Explore the vast range of titles available.

Workbook containing interactive exercises intended for use with online explorations of Google Earth for each chapter. Each chapter directs students to a corresponding Google Earth KMZ file, available for downloading at www.mygeoscienceplace.com.

There are many approaches that support studies of learning in relation to the physical environment, people’s interaction with one another, or people’s movement. However, what these approaches achieve in granularity of description, they tend to lose in synthesis and integration, and to date, there are not effective methods and concepts to study learning in relation to all of these dimensions simultaneously. This paper outlines our development and use of a new approach to describing, representing, and interpreting people’s interaction as they move within and across physical environments. We call this approach interaction geography. It provides a more integrative and multi-scalar way to characterize people’s interaction and movement in relation to the physical environment and is particularly relevant to learning research and professional design practice in informal learning settings. The first part of this paper illustrates our development and use of interaction geography to study visitor engagement in a cultural heritage museum. In particular, we illustrate Mondrian Transcription, a method to map people’s movement and conversation over space and time, and the Interaction Geography Slicer (IGS), a dynamic visualization tool that supports new forms of interaction and multi-modal analysis. The second part of the paper describes one team of museum educators, curators, archivists, and exhibit designers using a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment based on interaction geography. We show how this environment used interaction geography to disrupt the conventional views of visitor engagement and learning that museum professionals hold and then reframe these disruptions to enable museum professionals to perceive visitor engagement and learning in innovative ways that potentially support their future design decisions. We conclude the paper by discussing how this work may serve as a blueprint to guide future efforts to expand interaction geography in ways that explore new collaborations across the fields of education, information visualization, architecture, and the arts.

Biodiversity offsets are becoming increasingly common across a portfolio of settings: national policy, voluntary programs, international lending, and corporate business structures. Given the diversity of ecological, political, and socio-economic systems where offsets may be applied, place-based information is likely to be most useful in designing and implementing offset programs, along with guiding principles that assure best practice. We reviewed the research on biodiversity offsets to explore gaps and needs. While the peer-reviewed literature on offsets is growing rapidly, it is heavily dominated by ecological theory, wetland ecosystems, and U.S.-based research. Given that majority of offset policies and programs are occurring in middle- and low-income countries, the research gaps we identified present a number of risks. They also present an opportunity to create regionally based learning platforms focused on pilot projects and institutional capacity building. Scientific research should diversify, both topically and geographically, in order to support the successful design, implementation, and monitoring of biodiversity offset programs.

In the era of ‘Smart Cities’, Planning Support Systems play an important role in providing a suite of digital tools to support evidenced based planning and design (Pettit et al. 2019). Planning Support Theatres vary from the traditional City Command Control Centres which are used to manage the real-time city (Kitchin 2014) in that they look at planning and design of future of cities and regions through collaboration (Healey 2003) between various stakeholders. Such methodologies which lend themselves to collaborative planning and design including Geo-design (Steinitz 2012; Pettit et al. 2019) and Co-design (Punt et al. 2020). There has been a plethora of virtual learning environments applicable to any discipline-specific application, each with their own names, terminology, feature sets and degrees of interoperability. In addition to providing the regular set of advantages such as ease of use across large geographies, improving collaboration between diverse set of stakeholders, these virtual platforms have become essential in the current world with travel restrictions and social distancing. In this context, it is imperative to explore the use of virtual systems for the purpose designing and implementing planning support theatre for city planning and design. This research builds a prototype for web based, 3D, immersive, planning support theatre and evaluates its functionality against similar physical theatres.

