AGILE 2018 Workshop: Teaching Geospatial Technologies to All Lund, Sweden, June 12-15, 2018 |
Conference website | http://spatial.ucsb.edu/eventfiles/agile2018/workshop_site.html |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=agile2018workshop |
Position papers due | April 15, 2018 |
Notification of acceptance | April 30, 2018 |
Revisions possible until | May 15, 2018 |
Topic
Submission Guidelines
Program Committee
1 Department of Geography and Center for Spatial Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
2 Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, US
Contact
Organizers' discussion paper
Teaching the GI in GIS
A discussion paper preparing the AGILE 2018 Workshop on
Teaching Geospatial Technologies to All
Werner Kuhn1, Karen Kamp2, Sara Lafia1, Thomas Hervey1, Behzad Vahedi1, Jingyi Xiao1
Why is it so challenging to teach GIS across a broader disciplinary spectrum? Why do even geography students spend up to a whole academic year learning how to use these systems productively? How can GIS be taught more efficiently, given that such extended learning times are not practical in, say, economics or biology? And how can GIS be taught more effectively, given that GIS learners today achieve rather limited understandings of what a GIS is and does?
Our workshop will discuss a novel way to address these questions. We posit that, in order to effectively learn to use information systems, learners need to understand what the information is about. This understanding is best taught as a set of concepts underlying the information and behavior of these systems. The Learning Sciences refer to such concepts as threshold concepts, as they are often “opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something” (Meyer et al. 2006). We refer to them as core concepts of spatial information3, emphasizing that GIS users need to understand the concepts underlying spatial information, in order to effectively learn how GIS deal with it.
Information answers questions (Zins 2007). Thus, Information Science should study what questions there are and how to compute answers to them. This goal has not yet been tackled for geographic questions, nor is there a consensus on the concepts the questions are about. While the GIS&T Body of Knowledge has put forth a set of “foundational concepts”4, only some of these (e.g., the Basic Measures) could be used to structure user questions, while most are about the philosophical, mathematical, technical, and social foundations of the systems and of the science behind them.
Contrast this situation with that of statistics, which is taught across different disciplines on a well defined and universally understood conceptual basis. This basis includes such “core concepts” as probability distribution, confidence interval, and hypothesis testing. These concepts have formal definitions and any statistics software applies them in exactly the same way to problems in economics, biology, or any other field. Are there any obstacles that prevent GIS teaching to reach the same level of conceptual clarity and universality?
The idea of core concepts of spatial information has been proposed with the goal of making GIS easier to learn, understand, and apply across disciplines (Kuhn 2012). The GIS and Spatial Analysis literature contains relatively obvious candidates for such core concepts (field, object, …), which can be refined and combined. The core should be neither too small, as this would lead to overly abstract questions, nor too large, as this would not reduce complexity enough. For every core concept, there must exist data representing instances and computations to analyze them in today’s GIS. Following various simplifications of the originally proposed set, the current set of core concepts4 consists of:
- a single base concept: LOCATION;
- four content concepts: FIELD, OBJECT, NETWORK, EVENT;
- three quality concepts: GRANULARITY, ACCURACY, PROVENANCE.
The base concept combines with the content concepts to formulate “where questions” (e.g., about the location in space and time of objects or events). The content concepts describe views of geographic environments (e.g., the view of people as nodes in a social network). The quality concepts describe how “good” geographic information (e.g., how accurate the information about connections between people is). One can think of the content concepts as lenses on geographic environments and of the quality concepts as lenses on the information about these environments. For further details on the definitions of these concepts, we refer readers to our project’s webpage3.
Each core concept is being further specified by the core questions it enables GIS users to ask. For example, using the FIELD concept, one can ask “what is the value at this location?”; the OBJECT concept supports questions about properties and relations of objects in space and time, and the NETWORK concept supports questions about paths or centrality in a network (among others). All core questions need to be answerable by computations in existing GIS or other geospatial technologies. We call a computation that answers a core question a core computation. The concepts are being evaluated based on how much they reduce the number of computations that need to be taught.
The main innovation in the core concepts approach to teaching is to shift the users’ (and teachers’) mindset from “what procedure should I select next?” to “what is the question I want the system to answer?” Figure 1 illustrates this vision, with a user forming a question about the real world that is answerable through the application of core concepts and computations in a GIS (respectively Field and ValueAt in this example). At the workshop we will discuss this idea in more detail and test specific concept choices and questions regarding their ease of learning and understanding. Workshop participants are invited to challenge any or all concepts in this discussion paper, to suggest alternative sets, and/or to contribute to the testing of concepts and questions through use cases.
Figure 1Figure 1. A user answering a spatial question about the real world, using a GIS query language structured around core concept “lenses”.
Among the many open issues to address, completeness is key: how can one show that a proposed set of core concepts is complete, in the sense of covering all content questions? We have been translating documented practical GIS analyses into core concept questions and computations. We are also currently mining online bulletin board databases for questions that users are trying to answer with GIS. What are other approaches to test for completeness?
An issue that we have not yet addressed is the learnability of the concepts and of query and interaction languages based on them. Our unproven assumption is that any domain specialist (such as a biologist or economist) can express their domain questions in terms of the core concepts of spatial information.
We look forward to discussing the ideas set forth in this discussion paper in greater detail at the AGILE 2018 workshop. Generating feedback from the greater GI community will advance interdisciplinary thinking on GIS education, which can be put into practice in the classroom.
References
Kuhn, Werner (2012). Core concepts of spatial information for transdisciplinary research. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 26, 2267–2276. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2012.722637
Meyer, Jan H.F. and Ray Land (2006). Overcoming Barriers to Student Learning. London: Routledge.
Zins, Chaim (2007). Conceptual Approaches for Defining Data, Information, and Knowledge. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(4), 479–493. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20508
3 See http://spatial.ucsb.edu/core-concepts-of-spatial-information/ and the references given there.
4 http://gistbok.ucgis.org/knowledge-area/foundational-concepts