A Geospatial Dialogue with Esri Education Manager Dr. Joseph Kerski
Argis Solutions chief excecutive officer Brady Hustad and Esri education manager Dr. Joseph Kerski share their thoughts on GIS education and GIS in rapidly changing times.
This past spring as things more fully re-opened, we jumped at the chance to meet with Esri education manager Dr. Joseph Kerski for outdoor coffee and conversation. Dr. Kerski and Argis Solutions’ CEO, Brady Hustad, exchanged thoughts on GIS and the possibilities it encourages in education, as well as how rapid GIS advancements can create challenges for those who use its tools. Dr. Kerski’s vision for GIS in the educational sphere always inspires us, and GIS Day 2021 is the perfect moment to share excerpts from our spring meeting with him.
Hustad: For me the exciting part of working with education is this is the place where you get to do the art of the possible.
The commercial sector does what it needs to do to make money or solve their problem, whether its keeping pipes flowing or making sure they don’t inefficiently run well pads. Often the work can be very cut and dry. “I just need the data showing up. I need it lined up. I need it in the right colors. I need it to show up where I need it, whether it’s in the office or on a mobile device or both, and I need to share it with the person making the decision with the right purposes.” It’s relatively simple.
But with the education sector, they sometimes take on things that don’t necessarily make money but can be culturally important. Many times, they are solving a new type of problem, like grabbing GPR to look at an old cemetery because in the Jim Crow days they didn’t allow the marking of graves of African Americans. That’s a travesty. We need to solve that. A school can solve that.
It can be kind of hard for a company to solve that sometimes, because the bottom line is they have to pay their salaries. But for a school, this is a valuable project. Not only does in benefit our society, but it creates an opportunity for a problem to be solved in a unique and interesting way.
Kerski: We are right on the same wavelength. Absolutely.
Hustad: I find it very refreshing to talk to educators because they are always full of so many ideas. It’s not that commercial isn’t, but they have very focused goals. They are really just solving what’s the next step in front of me. When I talk to people in education they are saying, “Think about what it will be in 5 years, 10 years, 12 years!” Which is very exciting, right?
Kerski: In education, there’s always a higher goal. You’re not just learning, buffering, overlaying augmented reality, or whatever. Your bigger goal is to make smarter decisions and understand the world in a deeper, richer way. For example, taking action about urban greenways or invasive species, or something like that. That is always the higher goal. It’s never just to learn the techy stuff.
Coming back to another good term-- It’s not mine, it’s Jack Dangermond’s: The idea of GIS being the “nervous system of the planet.” It is operating behind the scenes like an elevator. You don’t really think about it-- you punch buttons and it works. You want GIS to work because you want these utility poles to work. And you want people to be able to have supply chain management so they can get coffee beans. It’s operating like your body. You don’t think about your nervous system, but without it, you wouldn’t be functioning. I use that a lot. I think he’s right.
One of my chief objectives is getting students excited and for them to become lifelong learners. One of the things that grieves me is when students say, “Hey Joseph, I took a GIS course years ago and it was one of the most boring classes I ever I took. I collected data for a month, and then I did map projections for a month.” If we bore them to tears, they aren’t going to learn anything.
At one time in the history of GIS it took days of data preparation to even get to the analysis stage. Now, we have lots of choices and that brings some uncertainty for faculty in terms of what to teach and when; that’s one of our roles: to guide faculty. “Here are some best practices we have online, and here are some new things coming up.”
There’s this whole discussion online, as you are probably aware, of the rapid advance of technology. Historical data and their formats are not being updated. There are half a million ArcGIS StoryMaps in classic StoryMap. I don’t know if in five years those will be readable. Convert them into the new, and then in 2030, am I going to be able to read the new?
Hustad: Stuff like that can be difficult because of budget and time. Our clients ask, “Do I have the staffing needed to make this conversion? Because I did this once, but now I have to justify the cost of this.” One thing I do appreciate about Esri, I can pretty much tell my clients, “Don’t worry, Collector is going to be around for a few years. You don’t have to go to Field Maps today. Take a breath because I know you’ve just got it implemented.” But it’s a challenge.
Kerski: Change is hard.
Hustad: For a recent county client, I proposed moving to ArcGIS Pro for because they were super siloed. That’s how, I think, change occurs. It’s an obvious thing. They couldn’t share their data internally. And so, I said, “If you go to ArcGIS Pro, you get published to ArcGIS.com and you share identity. Now you guys have an open platform that you can share among each other. But you still have your own little private silos. Because you have ArcGIS.com and a partner organization has ArcGIS.com, you can share your ArcGIS.coms with each other because you both have identity. You both can share it. Or you can make it public because you are government. Because maybe some of this data is public. But once you move it up there, all of the sudden it breaks down the silo walls and you can use it. Which is how I am going to try to elevate them out of single-use ArcMap licenses and directories full of file geodatabases.
Kerski: And as you probably saw in the last month or so, there are new tools to share across organizations. Educators have a lot of tools at their fingertips. They can’t use them all. They shouldn’t try to use them all. They need to ask, “What is going to bring the most value to the time I have to invest in this?”
The nice thing about the cloud is that in the past when we did teacher professional development, at the end they would say, “Oh yeah, I realize now I have to install this in the lab, and talk to my IT staff.” All these tech barriers. And there’s still bandwidth and other tech barriers now.
But now they say, “Hey I can use the Wayback imagery that Joseph just showed me! And I have the swipe tool, and I have 2020 on the left side, and 2014 on the right side for the globe. I can look at glacial retreat, coastal erosion, urban sprawl, deforestation and reforestation, all kinds of issues, just with that one tool! I don’t even need to sign in. All I need is a tablet or a laptop, bandwidth and a browser.”
I tell the educators in these institutes that honestly it is easier to hand out a bunch of worksheets. It’s harder to teach with inquiry. It’s harder to teach with problem-based learning. It just is. But is it worth doing? Yes, it is definitely worth the effort.
To access more of Dr. Joseph Kerski’s insights about geography and GIS, visit www.josephkerski.com, or follow him on Twitter. For Brady Hustad’s thoughts on geospatial trends and software development, follow him on LinkedIn.