Open educational resources for cartography: the Thematic Mapping Tutor

9 At the ITC faculty of the University of Twente, we have been teaching cartography for more then 60 years. Throughout this period, the technology of mapping has undergone spectacular changes and nowadays most students do not draw their maps any more, but use software instead. However, for maps to be effective in communication, their design still has to follow the same rules as before. Ideally, one wants to teach these design rules independently from the tools, such that the students understand how a good map works, not just which buttons to click to create it. 10 11 12 13 14 15 For this purpose, we created the Thematic Mapping Tutor. It is an open, web-based system that provides a structured way of constructing thematic maps out of selected data. The system uses the input of the student to construct a map in the Vega-Lite grammar, which is transformed to web-graphics. 16 17 18 In this paper we describe the educational philosophy behind the system, as well as technical details about its functionality. We report on first tests, and reflect on the possibilities and pitfalls of the system. 19 20 OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES FOR CARTOGRAPHY 21 The term Open Educational Resources (OER) has been defined as “teaching, learning, and research 22 resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that 23 permits their free use or repurposing by others” (Marcus-Quinn and Diggins, 2013). The concept of OER 24 comprises the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology 25 in general and the World Wide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to 26 share, use, and reuse knowledge (Atkins et al., 2007, p.4). It is agreed among education communities, and 27 backed by institutions, e.g. in the Paris OER Declaration (UNESCO, 2012), that to achieve the United 28 Nations Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals (specifically those concerning education), OERs 29 are an essential asset. 30 ITC, the Faculty of Geo–Information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente, is an 31 institute that aims at capacity building and institutional strengthening for developing countries, specifically 32 by providing higher education curricula. One might expect such an institute, with its mission and close 33 links to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, to embrace the notions of OERs. However, currently 34 we are only just starting first tentative experiments. There are myriad reasons for this, mostly out of scope 35 for this paper, but one in particular is the nature of much of the education at ITC: teaching people how to 36 practically gather, model, analyse and communicate spatial data through the use of software. To freely 37 share such exercises publicly, one has to share the software, and in many cases its license will not allow 38 that. But over the past years, open source geospatial information technology has reached a significant 39 level of maturity, flanked by open standards and the open data movement. This has resulted in using more 40 and more open source software in our education, specifically in the domain of spatial data infrastructures, 41 where we try nowadays to adhere to what we call an SDIlight philosophy. 42 The SDIlight philosophy at ITC 43 In teaching at ITC, and specifically in the Geoinformatics curriculum, we emphasise two principles. The 44 first addresses the systematics of purposeful spatial data production and uptake into computerised systems; 45 PeerJ Preprints | https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27203v1 | CC BY 4.0 Open Access | rec: 14 Sep 2018, publ: 14 Sep 2018 the second addresses the methodical construction of these computerised systems, applying principles 46 of model–driven architecture, formal specification and transformational design of SDI nodes. The term 47 Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) traditionally denotes large, complex systems, using proprietary software 48 systems. But its principles can also be applied in simpler and more cost–effective ways, and this approach 49 we call SDIlight . We have the students work with, and build, a software stack consisting of free and 50 open source components. To achieve interoperability, we emphasise the use of open standards, from the 51 Open Geospatial Consortium and others. You can find more details on SDIlight and its implementation in 52 Köbben et al. (2010). 53 Teaching Cartographic Communication Basics in an OER 54 As part of our various curricula, we have been teaching cartography now for more then 60 years. 55 Throughout this period, the technology of mapping has undergone spectacular changes and nowadays 56 most practitioners do not draw their maps any more, but use GIS or other software, or programming 57 languages. However, for maps to be effective in communication, their design still has to follow the 58 same basic cartographic communication rules as before. Ideally, one wants to teach these design rules 59 independently from the tools, such that the students understand how to make a good map, not just which 60 buttons to click to create it. We teach our students the basic rules of cartographic communication as a 61 series of analysis and decision steps, based on the Graphic Grammar of Bertin (1967) and simplified into 62 a workflow explained in a series of slides, and a poster (see Figure 1). 63