Thoughts on Expeditions following CAGTI16

Expeditions as Purple Cow: Expeditions is Google’s project where you use a viewer (such as cardboard) with your smart phone.  The system gives you 360 vision with wrap around visuals so you can turn and look at things above, below, left and right.  There was a great sense of excitement around this project at CAGTI16 with teachers interested in how they could use it and I heard very positive reports from teachers who had been involved in the pilot scheme.  Google have been very active capturing imagery from polar regions, coral reefs even other planets.  I think its certainly something to grab attention, it would be excellent at a Geography University open day or outreach event to pull people in.  It reminds me of Seth Godwin’s Purple Cow concept.  Well done Google, its worth paying attention to as a project just for this.

Hardware: Currently to use expeditions you need an Android tablet for the teacher and Android smart phones and cardboards for the students.  A comment I heard a lot of was 'when will it be available for iOS?' only being on Android is obviously a limiting factor because I doubt many schools are going to shell out on buying multiple Android phones just to use expeditions.  I imagine this will come soon.

Cooks Tour:  However I think educationally it needs more development.  The expeditions I saw at CAGTI expeditions are a ‘Cooks’ tour (see this paper ) - students get a wonderful immersive experience (hear the squeals in this video)

but they are being essentially passive because the lesson is structured around the teacher guiding students' view to interesting points and talking to the students.  The students themselves are not doing very much.  A Cook's tour approach can be a good introductory exercise at the start of a field trip (again, see the above paper), but to learn properly students need to do more, things like:

• Collecting and analyzing data, 
• Coming up with and testing hypotheses 
• or even making their own expeditions

Early days: But its early days in the world of Google expeditions.  I discussed all of this with Jamie of Digital Explorer at CATGI16 who has been involved in recording expeditions for Google and persuaded me there was more to it than I believed.  He pointed out that his recent abseil into a glacier 360 degree video

uses a neat little trick:  The film has been annotated with bits of text that students have to hunt for, it becomes a challenge to see if they can ‘collect’ all the text before the video ends.  This is getting the student to be more active than the Cook's tour which is good.  We both agreed that a lovely educational activity would be to get students to create their own expeditions.

History of VR in virtual field trips: Expeditions are getting attention elsewhere, Audrey Watters has an interesting post about the history of VR relevant to expeditions - she points out that people have been claiming that technology can replace the field trip since the 1920s with technology like the stereoscope.  However, Martin Weller's post about Pokamon Go  is a good counter point.  He makes the argument that just because you've seen an educational technology appear before is not an excuse to refuse to engage when it resurfaces elsewhere and gets a lot of attention.

So I look forward to seeing how expeditions develop and I'm aching to get my hands on an 'ExpeditionsBuilder': GoogleEarthTourBuilder for expeditions that I can get students to use.

Edit 11.07pm:  Noodling around some more, I find much more detailed advice from Google on how to integrate expeditions into lessons:

"To get the most of an Expedition, it should be preceded and followed with connected learning activities. The Expedition itself is one powerful piece of the instructional puzzle. So as you’re planning for the experience consider the following learning activities for before, during and after the Expedition."

so accusing them of pushing Cook's tours is a bit unfair, they're advising teachers to use expeditions mixed in with activities as but why have they hidden it away off on another 'semi Google' (edutrainingcenter.withgoogle.com) website? 

Thoughts after CAGTI16 (Geo Teachers Institute) part 1

So this time last week I was helping lead the Californian Geo Teachers Institute.  John Bailey had filled his hall to capacity with some amazing teachers (example blog post), educational technologists, librarians...  I thought I'd jot down some thoughts.

Maps are for everyone:  Firstly, its interesting to note the difference between Geo in the USA and in the UK - here, geography is a core school subject so if you put on a GTI you'd mostly attract geography teachers.  STEM teachers would mostly stay away - I predict they'd say 'maps are for geographers'.  In the States, geography is far less strong at school level so a range of teachers from many subjects showed up to learn what Google Geo tools could do for them.  Geo tools are now so easy to use that they can be used across subjects and it would be good if this could done in the UK too.

What Google Earth is for:



So true...

Map Design:  I did a session on map design for teachers.  As part of this I produced a worksheet that takes you through creating some of the basics of good map design via Google My Maps.   Important design points worth making about my maps:

• Google My Maps now allows you to select the base map.  Subtle and pale is good as the worksheet example illustrates.
• I find My Maps to be simpler to use than ArcGIS online
• You can choose a rainbow range to style your data.  I can't think of a reason you would EVER want to use this and, each time you do, a puppy dies - Kenneth Field rants about rainbow maps as well.  

