Curricular guidance from social media: #gistribe in action

For the past two years, I have presented a GIS/mapping workshop as part of Paideia — in 60-ish minutes, aiming to give the Reed community an introduction into the concepts of spatial analysis, basic cartography and critical map reading, and how they might start approaching analytical and/or spatial projects of their own.

This year I decided to split this into two sessions — one focused on GIS as a tool, another focused more on mapmaking and less on data and/or analysis.

Problem: when you’re limited to one hour, and this might be your only chance to get your audience excited about GIS — what do you highlight? To the Twitter, Batman!

The full suite of replies is below, calling for a mix of specific procedural tips, tool recommendations, key pieces of theory and/or details of working with data, as well as a nod to context, applications, and answers to “so what?” / “why does this matter?” questions.

Thanks to all who responded, and thanks to @wildlifegisgirl for the mention/RT. To get some sense of what the workshop looked like, here’s materials from the GIS presentation (session post @ Reed’s datablog / slides for presentation); the mapping workshop was much less structured, mostly hands-on/demo time using some available local data.

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