Teaching GIS&T

Abstract

This special issue contains a series of short papers on teaching with and about geographic information science and technology (GIS&T) in a variety of educational contexts, with contributors originating from both sides of the Atlantic. Although geographical information systems (GIS) already has an edited volume that purports to outline its history (Foresman, 1998), we have yet to put the entire phenomenon into its proper perspective, evenmore so into its pedagogic context. Briefly, most authors cite the Canada system of the 1960s as the first ‘GIS’, but the term did not gain much currency until the mid-1970s, when the first academic, research-oriented meetings were held. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a proliferation of programmes designed to teach the technology and, more importantly, what Goodchild (1992) called the ‘geographic information science’ (GISc) that underpins it. It seems to us that both the content of courses in ‘GIS’, with or without the ‘c’, and the ways bywhich they have been delivered, reflect an interplay between the available technology, the GIS industry and the academy. For better or worse the educational agenda has followed a technology-driven set of imperatives. Sometimes it also pays to revisit things one did and wrote some time ago and in looking at these stages we revisit the chapter ‘Enabling progress in GIS and education’ that one of us co-authored a decade ago for the second edition of the ‘big book of GIS’ (Forer & Unwin, 1999). Although much of the content of that chapter now has a vaguely antique flavour and the perspective reflected that of two geographers working in the context of academic geography, five ‘dilemmas’ that at the time seemed important for educators were listed and described: