GIS Technology

I am applying for a job at a local community college as a teacher of GIS. I have the qualifications, and its only part time. It might turn out to be good, or might be a disaster. I really don't know.

Since it's teaching, I've been pondering what sort of things I'd be lecturing to students about. According to their department, its about training people for jobs in GIS software and using GPS and other remote sensing devices to work. A fine idea, but the obvious thing that comes to mind for me, having actually DONE THAT for a living is GIS is divided into formal accuracy and coding (data mining and applications). These are the extremes which pay.

Everything in the middle is a muddle of "good enough", most of which is freeware and online apps that normal people use to find something and print or download a map to get there. Nothing more complicated than that, really. Google Maps and Google Earth are a great easy example of this. You don't have to pay a fortune or track down obscure data and convert it to work on your application. You get Google Earth and you do a quick Earth Gallery layer search. View the chosen data and there you are. Easy.

So this leaves me wondering what-all I can teach students who probably already have Google Earth GIS experience before taking the course. I'm not an App coder. I don't enjoy that. I am not qualified to teach or certify Surveyors, and that job ad isn't asking for it anyway.

What I CAN teach is how to help students of GIS use their GPS devices more effectively, free data, free online resources for mapping and historical documentation (WikiMapia), how to work with volunteers and NPOs to solve problems. Why do I focus on those? Because GIGO. In the real world, free data is often best because it is updated the most frequently. Paying for data means you're usually getting the old stuff someone insists is worth money, and hasn't accepted reality. Google Earth killed ESRI's plans of consumer GIS. ESRI is one of the giants of the industry, before Google decided to just give this stuff away and update the data constantly. I used to use ArcInfo and ArcView, the primary ESRI products which costs thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars to setup and run. And the big lesson? GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The cost of primary data is exponentially expensive based on its scale. Large scale is massively inaccurate, and ESRI will display that data closer than its accuracy justifies, since its vector based data, which is a line in space. Its not necessarily accurate, however. This is REALLY important if say, you use that data to build a house thinking you missed the mining tunnel but really should have paid for the surveyor team and your house literally fell in. This is something that actually happened. There was a lawsuit and a settlement and disclaimers on my maps because of this. It was before my time in GIS, but only barely. These days error in GIS make people take the wrong turn going somewhere, and those funny stories everybody has are actually a royal b17ch to correct the code for. A job I don't want. And eventually someone will cleverly figure it out, so don't bother thinking fixing those is a career.

I imagine I can help people decide if they want their GIS to be hobbyist level or for a living. Help them to decide between Surveying GPS and coding GIS applications. Neither of which can I do, personally. Hobbyists can use an instrument like the one I've got to map a trail, accurately enough, to add it to a popular trail map layer for Google Earth, which in theory would allow that free uploaded trail to be downloaded to someone else's GPS so a hiker can find it if they get lost along the way. Or maybe snowshoe it in the wintertime. Hey, people do that here. It's the Sierras. A skilled hobbyist with a GPS could leverage that into retail sales, a blog, a book, a series of videos, some kind of thing like that. Expertise is valuable sometimes.

I don't know that a job application will turn into an interview or a job. School starts in about two weeks. I can't see going from nothing to teaching a class at start of semester. It's unreasonable. So I keep applying at local jobs. Something will turn into work.