Critical GIS .com

A article has just been posted to the BSU "Making an Impact" series.  Articles from this series are randomly displayed on BSU's main homepage.  The direct link is here . An excerpt: For  Matthew Wilson and his students,  geographic information systems (GIS) provide much more information than the quickest route to your driving destination—and with more lasting consequences. Wilson, a  geography professor and 2009-10 Emerging Media Faculty Fellow, worked with 20 undergraduates of various majors on numerous community projects in Muncie. The group's spring 2010 work focused on what is called "critical geographic information systems." [Click for more.]

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...