Teaching Maps and Geovisualizations

As a kid, I was always excited about upcoming road trips and spending time with my dad looking at the road atlas to plan our route. This interest followed me throughout grade school, high school, and into college. My plan was to go to Savannah College of Art and Design and study Architecture and Urban Planning. But, growing up in West Virginia I fell in love with the outdoors and later decided that Landscape Architecture was a better fit for me—what better career than designing outdoor spaces, right? During my undergraduate studies I gravitated towards visualizations and the graphics involved with conveying a design idea, this really captivated my interest which eventually led to GIS and mapping. During my time at West Virginia University, most of the GIS projects centered on site analysis and conservation efforts. As I started to think about graduate school, I wanted a program that had a strong technology and GIS focus. I spent the majority of graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University doing environmental analysis mapping and remote sensing. Being the GIS Analyst for the Digital Scholarship Lab has opened my eyes to the possibilities of GIS/Cartography and its impacts on peoples learning. More recently, I have become excited about open source web mapping applications that give non-expert GIS users the chance to map their data. I think this has huge implications for society and allows experts from all disciplines to use mapping software to solve issues facing our world today.
The reason I am teaching this class is I hope to give you, the students, the skills to not only solve these problems, but ask tough questions that lead to larger conversations about our environment and society. Most universities focus GIS learning around desktop GIS software and are just starting to teach about visualization and web cartography. I hope this class will serve as an introduction to foundational skills in GIS and Cartography, while showcasing available methods for visualizing data that can be of use in your career. Since the class is a diverse make-up of majors and interest, it will ideally bring in new perspectives to mapping and visualizations that might be overlooked in other courses, which is very exciting!
I hope to learn from these different perspectives the best ways to incorporate ideals into designing better maps. Having used GIS for many years, I am intrigued by the mapping and learning styles of students just experiencing this technology for the first time, or very recently. Since this is my first time teaching, I hope to learn more about which teaching styles and lesson work best. I look forward to learning from everyone!