The project addresses three important challenges of contemporary higher education: 1) to provide faculty with the skills needed to create hypermedia instructional materials and use the Worldwide Web effectively; 2) to set goals for the development of the discipline-specific educational resources that will support the emergence of "virtual" departments and even "virtual" universities; and 3) to help transform the Worldwide Web from an ad hoc and improvised collection of materials into an orderly and systematically developed resource for education and research. In addition, the Virtual Department Project will address three subsidiary objectives: 1) to establish methods of review and evaluation suited to Internet resources; 2) to create a method for indicating and confirming the intellectual provenance for materials published on the Internet; 3) to provide a means by which electronic publications can be credited to their authors and cited by students and other scholars
To reach these goals, this proposal requests funds to convene of series of workshops and seminars over three years to bring together faculty from two and four-year colleges and universities. Two-week workshops will be held at the University of Texas during the summers of 1996, 1997, and 1998 to bring together thirty faculty from universities across the nation. The workshops will allow faculty to set goals for the development of these materials, to gain skills in hypermedia authoring, and to write the first of these new materials. Participants will return to their departments equipped to complete materials for one new on-line course and to share their skills with colleagues. During each year of the grant, one-day seminars will be held at the national meetings of the National Council for Geographic Education and the Association of American Geographers, the discipline's two major professional organizations. Each seminar will: 1) allow summer session participants to reconvene to evaluate and refine the materials on which they have been at work; 2) present the new materials to a larger professional audience; and 3) offer hands-on training with the new materials.
Yet many of the challenges of using these new resources effectively revolve around people and organizations rather than machines. The technology exists for humans to interact with computers at levels of abstraction and at speeds that mirror human thought processes. The question is how these developments should be guided to benefit students and society through the educated used of information. To exert the needed leadership, it seems likely that disciplines and universities will be called upon to re-engineer and re-invent themselves in coming years, both internally and externally. Some scholars are already forecasting the emergence of "virtual" universities--institutions whose roles will expand across time and space to serve a new and diverse clientele throughout the nation and world using the Internet and distance-learning technologies. Through time, the operational model of the university may gradually evolve from being a physical campus to an institution serving students at distant locations with electronic textbooks, interactive seminars, and hypermedia laboratory modules. The business model now employed by most universities in which revenue is generated by charging students by the credit-hour for courses attended may be radically changed also.
The question is how these same challenges are to be faced by individual departments, disciplines, and professional societies. These institutions--and the research university itself-- arose together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have changed little since. This is because the division of the university into "departments" of knowledge proved an effective way of drawing scholars and students into close-knit communities focused on the pursuit of common research problems. Only in the past decade have information technologies changed the assumptions upon which this spatial and intellectual division of labor was based. The "friction of distance" and the costs of communication have been reduced to the point where scholars and students can now communicate quickly, and collaborate almost effortlessly anywhere in the world. It is now possible to envision interlinking the curricula of geography departments across the nation into a comprehensive "virtual" department in which students and scholars would have instant access to high-quality educational and research resources developed anywhere in the world.
1) The development of new teaching and curriculum models based upon use of hypermedia, the Internet, and the Worldwide Web. Educational technologies expand upon the range of pedagogical strategies that skilled teachers can employ in the classroom, laboratory, and field. They give students access to new sorts of primary study and research material, permit communication and collaboration outside the classroom, support the interweaving of text, graphics, sound, and video, make it possible for students to "publish" findings, and enfranchise students in the global intellectual community. Yet these capabilities have emerged so rapidly that their use is just now being tested. The ad hoc way in which materials are published on the Internet is one of the greatest barriers to finding useful resources. Central to this proposal is the development and testing of a variety of models and the careful cultivation of Internet resources that will be easy to find and use.
2) The training of faculty in the creation and use of these new types of curriculum materials. One of the greatest barriers to expanded use of hypermedia, Internet, and Web resources is the lack of widespread faculty experience with these new educational technologies. Faculty often lack the time and resources needed to get started and to keep up with these techniques. A major thrust of this proposal is to provide such training and experience through summer workshops and hands-on seminars at professional meetings.