I'll save discussion of tour tips, my thoughts on expeditions and the future of Google's Geo tools for a second post.

Ten new Google Geo tools for the Classroom

Googler John Bailey (Program Manger for Geo Edu) recently did a talk for Google Education on Air on Google's Geo tools:



Being able to tilt the view over a crater in the Moon bought to mind a teacher quote in one of my sessions last year

"you just made me fall in love with Geography again"

I had to tear myself away...  Anyway, I thought I'd point you at my favorite ten new* examples of tools/content that John showcased:

1] 7:10m Distance: measure distance tool in Google Maps

2] 7:40m Area: that it also measures area in Google Maps

3] 8:27m Carousel: geolocated photos in Google Maps taken by users uploaded to google by users

4] 9:20m Tilt: how to tilt to see 3D Google Earth like pictures using tilt button bottom left Pisa location used: 10:05 Globe View: zoom out to globe view which will rotate which click and dragged

6] 11:08m Mars and Moon View: zoom out to full extent and now you rotate around the globe when clicking and dragging and can access mars and the moon.

7] 11:19m Two Map system: compare and contrast maps using geteach.com 

8] 38:25m Streetview historical imagery: see street view before and after the Japanese tsunami on Google Maps (location near the site with historic street view available).

9] 43:42m Tour Builder

10] 47:28m Time Lapse using Google Earth Engine. 48:25 Great moment showing Peruvian river meander dynamically.

*Actually some of them are new-ish rather than new

NACIS (carto) Conference thoughts

So I'm just back from NACIS (North American Cartographic Information Society) in Pittsburg, USA.  I was a newbie NACISer, I'd travelled over there as I'd heard that it was a good combination of educators, academics, techies, open source enthusiasts and working cartographers.

Tools:
My everyday tools are adobe firefox and Google Earth (you probably gathered that from the blog title) as I'm primarily concerned with educating 'sub-GIS' audiences like school students*, so it was interesting to find out what everyone else was using and finding which new tools were getting attention.  Of the new tools:
- Mapbox Studio
- cartoDB
were what I noticed everyone discussing, both are cloud services based on cartoCSS - a development of CSS, the code that controls look of web pages.  The difference between then (I was told) was that Mapbox Studio is better suited to finely tuning the look of a base map whereas cartoDB is better at styling data layers.  I did a Mapbox workshop whilst at the conference, it isn't that intuitive but then I don't think either of the tools are good 'first map' starters, they are more tools for those with mapping expertise.

Other tools that are well used are ArcGIS, adobe photoshop and adobe illustrator.  People's workflows generally consisted of processing in Arc then transferring to photoshop/illustrator to fine tune the look.  Very little mention of any of the Google suite of tools.  

Education:
There was a really good panel on education, convened by Matt Wilson.   The format was designed to keep people talking too much, I'd term it 'meatspace twitter'.  It largely worked producing some memorable nuggets:

• Map selfie students produce a map based on their lives as an educational exercise
• Map global warming or perish : on the future of mapping
• Maps and mapping is always tied up with the wielding of power
• Beer fart maps the fashion for 'link bait maps' that get attention but have little value
• Candy machine gun teaching teaching what students want, in a way they want rather than teaching with academic value

These are what I scribbled down in my notes, more detailed notes 

The discussion also ranged onto the 'future of maps', with discussion moving to privacy concerns about the data being gathered from mobile devices for maps and critical comments about the use of big data.  This paralelled discussions going on in educational technology that I've been following mostly to do with Learning Analytics, interesting that its affecting the two parts of my career in similar ways.

Tours:

My paper (notes to come) was on the use of map tours (Google Earth tours but for any platform) as an assignment in my undergraduate course fitting in with a session on the use of narrative cartography.   The highlight of the session  for me was Robert Pietrusko's paper on a similar assignment:  

Sumptuous design work on #maptours by Robert Pietrusko's students'. eg http://t.co/T1YxmyAFq8 Course: http://t.co/zYNoOX9kVK #NACIS2014
— Trevesy (@Trevesy) October 9, 2014

He has design students already skilled at layout and the use of design tools so they produce some fantastic looking tours compared to my students.  I'll be using his student's work to show just what is possible with map tours.