Navas, F.; Malvárez, G.; Penning-Rowsell, E., and Parker, D.J., 2018. Flood Hazard Prevention Appraisal in Europe: Training Key Stakeholders on the Benefits and Costs of Efficient Protection and Response. In: Shim, J.-S.; Chun, I., and Lim, H.S. (eds.), Proceedings from the International Coastal Symposium (ICS) 2018 (Busan, Republic of Korea). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 85, pp. 1546–1550. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Coastal floods in the European Union member states produce massive costs in environmental loss but also as flood damage property, infrastructure and economic activity. These costs will increase in the future due to Climate Change. The appraisal of benefits and costs are of key importance in the current economic situation in which Europe's resources need to be distributed with great prudence. In this context the implementation of European Directives, such as the EU Floods Directive (2007/60/EC) require that decision makers need to base their assessments of flood prevention measures on Cost-Benefit analysis studies. But despite this requirement EU member states are basing their implementation in a variety of approaches. In this article the results of the implementation of a new e-learning and face to face training approach based on flood prevention appraisal methodologies (e.g. cost-benefit, multicriteria analyses) is presented. The training programme used significant resources from web-based knowledge platform developed during relevant EU projects including extensive databases with legislative framework, a toolkit with resources on cost benefit analysis calculators and links with spatial data which were deemed essential for flood hazard prevention appraisal. The lessons learnt from the implementation of the training programme are of significance to assess the success or failure of the implementation of key legislative frameworks such as the EU Floods Directive in the future. A prior and post consultation process carried out with the participants showed that a) trainees were successful in developing the step by step procedure using a dedicated calculator; b) trainees also had a more contextualized general picture at EU level of the main issues regarding flood hazard prevention; and c) the trainees found the e-learning and face to face material and the resources very easy to follow and easy to understand, and explicitly recognised the pedagogic value of online availability of course materials.

An online program developed at the University of Costa Rica provides the professionals working in meteorology a new way to pursue graduate level degrees. The focus of this graduate program is Operational Meteorology and the students need to complete the research and development process of an operational product to graduate. The products created during the program are a solution to operational institutions in need of innovation and can later be incorporated into institutional activities including advisories, warnings and emergency management. A case study included here shows an example of the need that led to the product, the methodologies used for the development and the final operational product created.

The advances in open data, free and open source software solutions and open access to research publications have influenced the emergence of open educational resources (OER) initiatives. These initiatives permit access to openly licensed learning resources including courses, webinars, training materials and textbooks. Thereby, an increasing number of users has the opportunity to broaden their knowledge and gain new skills. The goal of this paper is to evaluate open education initiatives in the geospatial domain and its synergies with open spatial data and software movements. The paper is focusing on the Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) movement. The advantages and challenges of open geospatial education will be thoroughly discussed.

In this article, the authors feature the model, Under Control: The Damming of the Missouri River, which was designed to engage middle school students in a real-world geographic issue: investigating the long term environmental, economic and cultural impacts of the 1944 Pick-Sloan Plan, which resulted in the construction of six dams on the Missouri River during the mid-1900s. This topic was selected because the Missouri River is one of the most important physical geographic features in South Dakota and the region. A wiki, a set of expandable web pages that can be edited by anyone within the learning community, was used in the Under Control project to promote critical inquiry and collaborative problem solving across the eleven geographically dispersed classrooms that participated in the curriculum project. This article describes (a) the rationale for using a wiki, (b) the organizational and managerial structure employed, and (c) the professional development program provided to teachers preceding and during project implementation. Finally, lessons learned are presented along with recommendations for using a wiki in a large, student-centered curriculum project. (Contains 3 figures.)

Mary Somerville (1780–1872) was unequivocally one of the best-known mathematicians in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth-century. Barred from receiving a formal education, she tenaciously pursued her studies through independent reading and the solving of problems published in the Question and Answer sections of journals. Through her deft navigation of polite society in Edinburgh, London, and Paris, she was able to build a reputation for herself as an expert in analytical mathematics, especially as practiced and taught in France. At a time when British mathematics was widely perceived to be in decline, Somerville positioned herself within a network of mathematicians who saw the adoption of analytical methods as the way to reform. Moreover, she was able to leverage her knowledge of this esoteric and highly valued mathematics to build a successful career as an author of scientific books which lasted over forty years. However, the type of books that Somerville wrote and published, especially as regarding mathematical content, was heavily influenced by her desire and need to make a profit from her writing. This thesis presents the first scholarly treatment of Somerville's path as a mathematician, broadly conceived to include her engagement with scientific society alongside her written works, and provides new insight into the circulation of French analysis in early-nineteenth-century Britain.

Creating effective computer-based learning exercises requires an understanding of optimal user interface designs for improving higher order cognitive skills. Using an online volcanic crisis simulation previously shown to improve decision making skill, we find that a user interface using a graphical presentation of the volcano monitoring data reduces the effectiveness of the exercise compared to an informationally equivalent text-based data presentation format. Results are consistent with earlier work demonstrating that the over-automation of quantitative analyses in computer-based learning reduces their effectiveness in improving higher order skills. Additional research is critically needed to clarify the conditions under which user interfaces can be optimized for ease of use while not sacrificing the exercises' effectiveness in improving higher order cognitive skills.