new jersey geographer » Teaching

Thoughts on the start of the Spring Semester

John Reiser — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 12:45:44 +0000

Today marks the beginning of the Spring Semester. For many students, this will be their last semester at Rowan University. For me, I’ll be teaching GIS II, which is mostly upperclassmen, and Intro to Mapping and GIS, which is more mixed, but often filled with freshmen. I know most of my GIS II students by now; all of the Intro to Mapping students are brand new faces. One big change this semester is that I’m in the Pilot Group for the University’s move to the newest version of Blackboard. I’ve been rewriting my materials so that more of the course is available through the web. In doing so, I’m putting more of my materials out there on the web for anyone to use, provided they comply with the Creative Commons license. While most of my presentations have been available online for anyone to view, the class materials have been a somewhat different story; if I’ve put them online, it was only on my university web page and not a service like SlideShare. I feel more reserved about posting classroom materials online for two main reasons.(...)
Read the rest of Thoughts on the start of the Spring Semester on my blog.

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Post tags: creative commons, presentations, Teaching

MAC URISA and posts from the conference

John Reiser — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:00:21 +0000

I’ll be at MAC URISA in Atlantic City from the 4th until the 6th. On the 4th, I’ll be conducting a introductory-level workshop on Distributed GIS. On Tuesday the 5th, John Hasse and I will be at the Interactive Expo presenting our “Changing Landscapes” report and interactive maps. Wednesday the 6th, I’ll just be enjoying the conference. The materials from the conference will be available on my presentations page.

I decided to finally hop on the Tumblr bandwagon. I’ll be using it to post pictures and short notes while on-the-go. To me, Tumblr seems like a good middle ground between blogging and tweeting, and that’s how I’ll be using it. My Tumblr blog is at notes.njgeo.org or njgeo.tumblr.com. My most recent posts (tumbls?) will also show up in the sidebar of this blog. Look for updates from the conference and if you’re planning on attending, make sure to say hello!

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Post tags: Atlantic City, conferences, MAC URISA

Projects featured on Rowan’s home page

John Reiser — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:59:37 +0000

I’m proud to say that I now have two articles written about my work that have been featured on the Rowan University home page.

Most recently, Mapping the Guard (still on the home page) was posted, detailing the great work performed by students for the New Jersey National Guard. I’m very pleased to be heading up this internship program, because I feel that the students leaving the program will be excellent candidates for GIS positions. The students are learning about SDSFIE and other data schema, how to edit data in a multi-user environment, and working with web-based GIS services.

Way back when I was still an adjunct, Mapping the Campus in Layers was written. It’s a good read, because now that I’m at the University full time, I’ve worked to put the pieces together so that we can do much more.

Check back within two weeks about one of the projects we’re working on now. It might not be front-page material, but I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

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Post tags: ArcGIS, Internship, Mapping, Rowan University, SDSFIE, Web Mapping

Urban design photos

John Reiser — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:45:37 +0000

Nipper Building, Camden

I’ve been organizing my digital photography library and posting some of my better pictures to flickr. The “Urban Design” collection highlights pictures that illustrate important urban design principles. I plan on using these photos for the future planning classes at Rowan, but you’re welcome to use them too, as I’ve released them under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

Oh, and many of the photographs have been geotagged, either manually or through GPS records. I’ll be adding older photographs when I get time and new photos as I take them.

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Post tags: geotagging, photography, urban design

Student Experiences with OpenStreetMap

John Reiser — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:08:03 +0000

This semester, I integrated OpenStreetMap into my GIS II class by requiring students to research an area on OSM that lacked detail and update the map. OSM is a great real-world demonstration of some of the GIS principles we’re discussing in the class, such as topology and how different models represent features in the real world.

(...)
Read the rest of Student Experiences with OpenStreetMap on my blog.

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Post tags: geography, GIS, OpenStreetMap, Teaching