Google/ESRI/Apple

These three are the big companies with serious interests and investments in maps and mapping so it was interesting to see what presence they had.  ESRI had at least 4 delegates at the conference and I heard praise for them from others for integrating with the NACIS community and reacting well to criticism of their products both now and in the past.  Google, lead players in maps as they are, had no presence at the conference, given the effort they've put into producing tools I think it would be sensible for them to be there to promote their stuff and get informed feedback.  I think Apple were there but I didn't come across them, they certainly weren't as visible as ESRI.

Notable People
I was pleased I got to network with Alan McConchie from Stamen, I've been using their maps to illustrate points of good design to my students so it was very useful to hear where he thought things were going in cartography. I also hung out with Anthony Robinson from Penn State who teaches a terrific MOOC on GIS, he has a lot of expertise in education, maps and distance learning so I picked up a lot from him.

Thanks to all the organizers, there's a lot of work done behind the scenes and it made for a great conference.   I never did get to chat to him but Lou Cross clearly has been a great influence on the conference, he has a great sense of humour and is keen to make everyone feel included so last word should go to him:

To #NACIS2014 safe travels. Seek out a new person next year, and make them part of the family. Map on! pic.twitter.com/WFjSjsSox8
— LouCross (@LouCross) October 11, 2014

*as in, not so advanced that they need to use desktop GIS such as Arc desktop.

Are men better than women at navigating in virtual 3D spaces?

I have a PhD student Craig Allison who is looking at spatial understanding in maps and related 3D spaces.   He entered and won the faculty round of three minute thesis', a public speaking competition to see who could present their work best in three minutes with one powerpoint slide.  This is his talk at the final of the event competing with other PhD students from around the University.

Navigation in 3D Spaces: He covers the importance of designing 3D spaces well to assist users navigate them and the gender differences that he has found in his experiments.  It's especially relevant to anyone designing virtual field trips using tools such as streetview and/or Sketchup.





Sad that I couldn't make the talk to support him, great work Craig!

I've marked the location of the Psychology building he discusses if anyone wants a look.

'Death to Powerpoint' workshop 18/12/13

For anyone in UK HE, I am running a workshop on this topic sponsored by the HEA.  It's not on their website yet, this is for your diaries.

Date:  18/12/13
Title:  Death to Powerpoint:  Effective student and tutor Presentations using Prezi, Graphs and Screencasts.
Outline:  Tools such as Prezi, and software for creating tutorial videos (such as maths tutorials by KhanAcademy.org) have great potential to enhance tutors’ presentations and student assignments. This workshop will teach delegates the basics of using free software tools and the design skills necessary to use them effectively.

More details and sign up details to follow

Cloud Mapping Event: 3 Teaching Ideas

On 24th of May I was one of the organisers of a ‘Cloud Mapping’ event with Google and the HEA. Firstly, big thanks to Google for hosting the event, the venue and food were great (mmm, sushi lunch!). There was a good show of people and overall I think it went well with a lot of enthusiasm for a follow up meeting in a years time. I’ll report on the day as a whole when Helen Walkington (HEA) and I have had chance to discuss the official feedback. 

I presented 3 teaching ideas using Google Earth and I collected feedback via ‘post-it note’ voting so I thought in this post I’d outline the ideas below and collate the feedback.

Collating Spatial Data (AKA Crowd Sourced Maps) 

the grid around Mt St Helens 

 (more detail on the idea here): I reported on how I’d set up a grid in Google Earth around Mt St Helens, a volcano that erupted in 1980 and knocked down lots of trees in the vicinty. I gave students a grid square each to map and collated their edits. When I’d collated the results I presented the completed map back to students explaining what you could now see that wasn’t apparent earlier.

Delegate Votes: 23 (the winner!)
Delegate comments: I asked for ideas about how to reuse the technique, I also got back more general comments about the skills used. In terms of applications of the technique:

• Fieldwork Prep: 3 comments about how this would be great to use as preparation for a fieldwork trip 
• Temporal data: 2 comments that it could be used to map temporal data such as floods 
• Qualitative data: 2 comments that it could be used to map qualitative data (e.g. mapping rock outcrops in the desert visually followed by the official geological map) 

In terms of skills development some interesting comments:

• Mapping Criteria: Give students criteria on how to map and then review if they have achieved this as a group 
• Acquisition is the KEY skill of GIS. 

Explaining Scale via Powers of 10 Squares

The powers of 10 squares in action, 1km and 100m square lengths shown. 

