Online, Engaged Instruction in Geography and GIS Using IoT Feeds, Web Mapping Services, and Field Tools within a Spatial Thinking Framework

Over its fifty-year history, geographic information systems (GIS) have endured numerous evolutionary changes in information technology (IT), from mainframe computers to microcomputers, to personal computers, and to web and mobile technologies (Sinton and Kerski 2020). I argue that GIS has not only endured as a persistent set of tools and methodologies for problem solving through these changes, but it has thrived through these changes. Each evolutionary change brought new capabilities and applications to GIS. Through each change, new audiences came to embrace GIS, bringing a wider diversity of discipline expertise. During the most recent change of GIS to the web, GIS also became increasingly connected with mainstream IT trends, such as cloud computing, machine learning, and distributed architecture. Indeed, web GIS has hastened the adoption of GIS through more users and a wider variety of organizations. When GIS began, some pondered whether GIS would someday be so embedded as an enterprise tool within organizations that it would no longer be recognizable as a distinct set of tools (Goodchild and Longley 2005). In part, this has occurred: In many public and private organizations, GIS has become an enterprise tool, valued throughout an organization’s many departments. In a typical city government, for example, GIS is applied in utilities, transportation, law enforcement, and tax assessment. In a private business such as a convenience store franchise, GIS is used for marketing and testing new products, organizing supply chains, and determining the optimal location for stores based on population growth, zoning, available properties, traffic, and consumer preferences. However, GIS still embraces a unique set of research questions and methodologies: Its practitioners and researchers continually ask “whys of where” questions as they examine change over space and time at a variety of scales. Hence, “spatial” is still rather “special.” Simultaneously, therefore, (1) GIS has moved from a niche technology to an increasingly embedded part of an organization’s IT infrastructure and dayto-day workflows, and (2) GIS maintains a distinct community with its own culture and research methodologies. These simultaneous trends have a deep impact on how, when, and where GIS is taught and learned worldwide. Data