ESRI Conference -- Day Three

If you've been following the ESRI thread here you know that the ESRI Educational User Conference has been going on for a couple days now. I've known since I signed up for this conference that the dates for the event I was attending overlapped with another conference being held also in San Diego...namely the 2004 ESRI International User Conference (August 9-13).

This being my first time in joining any ESRI convention, I wondered how many people would be attending the educational user conference. I soon found out that it was upwards of 800 people, a healthy number it seemed to me.

Then, yesterday, as the International User Conference is about to begin, someone happened to mention that the expected number of participants at this related event is 13,000. Yes, that's 13 with three zeros!

With that little tidbit of information in mind, I knew that the scope of things was about to change. First on today's agenda was a video orientation to the IUC. I duly headed over to the San Diego Convention Center (the IUC is being held in the huge San Diego Convention Center, not the Marriott) wondering what 13,000 chairs looked like. Well, it looks like a sea of chairs in row after row after orw. Three convention halls were combined into one. Above our heads were sets of huge pairs of video screens which projected whatever was onstage. Wow! I thought. This is a BIG DEAL!

The video did a nice job of laying out the IUC day by day. There followed a talk by the Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI. His presentation went on for an hour or so. A most effective speaker, Mr. Dangermond welcomed all of us to the conference, noting that the first ESRI conference in 1981 was attended by a grand total of eleven. The next year the grand total grew to 17. Amazing to think about the growth since then.

I hope the Mr. Dangermond's talk is sometime made available. To an extent it was cheer-leading and a sales talk. But much of it was a good discussion of and demonstration of many of the powers of GIS and its software in ways that contribute to society, including in our work in the classroom.

He spent some time looking back and looking ahead. One of the "wow" demos he included was a table that served GIS images on it on a touch-screen that could be manipulated by people gathered around it. I'm guessing it was 4'X5' or so. What a great invention and collaborative piece of hardware. No one mentioned the price and I'm not about to request one for school, but it was a tantalyzing taste of some of the amazing things we're going to see come along in the not-so-distant future.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Rita R. Colwell, former Director of the National Science Foundation, gave a heartening talk. She has dedicated 25 or more years of her life trying to eradicate cholera, particularly in Bangladesh. She obviously feels deeply about the need to address world health issues and included examples of how GIS can help chart disease and predict outbreaks.

A different sort of day, then. More looking at ESRI from the standpoint of the company and a more general application of GIS in the world. Tomorrow the final sessions in the EdUC Conference take place. There also are some presentations in the IUC that look well worth attending.

ESRI Conference -- Day Two -- Part II

If not every presentation (or "paper") I attended today was the most applicable or relevant, it was almost always true that something mentioned or someone I met and talked to at each session produced either a new idea or a subject to pursue.

I didn't have time yesterday to list them, but there were a number of things I put on a "check these out" list.

They include:

Reference was made to Bloom's Taxonomy in two or three sessions. While familiar, I'm hard pressed to recall exactly what Bloom's Taxonomy is and what its relevance and/or importance are. A simple search took me to a resource at the University of Victoria's Counseling Services website which provides a clear chart laying out learning objectives formulated by Benjamin Bloom back in 1956 [Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York ; Toronto: Longmans, Green]. Learning is divided into competencies (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation). Another column lists the skills that grow out of the attainment of those competencies. Bloom's Taxonomy, then, is a systematic way of analysing learning and a tool to use in framing projects, assignments, and tests.

A number of sessions, when talking about materials used in GIS, talked about "orthophotographs." Doubting that this was talking about pictures of the mouths of middle-school kids, I needed to look this up. A pretty good -- maybe a little wordy -- primer about orthophotographs is here (.pdf file).

If you think our society, in general, is way too full of acronyms, don't come to this conference. People referred to DEMs and DLGs, among many others. DEM stands for Digital Elevation Map and DLG for Digital Line Graph. Both of these are important potential elements in maps and there are many online resources out there to download them.

Another acronym from GIS/ESRI is Arc IMS. ESRI says ArcIMS is "...the solution for delivering dynamic maps and GIS data and services via the Web." One reason I was curious about ArcIMS as a category is because it seems that such sites, as ESRI says, are ways to get access to already exisiting geographic information via the web. One site shown in a session today was OakMapper -- Monitoring Sudden Oak Death in WebGIS. Obviously a task to add to the long "to do" list is looking into more ArcIMS sites out there. Knowing the range of ArcIMS sites already out there could well save having to "reinvent the wheel" since something might already exist that meets my needs. Click here for a list of sites compiled by ESRI itself.

A book mentioned in one of my sessions seemed to hold promise in helping us get connected to data sources, particularly ones that are free or inexpensive and readily available. The book is "GIS and Public Data" by Bruce Ralston (published by OnWord Press in 2004). It appears to be a bit pricey ($75) so I'm not going to run out and buy one, but would like to take at least a look at a copy to see how useful it might be (it does come with a CD & DVD as additional resources).
Another online resrouce that seems worth checking out in more depth is CountryWatch.com. Seems this could be quite a resource for a number of courses.

I'll stop here for the time being. Not that I needed reminding, but, boy is there a lot of stuff out there!