(the tool in more detail) I outlined that understanding scale was a key skill of mapping and GEES (Geog, Earth and Env Sciences) teaching. I presented my recent joint development of powers of 10 squares as a technique for getting students to understand the size of the landscape they are viewing in Google Earth. I explained that I’d been looking at a study site for months and it wasn’t until I prepared the materials for my presentation that I realised how huge it was!

Delegate Votes: 8
Delegate Comments:

• Good for introductory teaching 
• Important for looking at landuse change 
• Liked the fact you could compare a landscape to a house size. 

Space Stories

A screen shot from one of my students presentations showing just how much we all use air travel

(how to record the video) I described an assessment I have just used with my undergraduate map design students where I got them to produce a 4 minute talk recorded as a video based in Google Earth. They produced materials in Google Earth and then videoed themselves giving the talk. After problems with them not really understanding what made a good map presentation last year I limited them to certain topics connected with climate change.

Delegate Votes: 17 
Delegate Comments: Again, these split into suggested applications and skills.  Applications:

• Landscape Change: 2 comments that it was good for showing landscapes over time i.e. archaeology, history, glacier retreat due to climate change 
• River Module: A delegate said s/he was going to introduce it in his/her river module 
• Weather Forecast: would be good to get students to give a weather forecast 

Skills:

• Not PowerPoint: 3 comments that it was good to get students to present using something else than powerpoint. 
• Before Fieldwork: It would be good as preparation prior to a field trip.

HEA/Google 'Maps in the Cloud' event

I'm part of the team organizing this event:

NEW! 24 May 2013 - Maps in the Cloud workshop, Google offices, London.

£50 per delegate

A workshop on using free (or really cheap) software for mapping for those involved in GEES teaching. Come to this workshop to find out about the latest technology available to allow you to map using data from the cloud. Presentations will include the latest Google Earth Engine and Maps Engine software, Edina’s new app ‘Fieldtrip GB’, Google tools for Citizen Science, Google Earth’s Time animation, Scale and Tour features as well as the opportunity to become part of an ongoing community.

Bookings will open soon, please register your interest by emailing: Helen.walkington@heacademy.ac.uk

I'll be talking about Google Earth tours.

Teacher Training Events and Tours Problems [GE v6.1}

This blog has been very quiet as I've been concentrating on teaching this winter and spring.  I'm finding some more time though so keep watching.

Geo Teacher's Institutes:  I'll be involved in the London presentation of these face to face training days, not sure which of the 2 days yet.  For the moment, save the date.


Education on Air Conference:  I'm also presenting a session for this conference via Google+ hangouts on Google Earth Tours for education.  If you want to be part of the 8 invitees follow the link and impress me with a comment that makes me think you'll be useful/interesting in the session.  Don't worry though, if you can't be part of the session actively, you can watch as a webcast or catch up with the whole session on YouTube later.

Tours Problems, Google Earth v6.1 and v6.2:  I have a class of students producing tours for meand I'm building some tours myself.  I've noticed a number of problems recording tours in the new versions of GE namely:

• Layers not appearing within tours as they should
• Audio not syncing with elements turning on and off (bug tracker report)
• Audio not replaying (especially when recording on macs and moving to PCs or visa versa)

so if you're thinking of producing complex tours at the moment, be wary (I think you maybe OK with simple tours).  You may want to wait for Google to fix these issues.

Flood London's Bankers!

I was recently asked to produce something to showcase new big screened computers in a new media room at Southampton University.  VIPs watching including our Vice-Chancellor.  I revisited an earlier idea where I flooded London, I rewrote the code using an animated update to produce a tour which will raise the water from 20 to 200m in 3 seconds.

Open this

Flood London.kmz

and turn off all layers in the layers panel except 3D buildings which should be on.

1] Double click 'Space to High' and you will be flown from space to a high view over london.
2] Double click 'Flood London' and sea level rises from 20m above current to 200m
3] Double click 'High to City' to be flown to the city of London.  You should see the skyscrapers of London's banking center already partly flooded.  Turn off the tour (black cross in tour control, bottom left of main screen) then
4] Double click 'Flood London' and the sea rises again.  Experiment with controlling the tour controller bottom right to see you can become a virtual Canute. 

It shows two nice teaching facilities:

• Animated update which will require you to get into KML if you want to do it for yourself in another location.  
• A set of tours:  By combining tours which fly the user around with one which controls the flood level we can build some interesting visualisations.

