From: Hugh Blackmer [mailto:BlackmerH@wlu.edu] Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 1:03 PM To: bonefas@colleges.edu; balexan@middlebury.edu; yu@middlebury.edu; sperry@mtholyoke.edu Cc: Laurent Boetsch Subject: RE: NITLE GIS Coordinator With ritual apologies for the length of what follows... -- Hugh Suzanne sent the 5-prong outline of the draft NITLE GIS support program (in the context of preparing for the discussions at the forthcoming GIS Symposium at Southwestern) >>1. Continuing to educate faculty, librarians, IT staff, administrators about >>GIS fundamentals and applications (e.g., the GIS Institute); >>2. Training GIS trainers to build up a cadre of experts, some of whom might >>serve as circuit riders; >>3. Coordination of best practices on the campuses; >>4. Building infrastructure: sharing datasets and projects, communication >>among GIS users; >>5. Hiring a staff person at NITLE to coordinate these efforts and provide >>some level of support. and suggested that comments would be welcome. I read through the five with growing excitement, and ever since have been thinking of more reasons why I'm the perfect person to undertake coordination of NITLE's GIS initiative. Here's a summary of my background and interests, which probably none of you know all the elements of: a narrative of how every step in the last 35 years seems to have prepared me for exactly this... My involvement with spatial information and perspectives dates back more than 35 years, to Peace Corps service in Sarawak, and continues through late-60s graduate training in anthropology and regional systems at Stanford. My dissertation research in Nova Scotia (Agricultural Transformation in a Regional System) relied heavily on maps and analysis of spatial data, before GIS was available. Shortly after I started teaching at Acadia I created a course in Human Geography which I taught for 15 years. I did research in surname distributions and demography in Nova Scotia, and during a 1979-1980 sabbatical at Stanford I did analysis of Hungarian census data using SYMAP, an early line-printer mapping program. Through the early 1980s I taught population analysis at Acadia, and in 1984 bought my first microcomputer expressly to allow me to make maps to support demography and human geography teaching. In 1986-1987 I spent a sabbatical year teaching World History and Human Geography at Northfield Mount Hermon School, and thus had an opportunity to work with spatial information at the secondary level. In 1991 I left Acadia and returned to school to become a librarian, and from 1992 to the present I have been at Washington & Lee, first as Reference Librarian, and since 1996 as Science Librarian. Through the mid-1990s I was the main instigator of Web development at W&L, and I have continued to explore the frontiers of the Web as an environment for teaching and learning, concentrating in recent years on digital library developments. I became involved with ACS initially via W&L's then-new Environmental Studies program, just at the point where GIS was becoming practical as a desktop technology (with ESRI's ArcView 3.0), and I took advantage of an ESRI offer to libraries to get an ArcView license, taught myself the basics, and started encouraging professors in various departments to recognize the potentials of GIS as a support technology in their teaching. I was a participant in the first ACS-sponsored GIS Boot Camp, have been to several ESRI training sessions, and have continued to develop local support materials and to spawn proposals for GIS and GIS-related development, both for W&L and in the broader arena of ACS. I also became involved in the ACS Information Fluency initiatives, and have written and spoken in ACS contexts on the importance of fluency with spatial data. In the past few years I have traveled to some 30 campuses, in California, the South, and in New England, and in many cases the primary purpose was to observe and discuss GIS development (often in the context of international programs and other liberal arts uses of GIS). I have participated in a number of GIS conferences and spoken on GIS at IT and Information Fluency conferences. I have been a consultant on GIS development (for University of Richmond, with ACS funding) and continue in that capacity with the FIPSE/CIPES Brazil consortium in which W&L is a participant. I have continued to experiment with the means to expand GIS as a tool for teaching and learning across the curriculum, specifically in courses I have taught at W&L (Anthropology of East Asia and Human Geography), in developing applications of ESRI's ArcIMS, and in building the connections between GIS and digital libraries. W&L-sponsored summer projects in 2002 and 2003 address these issues directly, and I am now working on a proposal to the NSF NSDL, tying together spatial information, digital libraries, and the emergent semantic Web. My Fall 2002 sabbatical took me to more than a dozen liberal arts college campuses in New England, and provided opportunity to discuss a broad range of teaching and learning issues with librarians, administrators, IT and computing satff, and professors. I am comfortable in that role, and know enough of the general and specific problems of each constituency to listen effectively and be able to help people make connections they hadn't seen for themselves. Fundamentally, I am enormously interested in the potentials of GIS as a teaching and learning tool, as a linchpin for the evolution of interdisciplinary study. For most liberal arts colleges this is not primarily a problem of TEACHING GIS as a technical skill, but rather of developing infrastructure to support effective use of spatial data wherever they may be found across the disciplinary spectrum. The overall problem is to change the accessibility of spatial data, the pedagogical salience of spatial information, and the infrastructure for management of spatial knowledge. Some aspects of this development of GIS are surely technical and require trained specialists, or specific technical training and institutional arrangements, but many liberal arts colleges will not make the necessary commitments of support staff and budget until demand rises and the advantages and necessities outweigh the risks of mistaken investments. Most institutions are working in something like a vacuum -- one or two faculty committed to GIS, little support, no integration... consortial activities can help with some of that. My professional orientation as a librarian is to information management and the empowerment of information seekers and users. As an anthropologist I am a lifelong student of ways in which people communicate and manage the world around them. As an educator I am an enthusiast for serendipity and lifelong learning without boundaries. An array of materials I have written about GIS is available at http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/sabb/omniumgis.html A December 2002 summary of personal directions is available at http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/sabb/to2003.html The proposal for Summer 2003 is available at http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/relee/cwandds.html A current version of the Digital South prospectus is available at http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/acsgis/digisouth.html