American Association of Geographers Meeting - Virtual Globes Session Today

Just had the Virtual Globes session this afternoon in San Francisco for the AAG conference. Needless to say, all the virtual globe sessions (yesterday's as well) were very well attended.

So, as promised, here's the slide presentation from today's talk on using Google Earth in higher ed. I think it went pretty well.

Though I'm not going to post the text of our talk, here is the abstract; I would say that we stayed pretty true to the original message of the abstract.

Sharing Project Data Using Google Earth: Doing GIS Without Learning GIS

Author(s): Meg Stewart*, Mary Ann Cunningham, Kirsten Menking, and Ken Bolton - Vassar College

Abstract: Google Earth transformed the public's ability to visualize landscape features through imagery and is amplifying spatial literacy and geospatial awareness. Increasingly this program is serving as a platform for GIS data with more individual purposes. We have begun to use Google Earth to serve data to other users on campus, in order to facilitate communication about research projects, to support teaching, and to aid in community outreach. Beginning with a set of data for a collaborative stream monitoring project, we have used this approach to present our data to the public, as well as to provide cross-platform data access to participants of various projects. We have also used Google Earth with locally-produced data sets to support workshops and demonstrations in non-GIS classes and across disciplines. While this application is in early stages of development on campus, it has proven a useful tool for these communication purposes. The intuitive interface of Google Earth allows us to more quickly and easily produce maps and distribute them by way of the Google Earth community bulletin board than we can if we used an internet mapping service product or traditional GIS software. We present our progress here to show our methods, to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to data distribution, and to help initiate exchanges of ideas on these kinds of directed applications of this software.