3) The creation of a comprehensive, discipline-wide plan for the development of interlocking curriculum materials. At the moment, curriculum and course development is the prerogative of individual departments, as it should be. But the creation and testing of new materials can be very time consuming, particularly if they involve hypermedia materials. There is little need for every geography department to reinvent and test these new educational technologies if such development and testing have occurred elsewhere. By careful planning, time can be invested wisely and experience shared widely among all geography programs. An important component of this proposal is to bring together educators from across the country to set goals and divide the work involved in preparing and testing these new educational materials.
Second, geographers have proven very responsive in implementing other information technologies in education. Over the past decade, courses and programs in geographic information systems have been implemented rapidly and widely. The widespread adoption of GIS technology means that:1) many geography faculty have acquired the basic computer skills needed to advance into hypermedia authoring; and 2) the majority of departments have some type of networked computer facility capable of accessing the Internet and teaching with hypermedia materials. Some measure of this responsiveness is apparent in the fact that, as of 1 May 1995, forty-two American geography departments have begun to publish materials in the Worldwide Web, along with departments at thirty-two foreign universities (appendix 1). Materials for thirteen courses are now available in the Worldwide Web (table 1 and appendix 2).
Third, Geography has been very active recently in developing new curriculum materials and implementing standards for education. Geography for Life: National Geography Standards 1994, developed on behalf of the American Geographical Society, Association of American Geographers, National Council for Geographic Education, and National Geographic Society, outlines goals for geographic education in the K-12 curriculum (Geography Education Standards Project 1994). These standards have already been woven into two major K-12 curriculum development projects sponsored by the NSF and Department of Education: the Geographic Inquiry into Global Issues (GIGI) and Activities and Readings in the Geography of the United States (ARGUS) projects (Hill and others 1994; Association of American Geographers 1994a). These standards are now being carried into college education in, for example, the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change curriculum project (Susan Hanson, PI) that was funded by the NSF CCD program this past year. Geographers involved in all of these projects will be involved as consultants, advisors, and participants in the Virtual Department.
Fourth, by its very nature geographical education can make great use of national and international resources now available on the Internet and Worldwide Web. Materials are already available on-line that pertain to geography's long-standing concerns for human- environmental interaction, regional studies, the spatial patterning of natural and cultural phenomena, and the interplay of the processes of the natural environment in transforming the earth's surface. Using the Internet and Worldwide Web, students can travel around the nation and world to gather data, maps, and information that support their studies.
Apart from the goals set for individual participants, one of the most important outcomes for each workshop will be to set goals and define a three-year revolving strategic plan for the entire Virtual Department Project. The plan will encompass general goals as well as those specific to the courses being developed within certain subdisciplines. Time will be set aside during the workshop for subdisciplinary interest groups to form and develop goals for their materials. The comprehensive strategic plan will be maintained and updated on-line so that participants--and geographers at all universities--can stay abreast of the project and plan their contributions and use accordingly.
A two-week format is required to explore these issues in detail and to prepare participants to continue their curriculum development work at their home institutions (table 2). During the workshops, morning sessions will be devoted to cultivating hypermedia authoring skills. Participants will be introduced to the hypertext markup language (html), html converters and editors, the preparation and use of graphics, the use of sound and video files, creating html forms, and configuring and using Web fileservers. Afternoon sessions will focus on developing effective pedagogical strategies, using the geography standards, establishing plans for the creation of new materials, and setting protocols for evaluating the new materials. Evenings will used for presentations by members of the advisor board who will introduce new topics and for the presentation and discussion of the project's strategic plan.
Although participants will put there first materials on-line during the workshop, they will continue their work at their home institutions. By coordinating this work among participants, the goal of thirty credit-hours of course materials per year can be reached by having each person take charge of developing approximately five-weeks of materials for a three-credit, fifteen-week college course.
