qGIS – Teaching and Learning with Technology at Reed

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. Continue reading “Curricular guidance from social media: #gistribe in action”

Workshop: Spatial Analysis + Mapping, Paideia 2015

I’ll be leading a one-hour intro to GIS, mapping, and geospatial analysis on Friday, 1/22, from 9-10 in ETC 205. Come join!

Materials from the workshop are here (Mapping_GIS_Paideia). Download the zipped file to your desktop and unzip it – open datafiles in either ArcGIS or qGIS (cross-platform and open source).

Spatial proximity and Reed’s smoking policy

Last year, Reed re-examined its smoking policy, which touched off some fairly spirited debates around campus. The revised policy is now in place, and you can see structures around campus to provide simultaneous shelter from the rain and access to ashtrays. (Catch up on what you missed here, thanks to the Reed Quest.)

One of the interesting things about this discussion is that it centered around a key spatial theme: proximity.

Continue reading “Spatial proximity and Reed’s smoking policy”

Workshop: Getting IN the map

The more I work with all-things-spatial, the more I want to infuse this sort of work across campus — maps as data visualizations, spatial context as framing for questions and answers, spatial patterns as answers and questions.