The registration area was fairly busy. As soon as I saw the number of registration cards in the J/K/L box, I realize there were going to be a lot of people here. A lot.
It also became clear that many of the folks arriving here are attending the ESRI International Users Conference which overlaps with the EdUC event. In fact, both groups attend the same plenary sessions and keynote speaker on Monday.
Anyway, we had our own keynote speaker today. As I said yesterday, it was originally scheduled to be Dr. Roberta Johnson. We were informed this morning that, unfortunately, Dr. Johnson had some serious health problems arise in her family and she was unable to attend. In her place we had Dr. Sandra Henderson who is from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) out of Boulder, CO. She spoke of the importance of science, and particularly Earth Science, in the education of our students K-16. The applicability of using ESRI/GIS geographical data in Earth Science is a natural, of course.
ESRI itself also made some announcements about upcoming events and applications. One is a competition called “Best Practices in Science Modeling Competition”. A new, free products called ArcExplorer was also announced. It’s expected to be available in the fall.
Other subjects mentioned that I put on my “check these out” list include:
Then came the first session. I attended the one called “Examples and Suvey of Model Curriculum – K-12 and Universities”. The presenters here focused on “Bloom’s Taxonomy and the UCGIS Model Curriculum Learning Objectives”. The focus of presenter Mike DeMers was the “Strawman Report” being worked on at University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) and urged all of us to take the time to read this report and offer any ideas for additions or changes that we felt were warranted.
Stephen Moore made the second presentation in this session. He was from a non-profit company called Center for Image Processing in Education (CIPE) which describes itself as an organization “that promotes computer-aided visualization as a tool for inquiry-based learning.”
After a noon-time walk around San Diego and lunch, the 1:30 afternoon session for me was “Fieldwork and Class Work”. A series of three presentations that began with a program called Great Outdoors Digital Inside (GODI). This was a great, real-life (and “hands on”) way of getting kids to discover ways to use measurements to study the world around them (in this case, wildfires in Yellowstone Park). Next came Robert MacArthur. He showed his program called Tucson Community Technology Education Network and projects where kids in schools and in after-school programs study aspects of where they live using GIS and ArcView.. The last of these presentations was by Roger Palmer from a company called GISetc. He and his wife have just returned from a trip to Costa Rica where they used GIS data to study many aspects of that country. It was fascinating and he made quite a convincing case as to Costa Rica’s beauty.
My final session of the day was one by ESRI itself which covered the reasons involved in migrating from ArcView 3.x to their current version of ArcGIS (version 9). This was quite fascinating, particularly since one of the first people I talked to this morning (a fellow tech guy from Toronto) was in the midst of moving his computer labs from 3.x to 8. He recommended unhesitatingly to begin the transition. It will not necessarily happen without frustrations but he strongly felt it would be to our advantage to not postpone the shift until later, particularly since we have a license to 8.x (which is very similar to 9), our computers are robust and current enough to support the recommended specs, and our kids all have their own laptops. After this afternoon’s session, I found myself in agreement with his advice.
On to Day Two!
