A Vision of Students Today

This American Life does mapping

One of my favorite shows ever, This American Life does mapping on this week's show. This weeks show has 5 parts and looks at mapping the world by the 5 senses. North Carolina artist, cartographer and author Denis Wood joins Ira Glass in Act I. Ira gives an interesting perspective to mapping from a non-mapping person (if there is such a person these days). I'm not sure I agree with everything he says but interesting none-the-less.

Denis is author of The Power of Maps and co-author of Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS (occasionally used in our GIS curriculum).

The following link will take you directly to this weeks podcast - Mapping.

GIS Day 2007

We'll be celebrating GIS Day on Friday, November 9th from 9:00am til 2:00pm right here at the AB Tech main campus. Drop in any time and to see all the exciting GIS going on in and around Asheville. The list of organizations putting this event on can be seen below:

• Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College – GIS Certificate Program
• Buncombe County – GIS Department
• City of Asheville – GIS Department
• Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) (Charlotte Office)
• Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)
  
• GeoMaxim
• National Climatic Data Center
  
• NC Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NC CGIA)
  
• Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI)
  
• Resource Data, Inc.
• UNC-Asheville / National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC)
  

We'll have demonstrations, hands on activities, a map gallery and more. You can get more information by going to our event at gisday.com or by downloading our flyer here (refresh the page if you are not taken to the download page). Please pass around the brochure and/or put it up at work if you like.

If you'd like to talk to a live person about the event ... you can call or email me or Greg Dobson.

Pete Kennedy - pkennedy(at)abtech.edu - 828.254.1921 x289
Greg Dobson - gdobson(at)unca.edu - 828.251.6973

If you are planning on bringing a large group ... let us know so we can plan accordingly! Thanks and hope to see you there!

GIS internship in the Smokies

This internship is based out of Gatlinburg, TN. The primary goal is created FGDC compliant metadata for the existing park GIS datasets. Great opportunity to get some real-world experience and learn about metadata.

Follow this link for more information

RSS in plain english

In most of my classes, my students are required to maintain blogs to journal about their work in my classes. They also use their blogs to upload course work for me to review. Work like maps and data. In addition to the student blogs, I have a blog for each of my classes where you can find links to student blogs. My course blogs serve as a source of information for my students about the class. All of these blogs, I have just mentioned are only a start to the blogs and other websites we all try to keep up with every day. How do you keep up with all the new stuff put on blogs (and other websites) on a daily basis??? RSS of course.

Why is this important to GIS? RSS is important to GIS because it is one of the powerful ways we now get information and GIS is all about information. There are even specifications about how this is being used to pass around geographically referenced information through the web. This is called GeoRSS and more about it later.

First, I found this great video describing RSS and why it is so important on the web today. Check it out.

Click To Play

A big fat thanks goes to the guys at The Common Craft Show for doing such great work. Check out their site for a lot more!

classic...

Bent Creek Trails ... in Google Maps ... in our blog

This past summer as part of our GIS 121 - Georeferencing and Mapping class, I had my students georeference a map of Bent Creek and then heads-up digitize the trails. I won't deny this class exercise was somewhat self-serving and selfish as I wanted some digital data of one of my favorite places to mountain-bike and trail run but it was a great learning exercise for the students as well.

Now that you can embed GoogleMaps in a website or blog, I thought I'd share the data here. I used the KML Companion to create a KML file from the trails in ArcMap and then passed the KML file to GoogleMaps in the URL.

Special thanks to 2 students for their help. Christy Caudill shared her trail data with me from last summer and Josh O'Conner showed me the easiest way to pass the KML to GoogleMaps.


View Larger Map

soooo.... i can't figure out how to imbed the Gmap with my KML on it yet. Hey, today is the first day they've made Gmaps easily embedable so i'll wrestle with it later but for now - here's a screen shot and you can get the KML file here too if you want to see it in GoogleEarth yourself!

See the Bent Creek Trails in Gmaps here!