HOW TO TEACH OCEANOGRAPHY WHEN YOU'RE NOWHERE NEAR THE OCEAN: THE APPLICATION OF GIS

The Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Furman University offers a course in Introductory Oceanography designed to develop a fundamental understanding of the principles and processes governing the oceans. This course is always filled to capacity (~25 students per class), mostly with non-science majors needing to satisfy their general education requirements in science. In many instances, this course is one of two science courses the students will be exposed to during their undergraduate college career. Thus it is our responsibility to develop the students' scientific literacy and general environmental awareness, so they can be more cognizant of scientific issues, better evaluate scientific material, and be able to make informed decisions regarding scientific policy.

One problem the class encounters is the long distance of our school from the coastal ocean (4 to 5 hours driving time), so field trips to the ocean are difficult for such a large group and usually given on a voluntary basis. Hence laboratory periods are used to provide the engaged learning experience that usually accompany field trips. This makes the development of labs that capture the interest, engage and challenge the students critical. Incorporating geographic information system (GIS) technology into the laboratory curriculum helps alleviate some of these problems by giving the students a greater capability to visualize, analyze and manipulate oceanographic data. Most of our students have difficulty tackling problems when they have to think in multiple dimensions, especially when they are not physically in the field to experience and observe naturally complicated phenomena. GIS provides a platform to integrate a wide array of spatial and temporal data, and gives the students the ability to visualize and process information that would otherwise be difficult to comprehend.

An example GIS lab developed and used for the course and student responses to the lab will be presented here. All data obtained for the labs were collected from data sources accessible to the public over the internet. This GIS lab will be made available to the public over the web at http://ees.furman.edu/resources.