Category: sustainability

Student GIS Projects

~ mwiniski ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been teaching the Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class in the Earth, Environmental, and Sustainability Sciences (EESS) Department for about 11 years. Suresh Muthukrishnan (department chair) also teaches the course. I’ve learned a ton from him. Here are some things I really enjoy about teaching the course:

House flipping hotspots near the Cincinnati Streetcar route. An example map from student Charlotte Moore.
  • Interdisciplinary Nature – Students from across campus take the course. Of course, there are lots of EESS majors. However, even those projects run the gamut. Projects like geologic mapping, landslide risk, sustainable farming, and even mapping data from GPS collars on mountain lions. But students of history, economics, sociology, computer science, business, and music also come up with some great projects.
  • The Opportunity to Learn – Every semester, students will come up with novel questions and methods. I think my typical response is, “I haven’t done that before, but I know it’s possible. Let’s figure it out together.” So I learn something new about GIS, as well as all the topics above, each time I teach.
  • Community Connections – Many of the projects involve community partners–folks like the Greer Police Department, Upstate Warrior Solution (which serves veterans), Greenlink (our public transportation department), local land conservation non-profits, the forestry department, and community associations. Our first deep partnership involved mapping streetlights, which I’ll talk about in another post.
  • Working with Our Post-Baccalaureate Fellows (postbacs) – I’m grateful to get to work with two recent Furman graduates who are on our team. Catherine Lippert (Sustainability Science) and Sam Hayes (History and Politics and International Affairs) are an integral part of teaching the course. They have serious GIS chops and roll up their sleeves to help the students with projects, every step of the way.
  • Project-Based Learning – The course involves a semester-long project. It’s a real challenge to teach GIS principles, create meaningful labs, AND support students as they use these concepts and tools to apply what they’ve learned to address a real-world problem. Every semester I think, “We took on too much. This isn’t going to happen.” But it always comes together. Here’s the syllabus for the class.
An historic, georeferenced map of Charleston Harbor (1711). From a student project by Kylie Gambrill.

Here are some examples from a recent class. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m taking credit for these. The students did the work. Catherine, Sam, and I were teammates. However, the examples are illustrative of the range of projects that are possible. The projects are easier to share, now that we have switched the delivery format from poster presentations to StoryMaps.

Charlotte Moore: Transit-Motivated Gentrification: An analysis of gentrification in Over-the-Rhine, especially as a result of the Cincinnati Streetcar.

Caroline Vickery: Contextualizing Upstate Farms: A preliminary examination of land use and nutrient loading for small farms in the Upstate of South Carolina.

Kylie Gambrill: Understanding Change: The Charleston Harbor — Our perceptions of the environment around us depend upon the cultural context we find ourselves in.

Bennett Dean: Affordable housing and public transportation in Greenville.

 Chloe Sandifer-Stech: Recommendations for green space around Enoree Career Center: A study of the influence of tree density on carbon storage.

Jake Gerardi: Land Sparing/Sharing Impacts on Birds: Assessing habitat quality of southern bird species using ecological principles in Greenville watersheds.

Madison Eichhorn: Affordable Housing & Good Jobs – An evaluation of proximity, density, and availability of affordable housing and employment.

Austyn Feigenbaum: Boating Safety Zones and Florida Manatees: An investigation on the relationship between manatee death rates and boating safety zones along the coast of Florida.

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing the range of student projects and learning more. It’s a pleasure to see all the hard work result in such great studies and stories.

Way to go iClicker!

~ mwiniski ~ 2 Comments

In an earlier posting I discussed some less than optimal packaging with a recent order of iClickers. We’re very happy with the clickers themselves, btw (which is also in the earlier posting). A glitch with my blog comment notifications caused a great response from the Director of iClicker to sit in moderation for quite a while. My apologies for that. It’s since been fixed.

I wanted to highlight Renee’s response here. Since the posting, I was also contacted by one of the iClicker creators about an idea I’d posted on a list serve about making analyzing data gathered via iClickers easier. We had a great conversation, and they are exploring adding some additional features to make analysis more seamless.

Thanks for being so responsive and committed to sustainability! I’m impressed.

Sustainable Packaging?

~ mwiniski ~ 4 Comments

I know it’s been a long time, but I’m hoping to get back in the blogging groove. I have a list of blog topics in a google doc that I’m hoping will sustain a more regular blog presence. I’ve moved my site over to a new host.  I’m redirecting automatically for now, but please update your bookmarks.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that we’ve been exploring clicker technology in class to promote class discussion (especially around controversial topics), predicting the results of a demo, etc. . We recently received a shipment of 60 clickers, and I was distraught over the packaging. Check it out. Each clicker was individually wrapped in the kind of packaging that leaves one’s fingers bruised and bloodied, and the amount of waste is pretty striking. Below is a pic of the packaging vs. what was inside.

packagingclickers

We’re in conversations now with the vendor now to check into alternatives. They may be under the assumption that we’re like many schools where clickers are sold in the bookstore. Instead, we’ve purchased several departmental sets for sharing. The six teacher clickers came with a more reasonable amount of packaging, so it has to be possible to scale back on the waste. We’ve been very pleased with the iClicker brand, but if you decide to go this route, please join in and ask about alternative packaging before they ship.

Some things the iClickers don’t do that we’re trying to find solutions for:

1. Data Formatting – We have a couple of professors interested in analyzing data gathered in class with statistical packages like SPSS. The session data is stored in spreadsheets, but there’s a lot of manual cleanup needed before the stats are run. It shouldn’t be too hard to automate the clean-up process.

2. Limited Choices – A-E works fine for many questions, but if you’re asking students about presidential candidates, important political issues, etc.., 5 choices can be very limiting. We knew that going in, but it would be great if there were a simple alternative. I asked the tech guy at iClicker if they’ve explored hooking into devices with more buttons or allowing a double click to expand choices (like AA, BB, etc.). They haven’t done anything with this yet, but the code is open source, so I’m going to poke around and see what it would take to add this expanded choice mode.

3. Mapping Choices – The flexibility of the software is great. You can pose questions / scenarios in presentation software, ChemDraw, Google Earth, etc.. Because the question is captured as an image, you have to go back and map choice A to Obama, B to Clinton, C to Edwards, etc.. It’s okay if you’re just using the questions as a discussion starter but makes looking at trends in student opinions more difficult.