DOES SERVER GIS LEAD TO A FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE IN THE WAY ALL EDUCATORS IMPLEMENT AND USE GIS?
Yes, GIS use is changing, whether one is more or less technical. Nontechnical users are authoring geo-content on the desktop and then exploiting online geodata sharing procedures that server GIS makes possible. In the ESRI case this means exploiting ArcGIS Online, a cloud platform for discovering, publishing, and sharing geo-resources. For more technical users it means building and sharing geodatabases, and installing, tuning, maintaining, and writing applications on top of server software. Not everyone in the education community needs to dig deeply into the server details: perhaps only 10 per cent of the technologyoriented users. Higher education will need to provide educational opportunities for these two key profiles: the niche of server GIS technicians and the mass of users of cloud platforms. IS SERVER GIS DIFFICULT IN AN EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT? Not necessarily, I think that in some cases people encounter difficulties when they try to work outside their normal profile: nontechnic
