The Wikification of GIS Education?

In December 2014 Anita Graser published the second edition of Learning QGIS, which provides a great introduction to the basics of the QGIS platform. Last month I had the pleasure of co-authoring Mastering QGIS with Kurt Menke (GISP), Dr. Richard Smith Jr., (GISP), and Dr. Luigi Pirelli. With all that alphabet soup it's a wonder we had any letters left to write the book... It was an outgrowth of curriculum from the GeoAcademy spearheaded by Dr. Philip Davis at Del Mar College and I think emblematic of our shared interests in furthering access to quality educational materials in the FOSS4G arena.

In 2008 Daniel Sui published one of my favorite academic articles titled "The Wikification of GIS and its Consequences: Or Angelina Jolie’s New Tattoo and the Future of GIS." Depending on who you talk in the GIS community the concept - and inherent value - of Goodchild's notion of volunteered geographic information (VGI) varies. And folks get even more feisty about the term neogeography - although some sectors are bit more measured in their response to this term. And it was a comment by Bill Morris about OpenStreetMap that spurred me on to summarize my reflections during the process of contributing to the book. 

“... in many ways the power of nakedly-open crowdsourcing surpasses Google’s proprietary muscle...”

— Bill Morris

Aside from the disturbing image of OSM contributors digitizing edits in their birthday suits, I think this sentiment reflects a similar shared value among the contributors to this project; putting as many open-source resources in the hands of novices and experts alike. Sui's states:

“The core of this new trend lies in web-based mass collaboration, which relies on free individual agents to come together and cooperate to improve a given operation or solve a problem.”

— SUI (2008)

                       Source: http://j-vh.me/1GsBXB4

Using a conventional definition for GIS, he identified four areas that would likely be impacted by the rise in wikification: hardware, software, data, and people. Given his connection with academia, it's surprising there wasn't any reference to the impact of this 'web-based mass collaboration' on education. 

But his ideas about the crowd-sourcing effect on 'doing' GIS are transferable to teaching and/or learning GIScience. I think the more common wiki-based model is excellent for documentation purposes and short tutorials but often those resources are best-suited for folks who already have a background in the fundamentals not novices (I'm not going to make the unnecessary and condescending differentiation between 'experts' or 'non-geographers' versus 'amateurs'). It is easier if you have some experience with GIS to hunt and peck through YouTube videos or isolated online wiki tutorials, to figure out how to create convex hulls or perform a least-cost path analysis in either an updated version of your go-to platform or when exploring - possibly migrating to - a new GIS platform.

So educational endeavors like the GeoAcademy the CartoDB Map Academy and even more traditional wiki-based 'getting started' resources supporting Fulcrum, Mapbox Studio, and PostGIS are offering more guidance than just what buttons to click. What's fantastic about this book project is that other than Phil Davis, I haven't met any of my collaborators in person. We followed Sui's idea of 'web-based collaboration' and developed, reviewed, and revised  a variety of educational resources to help novices through GISPs engage with FOSS4G options. What's even better is these efforts are spawning folks armed with new resources who are in turn engaging in their own educational activities. This is the cycle we want. I want to yet again re-purpose Sui's claim that "we are witnessing the emergence of a new geography without geographers" and argue we are experiencing a new education model without educators.

That being said, there's something very satisfying working through a book to ensure a more thorough understanding of a particular software or database format. I own the first edition of PostGIS in Action (and will order the 2nd shortly), An Introduction to R for Spatial Analysis & Mapping, Open-Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach, and The Geospatial Desktop. I haven't had time to tackle the R book yet but even with the University of Google at my fingertips, find myself reaching for bookmarked pages. In the same way that engaging in GIS often involves a quiver of tools, teaching and learning GIS should include a diversified portfolio.

I wanted to respond to Adena’s question below with more than just a comment to make sure it was included in the original post because she raises an important point of clarification: “Do you simply mean people are teaching themselves via tutorials and books like the one you’ve just published? Or something else?”
 

UPDATE: 4.27.2015

I was definitely imagining more than just people teaching themselves and not just following an xMOOC ‘sage-on-the-stage’ transfer model. I see a lot of instances where folks who perhaps don’t identify as educators take the time to share their expertise and experience - historically though platforms like ESRI’s forums (what would I have done without William Huber in grad school?!), to StackExchange, to even less structured tutelage through Twitter.

And that is where i see Sui’s concept of wikification crossover to education; folks with widely varied backgrounds (including the ‘experts’) are learning from one another. I don’t think the success of Mapbox and CartoDB occurred because geographers, GIS Analysts, GIS Admins, geospatial ninjas, (or whatever label you want to use) embraced those platforms and pushed the creativity envelope. More often than not when I’m looking for insight into why my CartoCSS isn’t cooperating or my PostGIS SQL query is bonking in CartoDB, I find help - and learn - from journalists, activists, etc.

Bill describes many of the criticisms we commonly hear about crowdsourcing, especially about QA but as I type this response, hundreds? of non-expert volunteers are building a map to inform disasters response to the Nepal earthquake. We often hear a similar criticism of MOOCs (cMOOC or xMOOC alike) about quality control and the risks of letting learners 'cherry pick' their educational pathway. Fortunately higher education can only control the crediting process, not the learning process and students of GIS have an increasingly diverse options for how they 'learn' versus how they are credentialed. Job announcements like this will continue to be more frequent even though the number of traditional GIS programs 'teaching' CartoDB, Fusion Table & RStudio is probably fairly limited (no, I didn't do a comprehensive study, just my experience interacting with folks at regional and national GIS conferences - many programs are dominated by ESRI). So this is what I meant by a new education model without the educators, because being an expert in GIS does not equate to an expert in PostGIS or CartoCSS. 

