Author: Jesse.Rouse

I am off to this year’s NC GIS Conference in Raleigh. This event occurs every other year and has become known as one of the country’s foremost local GIS events. I will add occasional updates to this post through the Academic Assembly on Wednesday and then through the conference on Thursday and Friday.

The afternoon at the Academic Assembly has kicked off with Greg Ferrara talking about ITRE at NCSU and their work with the NC SHP on motor carrier enforcement.

Next is Eric Lester talking about IAVO’s application GeoGenesis including their free version GeoGensis Lite which you can download and play around with.

After a quick break Ken Galluppi from RENCI is talking about geoanalytics with a lot of focus on cloud. Switching to Jeff Heard to continue…looking at an infrastructure to build what Ken was talking about. the Big Board…teleconferencing over a map aka real time interactive map.

Now Ann Moss Joyner with Cedar Grove Institute is taking us to the use of GIS for advocacy and social justice.

I just sat down from my presentation. I talked about NCView and why other institutions should join.

Chris Badurek of ASU is talking about monitoring rural sprawl which I can say is definitely an issue in Watauga Co. and I hope to add to it some day 😉

Thanks to Jeff Essic of NCSU for putting together the Academic Assembly.

Just a quick heads up that the campus labs should now all be updated to ArcGIS 10. This version has a lot to offer especially since we have jumped from ArcView to ArcInfo, but it also comes with a significantly updated interface. If you plan on using ArcGIS for class or research and do not have it on your personal computer I can provide you with the installation materials as well as free access to online training from Esri which you can check out at training.esri.com.

I also plan to do a one day hands-on intro session to ArcGIS 10 sometime during the semester, I will send details out to the general faculty list and here on the blog once I get things firmed up a bit. Meanwhile, I have been using ArcGIS 10 for a few months now, so if you have any questions or issues let me know and I will see if I can help.

It is, in fact, the end of the summer ‘break’. Both summer sessions went well from my perspective and while the online class wasn’t all that I hoped it would be, I think I did well for a first time through. The key is to not allow any wiggle room in terms of time, structure everything as tightly as possible. I structured half the class (the writing assignments and projects) and left the tests and exams open ended time-wise. Everyone got there writing assignments and projects in on time and most waited ’til the last minute to take the map tests and exams not leaving themselves enough time to do as well as they could. SO…the lesson learned…STRUCTURE EVERYTHING :).

With the fall starting, so too will the Spatial@UNCP podcasts. I am going with an every other Thursday schedule again this year and will probably lean towards mapping and cartography topic in the fall since I am teaching Intro to Cartography. If you would like to join me on a podcast to talk about how you are using geospatial technologies in your class, research or service let me know. If you have anything specific you would like to hear about let me know.

FYI, Geography Awareness Week is the week before Thanksgiving (Nov 15-19) and I hope to have at least one guest speaker on campus to talk about their work in Geography. GIS Day is always the Wednesday of Geography Awareness Week and I hope to do something during the activity hour that day on campus. Of course all of these things are contingent on not being crushed by the fall.