunity to define the future of GIS and to make a real difference.
V1 Magazine: Do you think students around the world know enough about GIS? What areas need more attention?
MG: Awareness has grown incredibly over the past decades, and we have identified more than 100 academic disciplines that are teaching GIS. Also we have seen GIS being taught, in one form or another, in just about every nation on earth. But of course there is still much to be done, to expand GIS across the campus and throughout the curriculum, beyond the traditional land-oriented fields of study.
In schools there is a huge need to intensify Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) programs and GIS has an important role to play here, in helping students go beyond pure geo-visualization and use GIS for creative problem-solving. Business schools, just to name one academic specialty, should be doing more to exploit the power of geographic thinking and problem-solving using GIS.
V1 Magazine: We often hear that people only use 15-20% of the functionality of a GIS. Is that true in your view? What steps can be taken to help students understand how they can use more of the functionality included in GIS tools to solve real world problems?
MG: This is probably true, but providing an all-purpose geographic problem-solving tool means that everyone’s particular 15% needs to be available on demand. We are taking steps to more heavily promote GIS problem-solving (as opposed to simple overlay and display of push-pins) and also the use of server-based (enterprise) GIS in teaching and research settings. At the same time more specific tools are appearing on the web, allowing certain user communities to discover and exploit their 15% of full GIS functionality online, tailored, and without any software installation.
V1 Magazine As you well know the INSPIRE Directive exists in Europe. Are students aware of the Directive and do they understand how and where they can contribute? Which INSPIRE thematic areas benefit from GIS and how is ESRI involved in them?
MG: Yes, I worked on parts of INSPIRE during my years in Europe and it’s an impressive undertaking, mostly aimed at freeing up and harmonizing across Europe a set of environmentally-relevant geodata themes. Students around the world should learn something about how nation states cooperate to provide consistent, continental-scale geodata, to improve decision making and reduce overall cost.
I think that most students are unaware of INSPIRE (just as unaware as they are of hundreds of other EU directives), however I am encouraged that they are becoming increasingly aware of more general public-driven open data initiatives, such as that which recently prompted Ordnance Survey of Great Britain to release multiple data sets.
V1 Magazine: GIS is both a tool and science. While there are several training sessions for learning about GIS, it appears that there are far fewer resources for learning about the connection between GIS and science. Can you explain how you see the connection between GIS and science together with the current state of play?
MG: It’s funny, in a way, how research is seldom taught, rather it is learned through imitation: young graduate student following mentor. In the same sense I’m not sure if training sessions, per se, on “how to do science with GIS” make much sense. However your mention of resources for learning about the science-GIS nexus, that is, case studies and general explanations of how GIS is a problem-solving tool and, thus, amenable to scientific method, makes a great deal of sense.
Our team is beginning to speak with a wider range of scientists (beyond the traditional geographical sciences), such as for example at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and European Geophysical Union (EGU) meetings in San Francisco and Vienna respectively. And we are organizing a series of workshops inviting key scientists to our Redlands headquarters, the first of which is on Space-Time Modeling and Analysis (Feb 22-23, 2010). But more can and should be done to produce published materials to fortify the GIS and science relationship. Our colleague Matt Artz edits a nice blog on that very topic: www.gisandscience.com
V1 Magazine: What possibilities for learning does ArcGIS Online bring as compared to ArcGIS Desktop? Does mobile GIS figure into GIS education, if so, how?
MG: ArcGIS Online (AGOL) is to education what a spatial data infrastructure is for government: a common (and free) platform for sharing content. AGOL allows educators to create groups, within which they can organize and selectively share map data, services and other resources that are stored on the ESRI cloud. These resources are discovered and consumed by any of the ESRI clients, such as ArcGIS Desktop or ArcGIS Explorer (also free). Mobile GIS has a couple of strong roles in education: field data collection and management (students need to get out into the real world more often!), and ArcGIS Server-based field applications, which are a key component of enterprise GIS. All educational institutions that have site licenses already have (included) access to these two classes of mobile GIS applications, and others just need to contact us to get special educational pricing.
V1 Magazine: Many people are interested in spatial data infrastructure (SDI) today. Is there one standard SDI approach in your mind? Can you describe how ESRI is involved in SDI?
MG: I have worked in SDI for more than a decade, the first project being the European Spatial Metadata Infrastructure (ESMI) funded by the European Union in 1997. Although there are plenty of technical details inside, the important aspect of SDI is that multiple agencies, data providers and consumers can find consensus solutions for collaboration and for sharing.
The primary activity in the use of an SDI is geodata discovery: knowing what exists and its fitness for a certain purpose. There are now many well known methods for this geodata discovery, adopting ISO standards, OGC specifications, other web standards, and yes, even Google search. ESRI supports many of these standards in its AGOL environment as well as in its ArcGIS Server Geoportal extension (for building SDIs). ESRI also collaborates on SDI projects with the 52 North open source initiative in Germany. So I would say there is not one single standard approach, but rather many related approaches for connecting GIS users to others, for discovering and sharing geodata.
V1 Magazine: The Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) continues to operate and information about teaching GIS within Europe. Are you connecting with that organisation at the present time and how do you see ESRI working with that group into the future?
MG: As a GIS professor in Spain I was an elected member of the AGILE management council for 6 years including 2 as chairman. During that time AGILE had close cooperation with my ESRI predecessor, Dr. Mike Phoenix, with higher education manager Ann Johnson, and with ESRI Europe marketing manager Frank Holsmuller.
