The 2014 Esri International User Conference was held last week in beautiful San Diego, California. The Online GIS team want to share their personal experiences from the trip. It's great to see that each person took home something different from the conference. Overall it is an awesome feeling to have 16,000 of your professional peers and mentors in one place. There is bound to be a moment when you are so inspired that you literally have to take a moment to collect yourself. With all that said, enjoy the first hand experiences of the 2014 Esri UC.
Leah Lewis: The fun began for me on Saturday with the much smaller Education Conference. For me, that’s my favorite. The group is small and there are a lot of people doing exactly what I’m doing here at UWF. It’s a time for me to get inspired, get involved and to be quite honest, impress people with what we are doing at UWF. I attended a session on how to create a mobile GIS course where instead of textbooks, students were required to purchase an android tablet. I thought that was a pretty cool idea and something that I plan to look into here on campus. Also, I went to several sessions on web GIS and how many universities are using the platform instead of static maps. I know here at UWF this is high on our priority list. I also attended several round table discussions where instructors and researchers talked about how make their courses better and how they are keeping their online students engaged in the materials.
Ahh Moocs. Mooc talk
was everywhere. Anthony Robinson of Penn
State presented his research after his widely successful Mooc at Penn
State. Esri also has a Mooc opening
soon. Well….did you know UWF is developing a Mooc? It was great to
hear about all of the successes and missteps from others. I left those sessions even more excited about
our Mooc (if that is even possible).
I know a lot of you are interested in giving back. You need those contribution points for the GISP
application or you want to make sure that today’s youth are fully able to grasp
geography and maps. If that’s the case,
then you should check out the ConnectEd
Initiative and Esri. Early this
year, Jack Dangermond pledged billions of dollars to schools in the hopes of
having a GIS is all schools. Esri is
looking for people like you to serve as GeoMentors to local youth and teachers. They need our help getting this
implemented in schools. The ConnectEd
website is full of resources, maps, and apps needed to get teachers
excited. Just today, I sent an email to
a friend at the Escambia County District to arrange a meeting with the
superintendent. I’ll keep you posted on
the developments but I have a very good feeling about this. I can’t wait!!
One last thing and I know a lot of you will be interested in
this hot topic. The GISP. The elusive GISP. The exam?
When will it happen? Well, you
heard it here first. In 2015, the exam
will be part of the certification process.
The exam, will not however, replace the current portfolio. So what does that mean? The application process is going to get
tougher. If you are close to being ready
to submit, I would encourage you to do so before the end of 2014. If you need help reviewing your materials, I
would be more than happy to help.
So, that’s just a fraction of my week. It was amazing, awesome, and oh so
exhausting, but I would do it over and over again. The sheer number of GIS people in one place
is mind-blowing at times. I find this to
be really funny considering when I first started in GIS, there were only a couple
of people in my office who were using the software. Last week, I was surrounding by 16,000 of the
coolest mappers I know.
Penelope Mitchell: This was my first time attending ESRI's International User Conference. As the conference rookie, I was in shock and awe nearly the whole time :) The Education Conference kick started the shenanigans. The plenary lectures focused on K-12 challenges and the path and fate of higher education--both topics looking at GIS in a different way. Cindy Marten, Superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, was an amazing and inspiring speaker. It was very easy to ascertain this woman was very action oriented. Marten spoke upon the use of geographic data to power and measure change within the community, and emphasized using data as a flashlight to guide us forward, rather than a hammer to punish. Anthony Robinson of Penn State spoke upon the high quality of online education and projected that within the next ten years at least one third of higher education enrollees will be in flexible online education programs.
And before I shut my trap, in case you have not heard, I want to share one of the coolest things ESRI recently unveiled: GeoNet: a forum to discuss, collaborate, and network with fellow GIS people! Log in, it’s pretty awesome.
Brittney Markle: July in San Diego is always such an exciting time of the
year. Learning the new goings on in the world of ESRI and GIS are just the tip
of the iceberg. Visualizing where and how we can apply current and new concepts
to our content is where it really interesting. Here’s a list of some of the
things I took away this that I hope can be implemented in our program to update
materials, provide resources (to student and instructors), exemplify current
applications, promote our courses (across campus!), and engage student
participation.
·
If the education conference taught me one thing
it was the importance of campus & local connections. Campus wide
connections (other departments that could use GIS- History, biology, chemistry,
public health, political science, etc) as well as other local connections (community colleges,
local high schools and middle schools, etc).
·
Web GIS is the future. That statement might not
be 100% accurate but it is getting big and student exposure to this world
should increase. There are a multitude of ways to apply web based mapping can
be applied to our labs. I can't wait to see how to integrate web mapping fundamentals
and tools into lab instructions and assignments.
·
GIS programming is not limited to Python. I made
it a point to step out of my comfort zone and learning another programming
language, JavaScript API for ArcGIS, and man did it blow my mind! I think I
went to about 3 session on JavaScript. My favorite was a hands on lab in the
Education Conference called “Intro to programming for non-programmers”. This
lab was great and could easily be integrated in the Programming course and an
early module. I was introduced to the Developers Sandbox which I had heard of
before and honestly it scared the mess out of me. In reality it proved itself
to be a very useful resource when using JavaScript. Oh yea-- this type of
scripting language is used heavily in web mapping.
·
10.3 and ArcPro- This was the big deal of the
UC. I have pages and pages of notes on both but in the end was still left
wondering to what extent ArcPro will be available to us. The beta version is
available now with the full version to release sometime in November of this
year. There will be ESRI training courses pertaining to ArcPro upon full
release. ArcGIS 10.3 is set to be released in September! ArcPro looks like it could be a lot of fun. It’s an
application that fuses together ArcMap, Catalog, Globe, and Scene... whoa!
Various capabilities include:
o
Faster 2D & 3D rendering
o
Multithread display
o
Ribbon platform
o
Multiple layout display
o
Easy publish and sharing capabilities
o
Tasks in the form of guided workflows
o
Simple search and query
o
3D editing and analysis
o
Temporal analysis
·
Resources:
o
ESRI Higher Ed:
o
Content:
·
Serious data, content, and student resource
right here!
In
the last session I went to the speakers were joking around and one of them
asked what we thought Arc stood for. The humorous answer was “Always Right
Click”. I thought that as pretty funny and very true... and that’s the last tid
bit I have to share. I sure does feel good to purge all of that information!
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