Interest in hypermedia authoring and educational use of the Internet and Worldwide Web is very high in geography, meaning that recruitment should not be difficult. The initial announcement of the Virtual Department Project in the December 1994 newsletters of the NCGE and AAG generated within a month almost three dozen inquiries about workshops. Recruitment will be pursued in a number of ways by targeting: 1) departments who have already prepared homepages in the Worldwide Web and are beginning to publish on-line curriculum materials; 2) AAG members on the mailing list for the association's Multimedia Software Committee (approximately 200); 3) members of the AAG's Geographic Education Specialty Group (477 members in 1994); 4) members of the AAG's Commission on College Geography (of which the PI is a member); 5) the general membership of the NCGE and AAG through their monthly newsletters; and 6) announcements sent to the chairs of all 2-year and 4-year geography programs in the United States.
Demand may easily outstrip workshop capacity. Given this possibility, applicants will be asked to submit brief statements outlining their teaching interests and experience, materials that they have developed for their courses, and their level of experience with information technologies. This information will be used to balance enrollment in the workshops by topic and level of experience. Although the workshop will be targeting faculty who are just starting out in hypermedia authoring, all participants will be expected to be familiar with at least one major operating system--DOS/Windows, Apple System 7, or UNIX--and one major word- processing package. In some cases, faculty with some hypermedia experience will be admitted to the workshop as a way for them to further refine their materials and share their know-how with other participants.
These advisors (listed as consultants in the proposal budget) will be involved in the project in two ways. First, they will review and evaluate the goals set and materials created during the summer workshops. Second, they will lead discussions during the workshops on specific topics relating to pedagogical strategies, standards for geographic education, and the development of effective teaching materials (table 2).
In addition to the advisory board, a number of graduate and undergraduate students will be hired for the project as indicated in figure 3. Among the most essential personnel are the two graduate RAs who will be hired on a 12-month, half-time basis for the full three years of the project. They will prepare materials for the workshops and seminars and for provide on- line assistance in hypermedia authoring for all participants. During the summer workshops, two graduate teaching assistants and four undergraduate laboratory assistants will be hired. The TAs will assist workshop participants with hypermedia authoring and library and Internet research for the curriculum materials. The undergraduates will provide routine laboratory and conference assistance for participants and help out with time-consuming graphics production work. The principal investigator is requesting two months of summer salary support in each of the three years of the grant to run the workshops and to prepare materials both for the workshops and seminars.
The first two goals will be met by organizing 3-4 paper sessions and panel discussions per meeting. Three such sessions were organized for the 1995 meetings of the AAG and attracted an average audience of 130 per session. In addition to the paper sessions and panel discussions, a full-day seminar will be held during each of these professional meetings to offer hands-on demonstrations and training for thirty to fifty participants in using the Internet, Worldwide Web, and Virtual Department materials. Such hands-on seminars and demonstrations will be of particular value to geographers who have not yet had an opportunity to work with the Internet and Worldwide Web. These seminars will be convened at facilities borrowed or rented from local universities as it is prohibitively expensive to rent such facilities at the typical convention hotel.
1) Offer complete topical and regional coverage of the discipline. The materials will address all major subfields of the discipline as well as major world regions, and the interlinkages among these topics and regions. The virtue of the hypertext format is that materials can be interlinked so that relationships among subfields and regions can be recognized explicitly.
2) Demonstrate the synthetic and integrative nature of geographical inquiry. One of geography's great strengths is its ability to offer insights into complex interactions among natural, social, and cultural systems. These linkages can be designed into the Virtual Department materials so that students recognize and use them in their studies.
3) Support a number of teaching strategies and classroom and laboratory formats. Students learn and instructors teach in different ways in a wide variety of settings. The materials that are developed to offer options that recognize these differences. Materials intended for classroom, laboratory, seminar, or field use must be developed.
4) Make fundamental use of Internet and Worldwide Web resources. The materials will be designed to link students directly to on-line resources that support their studies and engage them actively in the use of the Internet. This means that even if existing course materials are converted to the Web hypermedia format they will be developed to include such linkages.
5) Follow the standards for geographic education as outlined in Geography for Life. Geography for Life (Geography Education Standards Project 1994) provides an excellent and encompassing set of goals for geographic education. Although intended explicitly for K-12 education, there is substantial overlap with the goals for college geography.