Google IO talk on Maps Usability

I was interested to watch the Google IO video above of Designing Maps Applications for Usability on Mobile and Desktop by Luke Mahé, Jez Fletcher, Justin O'Beirne as a while back I had a go at presenting my own map design ideas to developers. The other week I said I've stopped critically reviewing other people's projects but when Googlers stand up and present about map usability I think some critical discussion is deserved. Here's some thoughts in note form:

Stuff I liked:

• Mobile vs Desktop: I don't do much with mobile maps so it was interesting to have the differences between mobile and desktop discussed, I liked the idea that users on the desktop are 'planning'
  
• Rendering Speed: Fast response is an integral part of the UX (user experience), I haven't really thought about this before except for very slow rendering maps so the discussion at 21 mins in was useful.
• Emphasising: Justin's points about how to use the GMaps API to demphasise uneeded map elements (30mins onwards) were smart and well made. I liked his examples of both good and bad maps.
• White roads for routes I especially liked Justin's point about making roads white for route focussed maps (36 mins), he's right that it emphasises the route well.

Stuff I didn't:

• Placemark Clustering: At 14.29 Jez and Luke promote the idea that a placemark clustering visualisation is better than not clustering points. Strictly they're correct as it is a way of tackling the 'too many points' problem but I think placemark clustering is flawed and not as good as other techniques. It should be said that this is my opinion - it may be that the clustering they show is actually a very effective technique, the proof would be a user test (which I will have a student looking at later this summer). My point is you shouldn't promote an unproven technique.
• Walk the Walk: It would have been good if the heat map Jez and Luke presented at at 14.58 had heeded Justin's smart advice and faded the background so the mix of colors stood out. To be fair, I guess it wouldn't have been straight forward to do this as it was a fusion tables map visualisation rather than a straight instance of the maps API but it can't be that difficult.
  
• Missing Topics: So they covered a lot of topics but there's a of UX things that IMHO are relevant to developers that I discussed but which failed to get a mention: Layer control, Icon design (although they did point out that you should choose useful icons rather than just use the default markers), use of color, balloon design, map copy/micro-copy and introductions.

Google IO 2011

I've never been to Google IO, I'm told the tickets are v difficult to get but looking at the recordings of the sessions, it could be one to think about for the future.

Mano Marks and Sean Askay on High Perfomance KML is excellent so far, I've only got part way through but Sean has already shown some combinations of Tours and the timeslider, update to change the elevation of polygons and a GPS track and heart rate visualisation that I want to play with. Sean's also launched a new site unchartable.com with similar content that I'm going to be watching.

I'm also watching a video on fusion tables which has some good new features about the fusion table/google maps tie up.

Credit to Google for getting this all recorded and released so quickly.

Gapminder and GA Conference 2011

So at the GA Conference last weekend the most interesting thing for me was Hans Rosling and Gapminder. Hans's talk was excellent, as he was addressing a set of Geography teachers he went into more depth about some map design characteristics of the Gapminder World. If you haven't come across it I recommend you give it 4.5 minutes of your time by watching this video

Thematic Maps: Gapminder started out visualising the data with a standard thematic map of the world which they colored to show changing variables like rise in GDP. Hans said they soon rejected that as countries with big areas such as Australia dominate the view visually. That's a clever insight IMHO.

Map with Symbols: So they tried circle symbols and varied their sizes. This was better but a change in size isn't as visually arresting as movement. Hans's smart phrase was : 'movement has a direct highway to the brain'. So they ended up with their famous graph visualisation and a map tab you can click to see a map presentation. I think the key point about the data presentation is that country location isn't that important, all you really need to know is which continent a country is in. This means the map can be ditched in favour of a graph plot which brings with it the advantages of movement and the ability to draw tracks.

I couldn't help thinking that Hans the statistician seems to know more about good graphical and map design than a lot of GeoWeb developers and GIS specialists I know.

Happy Easter Break!

Penrose Geoscience Education and Research Conference

So I've had some time to get over my jet lag and reflect on this conference held at the Googleplex last week, the conference website is now public.

I had a great time, the trouble with being an earth scientist/KML developer/educational expert as I am is that I never quite fit at any conferences I go to. This one was an exception, as an example: on the bus on the field day I had a conversation with the colleague sitting next to me about extractind DEM data from Google Earth, then switched to talking to the colleague behind me about the value of project based teaching in US schools. Then we hopped out of the bus and went and looked at rocks. Ace!

