from Mike Kirby:

We have an interdisplinary group of faculty that offers a one hour course on GIS. We have used ESRI text materials in the past and found that did not suit our needs. We are creating a PowerPoint based digital textbook which is focused on using the Rhodes GIS Lab and newtwork.

At the same time we are creating a digital library of information about the Memphis area. To this point, we we been organizing census data and Memphis real estate parcels. Our natural scientists want to develop air photos as soon as they are available from the state and I am interested in working with crime data available. In addition, we have students working under a grant at several neighborhood organizations and they are preparing problem properties inventories.

We also have a GIS lab with 7 computers, a large printer for posters, and a work study student. It is available for student projects and we will be teaching our class in this room next semester.

We have started a second one hour class which allows students to work on projects. The projects were a study of urban tree cover by SES, environmental justice related to a superfund site, and voter turnout by races and economics. We are especially interested in enviornmental justice and hope to collaborate with Andrea Simpson at the Uni of Washington to develop maps of various sites in Memphis.

I teach a senior seminar in urban studies and a number of those students have incorporated GIS into their projects. As an example, one student was able to map the location of pregnancy prevention programs on an overlay of rates of teen pregnancy by census tract (Health Department Data). Her finding was important: the programs were clustered in one area and were not located in the neighborhoods with high rates of teen pregnancy.

Our GIS group is also conducting a workshop for faculty and staff this fall. They are being asked to identify a project before joining the workshop. It is hoped that this will provide them with a greater motivation to learn GIS. This is also an important public relations tool as we try to further educate our campus the value of GIS.