6) Employ a flexible, modular format that can be adapted by individual instructors to the needs of their courses. Every instructor teaches in very different ways covering course topics in different orders and from different perspectives from semester to semester. Evaluation of student performance also varies. The new materials must be designed to support these varying demands so that instructors can pick modules that fit their needs without being constrained to fixed outlines.
7) Provide finding aids that make the materials easy to use. Materials will be indexed by course, module topic, regional or areal focus, keywords, and according to the standards of geographical education addressed in each module. These finding aids will remedy one of the great weaknesses of many existing Internet and Web resources--the difficulty of finding available materials.
The Activities and Readings in the Geography of the United States (ARGUS) project offers another example of how effective teaching materials can be assembled (Association of American Geographers 1994a). The ARGUS materials are organized around a topical outline, but with regional case studies. Four goals are set for each topic: 1) to introduce a skill for analyzing real-world data geographically; 2) to provide information about a specific place; 3) to employ a specific kind of map; and 4) to illustrate a useful explanatory theory of modern geography. In addition, the ARGUS materials were created so that: 1) each activity is tied to an easy-to-describe "engine" or topic; 2) each activity has a role in a larger course, but also is self-contained; 3) each activity provides materials of several levels of difficulty and with multiple springboards for discussion; and 4) each activity is designed with variable time requirements so that it can be expanded or contracted to meet varying needs.
The Geographer's Craft Project at the University of Texas at Austin demonstrates how this format can be implemented in hypermedia format in the Worldwide Web (figure 4). In this case, students gain facility with geographical research techniques by addressing real-world problems and issues. Course materials are divided into four categories: 1) general information; 2) lecture, discussion, and laboratory materials; 3) helpful information and background resources; and 4) an area for students to publish results of class projects. The materials have been designed in modules so that background information is available about each major course topic and for each research problem. This means that other instructors can use these materials selectively, as needed, by linking directly to the module they wish to use.
Other promising examples of on-line course materials are listed in table 1 and appendix 2. These examples will provide models for the development of additional materials. The important point is that the materials must be designed in ways that allow them to be used in a variety of classroom, laboratory, and seminar settings and in ways that point out linkages between topical and regional subjects. Rather than dictating course plans, the materials must be able to be employed flexibly by different instructors are different institutions. Figure 5 provides a diagram of how this might be accomplished. Here a topical module on the resurgence of cholera in Peru is being employed in a course in world regional geography. The module provides linkages to maps of Peru, the World Health Organization, and to another module that discusses issues of cartographic communication. The module on cartographic communication might itself be used in courses on maps and map interpretation, introductory cartography, or even GIS. The module on cholera might be used again for a course on the geography of Latin America. By designing materials in this way, instructors are not forced to teach from a single, predefined course outline. They can build their own courses from the curriculum modules developed for the Virtual Department project in ways that suit their individual needs.
The advisory panel (named above) will be charged with reviewing the overall plans for particular courses and modules. They will be responsible for assessing the goals and strategies adopted by participants and the overall scaffolding for curriculum development. Workshop participants will in turn offer peer review of the materials developed. Their focus will be the content and format of individual courses and modules. This peer review will be carried out on- line via electronic mail and also at the seminars planned for professional meetings. Finally, student feedback will be particularly useful in assessing the value of the new materials. Student evaluations will be of two sorts: 1) formal evaluations of the materials undertaken by faculty participants in their classes; and 2) immediate on-line feedback by electronic mail. To support this latter option, all materials will include interactive electronic mail "comments" forms that will allow students to send messages directly to the authors of the materials.
Interactive on-line review and evaluation via electronic mail and discussion lists will be an important part of this project. Indeed, over the course of the three-year project, plans will be developed for a comprehensive method of on-line review and up-date for all materials. Developing such interactive, on-line methods will be an important part of the overall project and will be a focus of the summer workshops. As the volume of on-line materials grows, this will be a key way to evaluate the quality of new materials and to maintain continuous monitoring of its use. Just as the Worldwide Web offers new opportunities for curriculum development, so to does the Internet offer new ways of implementing review and evaluation
On-line dissemination offers tremendous savings over conventional print media and even over digital media such as video disks and CD-ROM. In essence, distribution costs are reduced to the cost of a connection to the Internet; no other printing or mailing costs are involved. This means that any geography student or faculty member can access the materials anywhere in the United States at any time of day from home, office, classroom, or laboratory. Each individual user can print or copy just those materials needed for a particular course or project.
