UCGIS Education White Paper

Research-based GIScience Graduate Education

Research-based Education Working Group

PLEASE SEND COMMENTS TO THE EDITORS

Revision History:
10 July 1997 - Post-Assembly Version 1.0

Introduction

To advance the state of science, research universities must educate researchers and future research-capable educators. Educators at leading universities must consciously lead the best young minds to the very frontiers of research and then train and collaborate with those emerging researchers to push those frontiers forward. Geographic Information Science is both a new science (Information Science) and a more traditional discipline (Geography) that has been given vast new opportunities to grow. The opportunities have been made possible by advances in computer and information technology and by the creation of valuable tools such as geographic information systems for managing previously intractable quantities of spatial data. The UCGIS has made a commitment in another education initiative to study those emerging technologies and incorporate them into the education programs at member universities.

This initiative goes beyond seeing and using what's out there. This initiative goes beyond keeping abreast of technological advances and then applying newer faster tools to familiar data-bound problems. This initiative includes designing and creating new technology itself. It includes helping define the direction that new technology will take. It includes finding innovative, less obvious applications for the emerging technology. It requires true interdisciplinary dialogue followed by in-depth interdisciplinary research to define and meet the needs of the individual disciplines and of the evolving joint disciplines that constitute Geographic Information Science.

This initiative also identifies advanced areas of GIScience that have been sufficiently codified and organized to be presentable as Ph.D. level courses. These courses will lead graduate students to understand the important unsolved problems of GIScience; and one of the key objectives of these courses is to make research accessible to the graduate students. Textbooks on advanced topics are also needed to promote the highest level of research-based education that leads to further research.

Background

Geographic Information Systems are a rapidly changing product of a rapidly advancing technology. As with most computer systems, GISystems were initially only accessible to computer experts. Training in their use required knowledge of computer architectures and operating systems. With the evolution of user interfaces, open architectures, and user-transparent distributed processing, GISystems have become increasingly accessible to other scientists and even to the most inexperienced applications users. GISystems grew in functional complexity at the same time that they became easier to operate, providing ever more powerful tools to an ever expanding audience of users. Geographic Information Science seeks to understand, harness, focus and possibly redirect this technological revolution.

Geographic Information Science is a scientific discipline with fuzzy, rapidly changing boundaries and still undetermined potential. A primary objective of UCGIS is to define the boundaries and the boundary expansion directions, thereby realizing the potential of GIScience. UCGIS will accomplish this by identifying the areas in which UCGIS will encourage investment of its research and educational resources. Technology has often been the driving force in the development of an information science; and technology has always been a limiting consideration. GIScience must take charge of the development of its science; and one way to do that is to formally spell out the educational elements of a research GIScientist's Ph.D. training.

In their latest edition of Elements of Cartography, Morrison, Robinson, et al., describe the knowledge and skill requirements of a modern day cartographer to be part traditional cartographer, part computer scientist, part social scientist, part behavioral scientist, part mathematician, part communications specialist, which Morrison reiterates in his 1993 C&GIS article. Their "jack-of-all-trades" description of the working cartographer needs only to be extrapolated--more and better and deeper--to give a "master-of-all-trades" description of the research GIScientist.

Importance and National Benefits

Science is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary; and this causes some concern by both the traditional disciplines and by the science oversight groups. The National Science Foundation has recently acknowledged the need to broaden the scope of research-based education to span important, newly emerging, interdisciplinary research fields. At its inception the UCGIS recognized that GIScience is one of those emerging multidisciplinary fields; and the UCGIS made participation by more than one academic department a condition for university membership in the organization. This foresight has left the UCGIS poised to respond to the call for new research-based graduate training programs issued by the NSF:

The challenges of educating scientists, mathematicians, and engineers for the 21st century mandate a new paradigm in graduate training. To meet the need for a cadre of broadly prepared Ph.D.s with multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills essential to addressing the varied career demands of the future, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announces an agency-wide, multidisciplinary, graduate training program. The goal of the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) Program is to enable the development of innovative, research-based, graduate education and training activities that will produce a diverse group of new scientists and engineers well-prepared for a broad spectrum of career opportunities. Supported projects must be based upon a multidisciplinary research theme and organized around a diverse group of investigators from U.S. Ph.D.-granting institutions with appropriate research and teaching interests and expertise.

From the NSF IGERT announcement

Given that research in GIScience is already an active ongoing activity at the member institutions, why should the UCGIS single out a special education priority on research-based education?

The UCGIS is composed of outstanding research universities whose mission is not only to monitor, but also to advance emerging technologies as they apply to Geographic Information Science. The UCGIS provides a unique forum for sharing knowledge gained by individual research efforts involving advanced technology. By examining, formalizing, and combining approaches to research and to education that use new and innovate techniques, we expedite the process of codifying GIScience. This sharing will lead to faster technological evolution, as courses and textbooks promulgate solutions to spatial and temporal problems. In this sense, the research-based education priority facilitates the research goals of the UCGIS through education. Indeed, research-based education should contribute to a more robust understanding of where GIScience research is heading by showing clearly where it has gone and what it has accomplished in the recent past.

Linkage to Other UCGIS Education Priorities

The importance of research-based graduate education is also interwoven into the following UCGIS Education priorities, further underscoring its relevance and scope:

Supporting infrastructure - science advances more rapidly with institutional and outside support for research activities.
Emerging technologies - creating as well as exploiting technologies.
Professional Education - Research plays an important supporting role for data, tools, and course content provided to the professional student.
Learning with GIS - Access to research-based instruction promotes learning in all settings, thereby building the connections that cause out-of-the-classroom experiences to contribute to in-the-classroom achievement. There needs to be an assessment of how research can support (and equally important, where it cannot provide) an environment conducive to the development of spatial information skills.
Educational Policy - Research coupled with cutting edge education can transform the way we learn and teach, if not the entire educational framework. Bad research will not attract or keep the best graduate students. Therefore, research plays an important role when establishing educational policies.

National Needs

By realizing the potential of a research/education symbiosis, the UCGIS has the power to promote a number of national needs as well:

Strengthening research in GIScience within and beyond existing programs of higher education.
Promoting the development of additional interdisciplinary research programs at UCGIS universities.
Improving commercial GIS software development by graduating more research-capable GIS developers.
Accelerating the development of GIScience to give more and more people access to spatial analytical tools.
Providing U.S. Ph.D.s with more competitive analytical skills for the national and international marketplace.

Improving existing research method and developing new research methods using GIScience.

Providing new and improved GIScience tools to support research in GIScience and other disciplines.

IMMEDIATE ACTION ITEMS

(1) Compile a list of Ph.D. level courses and their content that lead to discussion of key as-yet-unanswered research questions. Also compile a cross-referenced listing of teachable topics that illuminate our previously identified key research issues.