Critical GIS .com

I'm facilitating a new take on an existing course at Ball State University this semester, developed with support from BSU's Emerging Media Initiative at the Center for Media Design .  GEOG448/548 is now ' GIS Workshop ', drawing on my previous experience supporting a similar course in the Dept. of Geography at the University of Washington, lead by Prof. Sarah Elwood (see also Elwood 2009 ).  In GIS Workshop, we'll have 20 students partner on around eight community-based projects to help the students learn collaborative- and participatory-research skills, while supporting community organizations to further their mission using spatial technologies. I'm excited about our potential community partners this semester: United Way of Delaware County , Open Door and Ball Memorial Hospital , the Indiana 500 Trail Project, and the City of Muncie Animal Shelter .  Students will have the opportunity to work on projects that focus on the social (justice) geographies of ...

I'm gearing up for next semester's Introduction to GIS, a course required of all Geography (and Social Studies Education ) majors at Ball State University .  In this course, I attempt to provide learning opportunities such that students can learn the technical skills associated with geographic information technologies, while situating these technical practices, critically . Course Description: This course will serve as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and histories that motivate geographic information systems.  This course will simultaneously expose students to key moments in the academic literature that gave rise to GIS in the discipline of geography while providing the necessary, introductory skills to operate ArcGIS.  GIS brings together traditional cartographic principles, computer-assisted analytical cartography, relational database design, and digital image processing and analysis to enable people to develop geospatial databases, analyze those databa...