Community-Driven Projects - Geospatial Technologies in the Liberal Arts – A Pre-Planning Meeting for a Conference for Instructional Technologists

Project name: Geospatial Technologies in the Liberal Arts – A Pre-Planning Meeting for a Conference for Instructional Technologists

Project lead: Meg Stewart, GIS Instructional Technologist for Academic Computing Services, Vassar College

Key collaborators:

• Jon Caris, GIS Specialist and Coordinator of the Spatial Analysis Lab, Smith College
• Andy Anderson, Academic Technology Specialist for Mathematical and Spatial Data Analysis, Amherst College
• Sharron Macklin, GIS Instructional Technologist, Williams College
• Jennifer Lund, Faculty Liaison for Research & Instruction Technology, Wheaton College
• David Tatem, GIS Instructional Technologist, Trinity College
• Alex Chaucer, GIS Coordinator, Skidmore College

Summary: This proposal will serve to develop a planning meeting to organize an inter-institutional conference or symposium on the use of geospatial technologies on college campuses. Potential topics for the event include:

• Web-mapping applications in teaching
• Virtual globes and their impact on teaching
• Mobile mapping (GPS, PDAs, tablet PCs) in teaching
• Supporting ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server, and other web-mapping servers
• Mash-up development
• Data management issues
• Licensing issues
• GIS lab support versus GIS project support (can or should one person do both?)
• What does it mean to be a geospatial instructional technologist?
• Interdisciplinary geospatial research
• Getting faculty and students interested in using geospatial technologies
• Develop a GIS support matrix among the attendees to benefit less experienced geospatial technologists
• Open-source GIS software

Key audience: Geospatial technologists at liberal arts campuses.

Intended outcomes: All key collaborators will meet in May 2008 to plan out a very detailed agenda for events at a conference. The outcome of this meeting will be the definition of areas of importance; an evaluation of ways to support those areas; and plan a detailed agenda for a conference or symposium.

Project timeline:

May 2008 – We will convene a two-day, one night meeting with the project’s key collaborators to identify goals for a conference, identify agenda topics, identify outreach ideas to solicit other geospatial technologists for needs assessment; write a draft for a conference proposal to NITLE or another source. Following this meeting, we will continue our inter-institutional collaboration by email, a blog, phone calls or video conference.