Ken Foote is a professor of geography and former department chair at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has served as president of both the Association of American Geographers (2010-2011) and the National Council for Geographic Education (2006), two of the major geography associations in the U.S. Ken has also served editor of NCGE Pathways series of publications for geography educators (2000-2005) and the Journal of Geography in Higher Education (1999-2003).

Much of Ken's work has focused on GIScience education as well as the effective use of learning technologies in higher education. While developing the first GIScience curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1980s, Ken saw the value of sharing educational materials across institutions as demonstrated by the impact of the NCGIA's Core Curriculum as well as the potential for using hypermedia and multimedia for effective learning and teaching. As a result, Ken began the NSF-supported Geographer's Craft Project in the early 1990s. This was among the first efforts to develop online hypermedia teaching materials for GIScience education. An additional highlight of the Geographer's Craft Project was an active-learning, problem-based approach to teaching GIScience as a way of helping students master the use of analytical techniques applied to real-world research questions. This contribution has likewise helped those teaching GIScience to build active learning into both classroom and lab settings.

Ken helped to popularize this approach in GIScience through the Virtual Department Project, another NSF-supported project to help geography faculty move into cyberspace. This was an early attempt to develop better and share teaching and learning materials for GIScience and geography education through a clearinghouse structure. Ken's recent co-edited book Teaching GIScience and Technology in Higher Education (2012) with David Unwin, Nicholas Tate and David DiBiase highlights the many innovations which have come since.