An Atlas of Remote Tweets and The Popularity of Null Island

                    Source: http://j-vh.me/1HMmSGi

When I see the word 'atlas' it often conjures up memories of a tattered monstrosity my father saved from the local transfer station. Although its glossy dust cover had long been lost, the embossed majuscule on the front book board still held stubborn scales of faux-gold gilding. It covered the entire coffee table when opened and was a frequent co-pilot in helping make better sense of books like Treasure Island, Around the World in 80 Days and Tom Sawyer. That atlas represented - and in many ways, still does - an opportunity to explore unfamiliar territory, to refine spatial relationships and more often than not, provide an outlet for escape and imagination to run wild. 

This was no less true when I purchased Judith Schalansky's 'Atlas of Remote Islands' published in 2010. I enjoyed both the simplicity in her cartographic representation and the accompanying text for each island, which provided an historical and social context. The emphasis on remote islands ensured that readers would be lured to far away lands while learning about how those places are still related to modern geopolitical realities. Shalansky clearly recognizes her bias in selecting locations by asking "Whether an island such as Easter Island can be considered remote is simply a matter of perspective." 

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“Whether an island such as Easter Island (pg.100) can be considered remote is simply a matter of perspective.”

One Thousand Remote Tweets 

I went back to Schalanksy's atlas after Eric Fisher at Mapbox released an interactive map depicting 6 billion tweets. Eric noticed that tweets were missing along the Prime Meridian, which resulted in anomalous banding. This made we wonder if the opposite were true - could we see individual tweets where we wouldn't expect them? So with the atlas as my guide I explored Fisher's map to see just how remote Shalanksy's selections were. 

First I created a table containing coordinates for all 50 islands - and for the geohipster crowd I added in Null Island, just because. I took the link to Eric's map and concatenated his link with each set of coordinates in CartoDB and then visited each island. My initial thought was to query the databases by a geographic bounding box using the q=&geocode=0,0,10km parameter but there isn't a publicly available database to query. Fortunately after I started exploring I realized there were so few I could literally just count them on-screen. I tallied the approximate number of tweets (approximate because yes I probably missed some) and added them to the table. The resulting CartoDB map depicts the location of Sholanksy's islands with an info window that reports out the total number of tweets, provides a link back to Fisher's map and a Wikipedia link for further exploration.

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I tallied a total of 1,005 tweets from the 50 islands that Shalansky included in her atlas but only 16 of the islands reported any Twitter activity. The majority of the tweets were - not surprisingly - from Easter Island (49%) followed by Robinson Crusoe (15%) and Diego and Christmas Islands (5%). Although a third of the islands have internet access, after re-exploring these islands through the lens of Eric's map it is probably unlikely we will see that number dramatically increase. There are enough localities like Southern Thule or Rudolf & Franklin Islands that will remain offline until we start seeing Twitter-supported satellite phones (or maybe that is already a thing).

                     Source: http://j-vh.me/1xVAyPn

Null Island, Where Art Thou?

It was also interesting to see how many people had 'visited' Null Island. While it is likely impossible to decipher whether this was intentional geolocation anarchy, geohipsters at play or geocoders gone wrong, given that Null Island doesn't exist it tallied an impressive 10% of the total Twitter activity. And this is where the realities of the traditional atlas intersect the realities of spatial data collection. 

I wouldn't have found Null Island in my childhood atlas (or using Google Earth today) but it IS a spatial entity - albeit two simple coordinates that could have just as easily been named 'Origin Island.' So while the framing of Fisher's map as the most detailed ever resulted in the folks at Floating Sheep to state it 'rubs us the wrong way' it does provide some interesting details about the intersection between access to and adoption of the Twitter platform and how that data is aggregated and interpreted by various geolocation services (something they also elaborate on).

Null Island is a spatial reality that became a visual reality - and geohipster totem - after accepting that the multiple reports of a position of [0,0] represented 'something' (although initially just a geogoder failsafe).  Visualizations of global flight patterns or wind dynamics also represent these spatial realities we can't 'visit' or see without the visualization process. And without Eric's visualization - most detailed or not - it wouldn't be as easy to decipher something like the distribution of the most remote tweets. And though the medium of the atlas by which we explore the world may be changing, Shalanky's caution about what we consider remote is still warranted.

Although Shalanky's subtitle is "Fifty Islands I have Never Set Foot On And Never Will" I feel fortunate to have visited at least one of them - Deception Island. I was a participant on the Geological Society of America's 125th Anniversary field trip to explore the geology and ecology of South Georgia Island, South Scotia Arc and Antarctic Pennisula through Cheesmans' Ecology Safaris. For a more in-depth geologic exploration of the island you should read Anne Jefferson's and Chris Rowan's recent blog entry on Highly Allochthonous. However I can safely add Null Island to the list of islands that I will never set foot on...

Van Hoesen and Edwards on Deception Island

Photo credit: Heather McFarland