About the Virtual Department:

Linking Curricula among Geography Departments through the Internet and Worldwide Web

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Contents

Overview

Work is beginning on a project to interlink the curricula of geography departments both nationally and internationally using the Internet and Worldwide Web. The goal of the Virtual Department Project is to offer high quality curriculum materials and classroom and laboratory modules that can be used across the Internet by geography students and faculty at any university in the world, and to promote collaborative research. Stress will be placed on curriculum integration through the creation of on-line "electronic" texts and resource materials that will be of service to a wide range of departments. The project will link existing materials already available on the Internet (as is already being done at departments using the Worldwide Web) but, more importantly, will commission new materials to address topics not now represented on the Internet. In this way, geographers at many universities can share the time and expense of developing hypermedia and multimedia curriculum materials and benefit from materials that might not otherwise be made available commercially.

In addition to the goals of cultivating and coordinating new curriculum materials, the Virtual Department Project will address the issues of: 1) establishing a method of review and publication suited to Internet resources; 2) creating a method for indicating and confirming intellectual provenance; 3) providing a means by which electronic publications can be credited to their authors and cited by students and other scholars; and 4) assembling an interlocking set of on-line research and reference materials that will represent the discipline of geography to non-geographers using the Internet.

The project will concentrate first on linking and developing materials that will be useful to the widest range of geography departments, those aimed at: 1) undergraduate courses and laboratories in physical geography; 2) undergraduate courses in human geography: 3) courses addressing geographical techniques including cartography, GIS, and spatial analysis; 4) upper-division seminars on the history and philosophy of geography; and 5) materials designed for K-12 and pre-collegiate curricula.

The project is endorsed by the National Council for Geographic Education, the Commission of College Geography of the Association of American Geographers, and the Geography Education Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.

Funds will be sought to convene summer workshops to bring together teams of geographers to organize and develop these course materials. Participation in the project does not assume previous experience with the Internet or Worldwide Web, but only a willingness to contribute course materials (outlines, essays, resource materials, photographs, and illustrations) to the project.

How to Participate and Contribute

Curriculum materials of all sorts will be required to build the virtual department including laboratory exercises, course syllabi, lecture and discussion notes, and general reference materials such as slide sets. Materials can be made available in any language. Help is needed on at least three fronts:

Alert us to materials you have already published in the Worldwide Web or to resources you have discovered. These can be added to the Virtual Department.
Develop course materials for the Worldwide Web in your subject area. These can be added to the Virtual Department at any time. If you do not have access to the computer resources you need at your home institution, please contact Ken Foote (k.foote@mail.utexas.edu) for assistance. Help is available for getting started in hypermedia authoring and for using computers at the University of Texas for some of your work.
Volunteer to lead the development of additional materials. This might involve seeking out colleagues who are willing to make contributions, forming task forces to address particular topics, and commissioning additional materials. In particular, volunteers will be needed to focus on and coordinate developments in the following areas:

Conventions and standards for review and publication
Materials for undergraduate human geography
Materials for undergraduate physical geography
Materials for teaching geographic techniques including GIS, statistics, cartography, and remote sensing
Materials on the history and philosophy of geography
Materials on current events
Materials for pre-collegiate (K-12) curricula
General reference and research materials

Please contact Ken Foote (k.foote@mail.utexas.edu) if you would like to participate in any of these activities. Work is already underway to save time by coordinating the compilation of comprehensive department and resource lists that can be shared across the network.

Plan of Development

During 1995 the Virtual Department will focus on linking the many geography departments already on- line, inventorying existing course resource materials, and preparing samples of hypermedia course materials. Additionally, volunteers will develop plans for cultivating additional materials within the areas listed above and experiment with formats for hypermedia publication. The emphasis during 1996, in the second phase of the project, will be to hold authoring and curriculum development workshops to create new materials, and to begin to set standards for review and publication. In the final phase of the project, stress will be placed on commissioning materials that fill gaps in the existing on-line curricula so as to offer comprehensive teaching and research materials across the entire discipline.

Sample Materials

Click here to move to the course materials already on-line in The Virtual Department.

Click here to return to The Virtual Department home page.