You're listening to episode 743 of A Very Spatial Podcast, August 3rd, 2024.
Come in and go in life so quick.
Hello and welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast. I'm Jesse.
I'm Sue.
And this is Frank
and this week we wish Barb well, since she is,
she's taking care of a sick puppy dog, you know, apparently ate something he should not have because that's what puppy dogs do. That's what they do. And it's having the effect that you would think she needs to be near a door for not doing the podcast.
And we think her for that. Yes. Well, I'm sure you think her more than we do. We feel for her for having to open the door and go out with the doggy, but
it's not fun. My brother's dog once made a chair. There you go.
Not the whole chair. Just enough to cause a problem. It was a Rottweiler.
So big dog, big, big chair. She was okay though. Afterward, eventually.
Okay. So on those notes, we are coming up on, well, a conversation. I guess maybe we should start with the little bit. Do we, is there anything from the UC that we actually want to talk about?
You know what? I was astoundingly. Absent from paying attention to UC this year. And I think it's because they've gotten in the habit of doing the, you know, the you know, they do their announcement like two weeks ahead of time. This is what the update is. So, you know,
like you're saying last time, so much of it is in on RTS online that it's already, you know, out before the, the UC starts.
Yeah. So, I mean, it's kind of you know, I know a lot of people from West Virginia went there. There was a pretty good turnout. I got to see video, not videos, but photos from people in the West Virginia Association of Geospatial Professionals. So they had a lot of good things to say and they came back thinking of the field apps are something they need to put a lot more energy into their, their own personal energy into. So I presume that was, Relatively dominant in their experience.
I think whenever I was watching the keynote, you know, there, there's always a lot of little things, but there was no, this is the thing that we're kind of pushing this year. And I think, you know, whenever we started, it was that kind of thing where there was a lot of specifics that were being rolled out at us.
Any given time, but now we've gotten to the point where so much is kind of rolling out and a lot of it is moving between old software and new software or desktop and onto online that it's not necessarily. a new thing per se. It's more that it's just, it's notable that it's there, but it doesn't have that same mid two thousands.
We're making slippy maps kind of feel that the old, you know, UC and where 2. 0 is and all these other conferences, you know, we had these, these things that were happening that were changing, not just the industry, but how. people outside the industry was using and interacting with the industry. So it's just a different feel.
Yeah. And I think, I think for me, because this is the time of year for those of us as educators start looking at the calendar and going, wow, we have like less than a month for most of us. Or so until we start again, it's starting to think, how are we going to present our courses? To students this year, right? What's, what's the, the takeaway of any changes you might have to make?
And I think that this year was continuing, you know, we, we talked about a few things that were, in fact, as you said, Frank, announced beforehand. So, especially got me thinking about a web editor, although I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.
The dilemma that I continue to see kind of each year for the last few years is the balance between things that have been moving online, so the modern GIS, but also those concepts that I think are still best taught on the desktop, especially If you have you know, if you have things that someone might do in a different type of software, but still GIS, I'd still think the desktop and how to use an application is a really important thing.
But it's trying to find that balance now because a lot of the new things are coming out in one, one environment, the online part of the ecosystem, maybe, but on the other hand, I still think the value and the importance of the desktop. So anyways, so the things that. That as I kind of went back to review stuff that I took away from this year's UC is just kind of continuing that conversation in my mind over, you know, how much, how much should I adopt? It might be part of the new stuff.
How much do I still want them to have the grounding? Cause right at the end of the day, every semester, we still have 16 weeks in a regular semester here in the U. S. So still limited amount of time.
And. That just is getting, I guess, more frustrating for me a little bit internally every year to try to say, well, I want to do these five new things, but if they don't understand this other thing that I've taught every year before they do the five new things, they're not going to get it kind of so. So anyway, so for me, it's kind of as I plan my classes. Seeing what's come out everybody, you know, that kind of thing has been been how I've kind of approached it
Yeah, I think that this is a general trend to go back to what jesse was saying in technology in general in general general trend in general, sorry, that everything's very evolving as opposed, you know, he's thinking about my iphone is Getting a little jerky a little slow a little problematic. It's about six years old now i've I know it's an 11 so it's a few And I was kind of thinking of maybe when the new ones come out, we'd upgrade.
And I was sort of looking at the rumors that are coming up for the 16. And I was like, it's all the same, you know, sort of micro evolution, important stuff, better cameras, a better camera. It's nice. More memories, more memories. Nice. But it's nothing. Oh, I have to really have this feature. And even when I'm seeing people are saying, well, yeah, the 16 school, but you really should wait for the 17 because they're fundamentally going to change things. You say, well, how?
And they go to the list and I'm like, it's just an evolution. It's nothing that I can see. That's really fundamental, groundbreaking. And so when I was thinking about that, I was in the U. C. I was like, well, that's sort of the same thing here is that we're just slowly rolling Towards certain things and then rolling towards certain other things. And it's not so much a, a massive schismic shift to this. It's a, Oh, we're drifting this direction now. Oh, okay.
Oh, and now we're going to drift back that direction. So it's sort of constantly staying on top of that rolling ball as opposed to, you know, kind of drifting. Predicting where to jump or where it's going to jump next.
And I think that our, our idea that these things are supposed to be whiz bang, there's something new every year, you know, kind of comes from again, the eighties into the nineties and into the early two thousands. But now I think that it's, It's the conversation, right? It's not going to something with the UC or hexagon live or whatever conference it might be to see the new thing.
