Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
identify the placenames that students talked about in discussion assignments and to
geocode those places to explore the relevant geography for major discussion themes
in the class.
Phrase Nets
The Maps MOOC class experience began with a prompt emailed to students to “pin
themselves” on a web map to develop an overall view of the people and countries
represented in the class cohort. Students in this early class activity were asked to
add a pin to a world map to represent their home, and to provide basic demographic
information (age range and gender). Students were also asked to provide a simple,
one sentence answer to the prompt, “How do you use maps?” This prompt was
intended to elicit a wide range of opinions from around the world regarding how
novices view Cartography prior to completing the Maps MOOC. Of the 22,781 pins
added to the map, 11,710 had complete data for age, gender, and the map usage
question. We focus here only on these complete observations.
To evaluate student responses to the question “How do you use maps?” in the
opening map assignment for the course, we turn to a technique developed to support
visual analysis of phrases. Phrase nets were conceived by van Ham et al. (
2009
)to
aid exploration and visual analysis of phrases in text. The method allows users to
select relations (either syntactic or lexical) and to view what frequently comes
before and after those terms. For example, in Fig.
1
(Top), we show how the word
“and” is used to link words commonly found in the responses we gathered from
students reflecting on how they currently use maps. Links between pairings are
shown with lines of varying thickness depending on the degree to which those terms
often co-occur. Some of the pairings of interest include
Maps and GIS
,
Travel and
Work
, and
Place and Directions
.
Changing the relation used to form the Phrase Net can reveal other interesting
patterns in this dataset. If we choose “the” as the relational linkage (Fig.
1
, Bottom),
one can see that a key phrase in our responses was
Understanding the World
.This
was complemented by less frequent pairings such as
Discover the World
,
Explore
the World
, and
Navigate the World
.
Expanding the lexical relations in Phrase Nets can further reveal how maps are
viewed by students in the Maps MOOC. Figure
2
(Top) shows the resulting
visualization for the “of the” relation. This structure pulls out a colloquialism in
Lay of the Land
. The most common phrase here is
Understanding of the World
, with
evidence that significant numbers of students also wrote about
Sense of the Place
and
Parts of the City
, the latter of which is one of the few scale and context-specific
references that appears in any of the phrase nets we developed.
Since Phrase Nets can also use syntactical relations to arrange text, we can also
look at the basic pairings of words separated by spaces alone. Figure
2
(Bottom)
shows the extent to which students view technology as a key aspect of their map