Some measure of the advantages offered by on-line distribution come from the experience of The Geographer's Craft Project. Modules for this course were first put on-line in the Worldwide Web during fall 1994. By the close of the spring semester of 1995, these modules were being used by over thirty other geography departments, as well as by almost twenty research groups and commercial users.
Dissemination via network is likely to be particularly valuable for BA granting institutions and two-year colleges. The availability of these materials is likely to provide an important incentive to these institutions to establish Internet connections.
The first two issues will hinge on developing, during the three-year grant period, a means by which smaller faculty groups can assume responsibility for the further development and update of materials within specific subfields. In this way, responsibilities can devolve to particular specialty groups within the Association of American Geographers or to panels of subdisciplinary specialists.
The third and fourth issues can be addressed in the design of the materials. All files can be dated and designed to include information about the author, method and extent of review, and the location (or address) of a master copy against which other versions can be compared. Indicating the method or extent of review will be particularly important. At the moment, Internet and Worldwide Web sources provide little or no indication of quality apart from the reputation of the institution from which they are issued. As these resources grow, it will be very important for users to have any easy way to gauge the quality of course materials.
The fifth issue concerning copyright and permissions is an important concern for all hypermedia materials developed for the Internet and Worldwide Web. All existing copyright laws apply to materials published in the Internet. All materials for the Virtual Department Project will be designed with this restriction in mind and will use public domain and newly created materials wherever possible. In a few cases, some images will be copied under the "fair use" provision of the copyright law. Where the use of the originals of some images and text is essential, permissions will be sought from copyright holders. However, the burden of developing completely new, copyright-free materials for the project will not be great since faculty participants will be able to pool resources including personal collections of slides, photographs, maps, and diagrams.
The success of the project led to a subsequent grant, "The Geographer's Craft: Hypermedia for Teaching Geographical Methods in the Liberal Arts Curriculum," which was funded by NSF's Course and Curriculum Development program in 1993 (DUE-9354476, 24 months, $140,000) to provide staff support to develop additional on-line hypermedia materials. By the close of this project during the coming academic year, The Geographer's Craft Project will have published the first complete on-line, Web-based hypermedia text in the discipline. Both grants were instrumental in persuading the University of Texas to provide additional support for equipment and staff.
Foote (1994) has published one article on the project and has another manuscript in preparation for the Journal of Geography in Higher Education on developing course materials in the Worldwide Web. All materials developed for the project are available by clicking here. In the past two years, Foote has made nine presentations on The Geographer's Craft Project at the: 1993 Annual Meeting of the AAG (Atlanta, 10 April 1993), the 1994 Annual Meeting of the AAG (San Francisco, 31 March 1994), the Intergraph Users Group Meetings (Las Vegas, 6 October 1993), Indiana University of Pennsylvania (15 November 1993), University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown (16 November 1993), Texas Geography and Technology Conference (Dallas, 4 March 1994), Texas Alliance Conference (Houston, 24 September 1994), the University of Texas Technology Seminar for Faculty (12 January 1995), and the Austin Regional GIS Users Group (4 June 1993).
Association of American Geographers. 1994b. Guide to Programs of Geography in the United States and Canada, 1994-95. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers.
Association of American Geographers. 1995. Profiles of the AAG Membership 1992-94. Newsletter of the Association of American Geographers 30 (April): 7.
Foote, Kenneth E. 1994. The Geographer's Craft: A New Approach to Teaching Geographical Methods in the Liberal Arts Curriculum. The Pennsylvania Geographer 32 (1994): 3-25.
Geography Education Standards Project. 1994. Geography for Life: National Geography Standards, 1994. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Research and Exploration on behalf of the American Geographical Society, Association of American Geographers, National Council for Geographic Education, and National Geographic Society.
Hill, A. David, James M. Dunn, and Phil Klein. 1994. The Britannica Global Geography System: Geographic Inquiry into Global Issues. Chicago, Ill.: Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation.