Now I have reversed roles and attend the AGILE annual conferences representing a sponsor and an affiliate member. AGILE and ESRI signed a memorandum of understanding many years back and this facilitates ESRI sponsoring the conferences, for example we provide 8-12 travel grants allowing young researchers to attend the conference each year. ESRI also offers AGILE member laboratories access to many of the ESRI Virtual Campus courses without charge. In exchange we learn a great deal about cutting-edge GIS research and teaching, and we get a better idea about what European educators need from us. So yes, I’d say the relationship is working quite well.
V1 Magazine: Neogeography is a hot topic these days as a democratization of geospatial activity is taking place. Where do you think we need to go in the future toward helping students to integrate neogeography together with professional GIS services?
MG: This is an interesting topic for us, because it is at the same time enormously gratifying to see people empowered to produce and analyze their own geodata, and troubling because of issues of consistency with authoritative data sources. I think that a system which would register and distinguish official sources from lay public sources would be very useful in the future.
Without this classification the geodata discovery process will end up like an ordinary Google search: 40 million partially related hits but not much internal information (metadata) to know which are appropriate to use. So there are some really nice research topics out there, in the area of mixed source information systems and mixed source decision-making. We look forward to helping researchers find useful solutions here.
V1 Magazine: Some people suggest that the concept of mapping is changing. Would you agree with this statement, and if so, how?
MG: If we widely define mapping as representing phenomena on the earth’s surface, I’d agree with that statement. We now can access millions of sensors (space, airborne, in situ) in near real-time, and we possess new tools for multidimensional representation for data analysis.
Non-specialists are now producing geodata, using common tools such as GPS receivers and cell phones, and mashing them up with high-resolution imagery provided on the web: this scenario was not within reach10 years ago. As I mentioned regarding neogeography, these new concepts do not replace traditional methods in all cases, however they are augmenting authoritative sources, and we’ll need to find mechanisms to optimally incorporate these sources into our geo-information society.
V1 Magazine: Do you think students are learning GIS better today than before? What is contributing toward that? What are the challenges for GIS learning today?
MG: Interesting question. It’s a bit like asking if kids eat better than before. The answer to both is that in theory they have many more opportunities to do better than before. But in practice many students, and their teachers, do not take full advantage of the possibilities. Earlier you asked about mobile GIS and also I mentioned server-based GIS. These are both key parts of an enterprise GIS, what is being used by major corporations and public institutions around the world, yet most students today still learn only the desktop GIS “pattern”. Also implementation environments constantly evolve.
When I studied GIS in the late 1980s we programmed in FORTRAN and C and used very basic graphics devices. Today students have a huge array of geospatial API-based resources at their fingertips, to create easy but powerful mashups, yet many are not touching these technologies in school. In sum I’d say that students are learning more than we did, yet still not fully exploiting the possibilities, as GIS evolves at a similarly rapid pace as does all technology. This is more of a challenge than a major problem.
V1 Magazine: A convergence of geospatial technologies is happening today with many applications combining technologies. It can be daunting to teach everything, yet, it seems clear that knowledge about different technologies together with GIS is needed. What can be done to accomplish this? How will we know if we are succeeding?
MG: It is true that GIS can be, and is, integrated with all sorts of other technologies. Rather than getting bogged down in the details of the technology du jour, however, educators have the option of explaining higher level ideas, such as APIs, interfaces, and standards, and then students are normally able to transfer these ideas into what the new technology offers.
Our Web GIS technology today is driven by Flex and Silverlight interface programming, which was not on the radar 3 years ago, but anyone who understands how APIs work in general can make the transition fairly rapidly. Today’s top geo-programmers can connect pretty much anything to GIS platforms, if an API is exposed and documented. Teachers who are not programming saavy can continue teaching desktop GIS, but we should be clear that this does not represent the whole story of modern enterprise GIS.
V1 Magazine: When you listen to students around the world today, are there common themes or topics that they talk about when discussing GIS? Can you explain some of them?
MG: From the student perspective the number one theme around the world is jobs. How can I get a job using GIS? What do I need to learn to get a job in GIS? Our response is that many opportunities exist, however it is often necessary that students assume two things: 1) they will need programming experience, and 2) they may need to move to where the jobs are.
This latter point is key in many regions around the world, because many young people are not accustomed to “putting the job first” and leaving family behind at least temporarily. Another hot topic with students is the relationship between geovisualization (i.e. Google Earth, ArcGIS Explorer) and GIS analysis. We support both but like to point out that we favor a progression from simple geovisualization to visual analysis, to spatial analysis, to enterprise GIS use.
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Dr. Michael Gould is Director of Education, Industry Solutions, ESRI. He did graduate studies in Geography-GIS at NCGIA – State University of New York at Buffalo. He moved to Spain in 1991, where he managed technology transfer for ESRI-Spain and then moved back to academia and taught and researched GIS-related topics for 15 years. During those years he created and worked on numerous European Union-funded research projects, participated in the INSPIRE definition process, co-organized an annual summer institute in Italy (Vespucci), served on the AGILE Council, helped create the Spain national SDI, and co-founded an international Masters degree program in GI Technologies. In January 2009 he moved to California to take over the education program at ESRI, which has a global mandate. Contact: [email protected] and Twitter: @GISeducation
