What are the most pressing issues in GIS education today?
This really cuts to the heart of what the entire GIS education community has been grappling with for the past fifteen years. Public awareness of environmental and spatial issues is at an all-time high; we have geo-enabled many common technologies, with more to come. We are monitoring the Earth as never before, and GIS is rapidly becoming the nervous system of the planet. We therefore have more information at our fingertips, more awareness, and more tools. At the same time, however, urban sprawl, fossil fuel use, deforestation and other practices continue at rates higher than ever. Can we, through GIS education, have a widespread affect on these societal forces? Secondly, the GIS education community needs to do a better job at working directly with educational policy makers. While in some countries, such as Denmark, this has led to national curriculum changes, elsewhere we have succeeded in working with teachers and professors at local or provincial level, but not at national level. A t
