VIRTUAL GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION: ARE WE TOO FUZZY IN OUR APPROACH TO TEACHING SPATIAL CONCEPTS?

The cognition of geographic principles and spatial concepts has an association with human memory, perception, reasoning, common sense, and spatiotemporal knowledge of both objects and events. Recent advances in commercial geographic software, both in the areas of GIS and GPS, such as Google Earth©, have an amazing impact on human spatial perception. Currently, a pertinent question might be, “are we putting too much of our efforts, as educators, on geospatial principles in a virtual sense, such that our future geoscientists will experience challenges in differentiating reality from geospatial representations? Might “virtual” fieldtrips be, at best, second rate substitutes to real field trips, in regards to experiencing nature in its intended setting?

Research in geographic cognition is not new, having been explored as early as the 1950's by behavioral geographers and psychologists alike (Montello, et al., 1998) concerning the processing of spatial concepts by humans. Yet, with all of our recent technological advances, undergraduate students still have difficulty in grasping geospatial concepts. Students frequently juxtapose dataset attributes and rarely plot points precisely on a map (Waters and Evans, Centre for Computational Geography, U.K.).

GIS is a tremendously useful system for managing and visualizing spatial data. It has become, in short, a “smart map” tool that allows users to create interactive queries, analyze spatial information, and edit data. However, is it really doing justice to future geoscientists to learn exclusively by a virtual method? Perhaps to supplement the curriculum, but if it is presented in lieu of fieldtrips, then we must ask ourselves if we are not seeing the “forest for the trees” in our geospatial educational curriculum.

A recent study by Ishikawa and Kastens (2005), published in the Journal of Geoscience Education, found that two approaches can be used to promote insight into assisting students with spatial cognition. While their proposed methods are most certainly viable approaches to geospatial education, albeit classroom techniques, a suggested strategy might be to return to the traditional field trip for education, in addition to the virtual display techniques.