KarlG's blog

Welcome to TeachSpatial Version 2. TeachSpatial is a prototype and a work-in-progress. It is intended to seed discussion, and hopefully, directly assist those who wish to develop spatial learning objectives that span disciplines, or who already have and are looking for teaching resources that might help their instruction.

 Thanks to a small one-year grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education (NSF-DUE 1043777), we have been able to significantly expand and upgrade the site. Some highlights so far include:

In March, 2011 eight researchers from the fields of geography, psychology, earth science, mathematics, cognitive psychology and math education met at a UC Santa Barbara Center for Spatial Studies workshop to take preliminary steps towards developing a set of spatial literacy benchmarks for college freshmen; that is the set of spatial concepts, spatial principles and spatial reasoning skills they might reasonably be expected to have understanding of and/or proficiency with.

In December, 2008 a specialist workshop titled Spatial Concepts in GIS and Design was hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara Center for Spatial Studies (also known as spatial@ucsb). One of the core questions discussed was 'to what extent are the fundamental spatial concepts that lie behind GIS relevant in design?' One approach to answering that is to identify the sets of fundamental spatial concepts that lie behind each field—GIS and 'design'—and find their intersection. We undertook the first step of that procedure last year, and the preliminary results appear in the Concepts section of the teachspatial.org web site. The field of design in this inquiry is limited to urban design and architecture, with concepts drawn from Kevin Lynch's classic of design theory, Good City Form and Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order.