Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
instruction. The Core Curriculum that was developed included 75 lectures, each
semester having 25 courses developed by approximately 50 different professors. This
original Core Curriculum was marketed in 1990 for $200 as a set of three manuals
containing the 75 lectures and was accompanied by a series of laboratory exercises.
The lectures were essentially notes with questions and references. The NCGIA Core
Curriculum in GISystems was a great success. Eventually more than 2000 copies
were purchased in over 70 countries, after being translated into at least eight languag-
es (including Chinese, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese and
Russian). The original version may still be found at: http://www.geog.ubc.ca/
courses/klink/gis.notes/ncgia/toc.html . The enduring popularity of this, much dated,
series of lectures is attested to by the fact that if you enter the words “spatial interpo-
lation” into a Google search engine the first hit that you are likely to get is to Lecture
40 from the original Core Curriculum.
3
The NCGIA Core Curriculum in GIScience: A New
Beginning
GIS is a rapidly changing field because of new software, hardware, and algorithmic
and conceptual developments and as a result within less than ten years it was felt that
the Core Curriculum had to be updated. It was determined that now it should go on-
line and it should reflect the fact that the “discipline” of Geographic Information Sys-
tems had changed its name. Specialists in the field no longer wanted to teach about
software systems they wanted, instead, to teach Geographic Information Science. The
new name had been introduced by Michael Goodchild in an article in one of the lead-
ing journals in the field [17] and now many journals reflected this new thinking by
changing the word “systems” to “science” in their titles (for example, in 1996, just
four years after Goodchild published his seminal article the name of the International
Journal of Geographical Information Systems was changed to the International Jour-
nal of Geographical Information Science).
The new set of Core Curriculum lectures may be found here: http://www.ncgia.
ucsb.edu/education/curricula/giscc/ . If one goes to this website a number of features
will be noticed. First, the new Core Curriculum is much larger with 194 lecture topics
listed. Second, many topics have no lecture associated with them, only the title is
listed. Third, some of the topics for which there is a lecture refer back to the original,
1990, Core Curriculum. Finally, it will be seen that the new Core Curriculum is also
now a static document having not been updated since August 13th, 2000. Indeed, a
note was posted on the website at that point explaining that the project had been
placed in a state of “suspended animation” since December 1998. This note [6] states
that the Core Curriculum would not be continued because other resources such as
the Digital Library of Earth System Education [13], the Esri Virtual Campus [14]
and the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Sciences [8] were all becoming availa-
ble as supplementary resources that would support aspects of GIS education.
NCGIA's revised Core Curriculum has not been updated since 2000. However, the
CSISS website presents a cornucopia of resources and links to resources for those
