Instructional Development Award Recipients
Several undergraduate instructors who attended the 2004, 2005, or 2006 SPACE workshops were awarded funds to continue their efforts in integrating spatial analysis into their course curriculums. These pages showcase their achievements. See the full recipient list.
Nancy Obermeyer
Affiliation: Department of Geography, Indiana State University, Terre Haute
Workshop Attended: GIS and Spatial Modeling for the Undergraduate Social Science Curriculum, OSU
Accomplishment: Organized GIS-interested faculty across campus, including faculty in the Colleges of Arts & Sciences; Technology; Business; Nursing; and Health & Human Performance; and professional staff in our Library and Office of Information Technology. We have already begun working to develop greater cooperation that is designed to result in course-work in GIS that will be specially tailored to the needs of each department and their students who request it. These efforts already have resulted in our library installing ArcGIS software on all library computers.
Notable Achievements in Her Own Words
Since returning from the SPACE workshop, I have been focusing on continuing to organize other faculty who are interested in GIS across our campus. Beginning with my Geography/GIS colleagues, we have reached out to faculty in the Colleges of Arts & Sciences; Technology; Business; Nursing; Health & Human Performance; Nursing; and professional staff in our campus Library and Office of Information Technology. We call our group the "GIS Partners". 
Nancy Obermeyer
At our first meeting, those of us who have more experience with GIS proposed to help our colleagues develop modules that will fit their courses in subjects ranging from Criminology to Public Health, to Marketing. These offers have been warmly accepted, and we are now in the process of making them a reality. At the second meeting, our GIS colleague, Ryan Jensen, gave a presentation on GIS for those who were not fully familiar with the software.
We submitted a “mini-grant” proposal to Indiana State University’s Office of Information Technology (OIT). We requested funds to (1) purchase two laptops, two digital cameras, and two GPS devices (“portable data collection” equipment) that we will make available to our GIS Partners for collecting spatial data in the field; and (2) to cover participation by ISU in the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS).
One other important immediate result of our cross-campus collaboration has been that the Library has installed ArcGIS on all its computers, making it readily available to our faculty and students. We hope to continue diffusing GIS software by making it easier for interested faculty to have GIS software installed on their own computers. In addition to continuing the dissemination of ArcGIS (for which ISU has a site license), we will also diffuse GeoDa, to which you introduced me during this past summer’s SPACE Workshop at Ohio State University.
Future Participation
The next phase in our GIS initiative on the ISU campus is to begin to develop course materials for our GIS Partners beyond the Geography program. This is an especially good time to develop these materials because the City of Terre Haute and Vigo County have just unveiled their joint on-line GIS. The City has made their base maps and data bases available to us to develop GIS modules using local data.
We will use these base maps as the foundation for developing local databases that our GIS Partners will be able to use for their classes. For example, in my "GIS Applications" class (GEO442), students are building a GIS using the Terre Haute GIS base maps, then collecting specific data about structures in the "Farrington’s Grove Historical District" near campus. The data students are gathering include incidents of crime in the neighborhood, which has been identified as a problem in the area. This will be useful to our GIS Partners in Criminology.
I will use SPACE support to offer a workshop on campus to help create modules that will meet the teaching needs of our GIS Partners. In addition, a second workshop will help prepare our GIS Partners to use GIS for their research.
Longer term, I would like to present the resulting experience, materials, and process at an ESRI Education User Conference.