Quick Guide to the Virtual
Department
1. The goal of the Virtual Geography Deparment Project is to develop ways for geographers to share
materials and use the World Wide Web.
2. The Virtual Geography Department is organized into Working Groups , which are further
subdivided into Focus Areas.
3. Working Groups are headed by a group leader who acts as editor and organizer. Working Groups are
sponsored by the group leader's home department.
4. Each Focus Area within a Working Group is headed up by a coordinator.
5. Materials are organized into modules and all adhere to a standard format .
6. Instructions for participating in the Project and
help with getting
started using the materials are available.
7. More detailed information is available below and in the original proposal submitted
to the National Science Foundation.
About the Virtual Geography Department
Project
Work has begun on a project to interlink the curricula of geography departments both nationally and
internationally using the Internet and World Wide Web. The goal of the Virtual Geography 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 is being 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 links existing materials already available on the Internet and, more importantly, has commissioned
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 the materials that might not otherwise be made available commercially.
In addition to the goals of cultuvating and coordinating new curriculum matierials, 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
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 is endorsed by the National Council for Geographic Education, the Commission of College
Geography of the Association of American Geographers, and the Geography Education Specialy Group of
the Association of American Geographers. Funding is being provided by the National Science Foundation
to convene summer workshops in which teams of geographers come together to organize and develop
course materials.
Participation in the project does not assume previous experience with the Internet or World Wide Web,
only a willingness to contribute course materials such as outlines, essays, photographs, illustrations, and
resource materials to the project.
Created 8/19/96 by Shannon Crum. Last updated 8/19/96 by slc.
