Instructors as developers? Designing, evaluating, and maintaining Web mapping pedagogies using minimal computing

Web mapping curriculum is situated within constant technical flux. Instructors need to balance rapid shifts in mapping technology with the realities of their own time and labor. As such, choosing what technologies to teach, and how to teach them, is of central concern within web mapping pedagogy. To address this concern, I use minimal computing, a processual framework structured by a series of guidelines, including: what we need, what we have, what we must prioritize, and what we are willing to sacrifice. Minimal computing, I argue, has tremendous relevance to the web mapping classroom, and is particularly useful when designing curriculum and tools maintainable by instructors in the long-run. In this article, I use minimal computing to reflect upon the design, evaluation, and maintenance of two free and open-source (FOSS) pedagogical tools, Scrollmap and Web Walking Tour, developed for an upper-level cartography course taught at UW-Madison. Through a combination of instructor logs, surveys, and maintenance reports, I detail how both tools have evolved, comparing results to guidelines from minimal computing, with a particular emphasis on instructor labor. As such, this article serves as both an introduction to each tool and as a replicable workflow for future curriculum development.