So cherry picking things that stood out for me:

Effective use of 3D: Barbara Tewksbury described how she used some stunning geological examples in arid regions to teach the introductory geology concepts strike and dip. (abstract here)

Avatars in GEarth: Steve Wild and Mladen Dordevic described the latest progress on getting communicating avatars into GEarth for the purpose of group teaching geology (disclosure: I'm a consultant to this project). Using JavaScript they can have avatars communicating and sharing locations with each other, its early days but I heard a lot of enthusiasm for the idea at the conference (no link yet but I think watch this space for news and to see other parts of the project)

Paper works so use Paper: In discussing getting students to understand the concept of the mid Atlantic ridge Heather Almquist described an activity where instead of getting students to use the new Cross section facility she got them instead to read off results and plot them on a piece of paper, 'they don't understand the concept of a cross section if you don't' (abstract). I've always advocated appropriate use of technology and this seemed a great example of not overusing technology.

Powers of 10: I've heard it said that an inspiration for Google Earth was the powers of 10 film

by Eames and Eames. I remember being mesmerised by it as a kid (blog post tribute), Ron Schott gave a keynote describing his use of Gigapan photography. I like gigapans but I was more impressed by a sequence where Ron presented a series of gigapan views each a subsection of the one before. It reminded me of the powers of 10 film and sparked an idea I might apply sometime in the future.

GEarth API Twins: Another of Ron's smart ideas was to put two instances of a GEarth API of the same view next to each other. This can be used to match geological strata as he showed or to render an overview of a region while the user flies into the second twin which he didn't. I can't find an example of showing geology but for an idea of what a 'twin' is this uses twins to show the antipodes of any location.

Into the Googleplex: Finally, it was fascinating to visit the Googleplex having heard so much about it (video tour). I expected to see the fun stuff but what hit you was the youth of almost everyone there, hardly a grey head to be seen and the perks of being a googler: fantastic free food, wifi enabled luxury buses taking you home and (the visual memory that is strongest for me) an infinity pool big enough for 2 googlers looked after by an attentive life guard under an umbrella in the early evening of a January day.

GI Usability Conference Talk and Notes

Google Earth Tours: Testing spatial content

View more presentations from mukih.

Muki has posted my recent talk slides along with the other slides from the day. They're cryptic without my audio explanations so I've produced some notes for you to read as you scan through the slides.

GI Usability Conference and the Last Half Meter

Sorry for the absence of posts, I've been too busy over the last week or so but the activities that have kept me away have generated lots of ideas for posts that I'll be getting to shortly.

What is Usability of Geographic Information?: On Tuesday I was at the second GI usability conference (programme and links). The most interesting aspect of the day was comparing my own ideas about what GI usability is against others. To me, its about how data is visualised on screen which is most of what I discuss in this blog. To others it included data structures, metadata, interoperability, topics I think are important but didn't strike me as being 'usablility' before.

The Last Half Meter: Whilst the other definitions of usability I came across are important topics IMHO there is a lack of discussion/knowledge in the area of GI visualisation. To me the situation is nicely summed up by diagrams like this one:

It's a subset of a data flow schema about how a user queries a GI dataset and it's similar to a number of other diagrams I've come across by techies about GISs. in terms of getting the system to work you can clearly see the technical links, what database talks to what etc. but what is missing IMHO is any sort of consideration about how that data is displayed on screen and how the user will interact with it, if you will, the 'last half meter' between the user and the hardware. I want to know more about what will happen in the red box, for example:

• How many screens will they need to navigate to post a query?
• What happens if their query doesn't produce the answer they really wanted, how will they iterate to a better query?
• How will documentation/help/FAQs be offered to them?

All the above are key questions that affect the overall performance of a GIS/user system but they are represented in the figure by a single arrowhead delivering perfect information to the user in a kind of Vulcan mind meld interaction. I think this shows the bias of techies to want to solve the straightforward technical issues like interoperability or speed of display but don't like addressing the messy issue of how the user interacts with the GIS.

In some senses this analysis is a bit unfair, I'm drawing a big conclusion from a single diagram but my argument predicts that you should see GI projects where they author has invested a lot of time in solving technical issues but not tackled some basic rules of cartography/usability. The Hurrican Gustav project that I reviewed is a perfect example and its by no means the only one.

Geographic Usability Workshop and absence

Sorry no post this week, I have one brewing about GIS teaching in UK schools which will come out soon. Meanwhile, I'm trying to put something together for this UK based workshop about Geographic Information Usability (via Muki Hacklay) which looks like it could be a very useful forum.