You may go there to talk to people and to go to very specific deep dive sessions that you're interested in, but it's really about the conversations about the community. And that's what these events are about. And that, you know, kind of ties into what we were talking about with Bernie last sorry, burn last time. And yeah, I think it's just.
These things are just changing what they are and, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that society is more interested in the conversation and community now than what the neatest and greatest technology is going to be. But maybe that's just me. I don't know.
Or they're interested in the outcome, right? Like, I don't care about the sausage making. I just give me the damn sausage. And so if you go online to make a thing using this, that particular tool set, but then you have to download it to ArcGIS Pro to do this type of analysis and then re up that, I don't care, just show me, you know, where the. Problem areas are the opportunities are the issues I'm facing on a map. Just show me.
But again, that's less the conference is less about that. Unless you're going somewhere to talk to someone about an issue that you're having, because you're spending a lot of time on Google or on Reddit or on stack exchange or something like that to have those conversations community for the. The various sites. So yeah, I, I just,
well, no, I, I think though, I, well, I, I would agree with what both you're saying, but I would say that one of the, one of the things that, that still I find is that there's a lot of power in being, being one of the ones that's actually trying something, right? Because as, as you say, Frank, right I want to see the results. So of all of this array of, of fancy technology and, you know, we've tried to keep up with it and all of that.
The. The things that tend to stick are things that people on the right day show the right people, Hey, this is how it works. And this is what I can use it for because of the 15, 20, 30 different examples you might see, the one that resonates, you might be the one to say, all right, so I can see how to apply that technology and I could see it in my case. And so. Sometimes that's it, right? And it goes all the way back to some of the early episodes.
Like, you know, we talked about just information overflow and what you, what you end up remembering or what ends up getting kept is the thing that, that you see a connection to. So, one of the cool things that a part of the community, right, is that you do come and say, you know, this, this is great.
You might start off with this is my problem, but you might see the thing that among all of the cool gadgets or whatever, the thing that you say, all right, in my particular use case, not only does that give me the result I want, but actually I can see my path to get there. Either you've explained it to me or the skills I already have, I say, that's it. All right.
So for example, I could go and see something super cool in Linux, you know, that's built with Linux, but I would be like, you know, I'm not gonna learn Linux to do that. So I'm gonna move on. But someone else who knows Linux might be like, that is awesome. And I can do it. All right.
So I think that that's one of the cool things about being in the space of the UC or any of these places where you have the community coming together is that it is like in some ways it's in a person where you can go to Google or Reddit or the various forums, but something about just being there in the moment and seeing it. All right. And being able to say, you know, back and forth. Hey, you know, this is my case. What do you think? I kind of think with participants with presenters.
I mean that was always a cool part two for when we were going to dc is getting to go to all the sessions and just seeing how people were actually doing it and you know, I mean just just yesterday right got got back into a little bit of testing out with some vr again and I keep going to vr and leaving because although I can envision How I might want to do it, right? I have to actually follow through with it.
And so maybe I go and I see something like that among the many, you know, whiz bang types of technologies we've seen over the years. But, that I think was always for me the, the great thing about just attending all of the conferences we've been to is just to see it.
So, we are at that time of year, every year we get to August and as Sue alluded to earlier, we are contemplating our coming semester, the next semester after that, maybe the summer after that and, and how we're going to look at geography and that's it, right? We are a geography podcast that spends a lot of our time talking about geospatial, but we're still geographers. And we talk about spatial things.
We just, a lot of times use software and technologies to kind of support that and to give students kind of an entree into a lot of the fields that, and experiences they might have in the real world. So I think that's the question right now. Not are we picking up modern GIS, but you know, what is it that we're doing in terms of geography? Right now that we're we're doing as we're going forward this year.
What are what are our thoughts on geography and what kind of geography we want to focus on this year? What things of geography want to focus on this year? So I'll I'll kind of kick off and, of course, give the most obvious one and probably take a little bit of what Frank might have talked about.
And that is, you know, we've got a lot of conflict going on in the world, and it's having an impact on the political geographies, but also the economic, the food geographies and security that, you know, we can go down through the whole list of natural hazards. And more importantly, in this context, human hazards that have an impact on us in these areas that are changing.
geography is day to day and they may not have longterm ramifications, but they definitely have short term ramifications and we're not even sure where they're going to end up. Some of them have been going on since what was it? Three, what was 10 years ago? So I guess it was two summer Olympics and three. Yeah. ago, whenever Russia decided to start with Crimea and it's continued on with that expansion.
Of course we have what's going on in Israel and they've of course expanded from focusing on Gaza and now are looking at it as more of a regional thing. And so, you know, we have a lot of these things and those aren't the only ones. Those are just the ones that are the most notable on. and have some of the largest amounts of money behind them right now. And of course we're all still curious of what's going to happen in terms of in the context of Taiwan in the next four to five years.
So yeah, that's one of those things that I think whenever I'm talking about geography, it's, it's just one of those things in the back of my mind. How do you talk about how these things are changing what we think of as geography in these areas?
So I was trying to think of a way to not start with the election, but that's as a political geographer, as a political scientist, I'm going to start there. And of course, there's only 90 something odd days as of recording left in the election, but there's always going to be. Post game analysis and why this was here and that was there and what the, the changes across space. And of course, from a geographer standpoint, it's fascinating to look at county level stuff as opposed to state level stuff.
And then, you know, then look at things like urban versus rural and all that kind of stuff is going to be irrespective of the policies that that embodies. And no matter the outcome, it's going to be fascinating as a geographer and a political scientist to sort of tease that out, sort of try to understand what pieces resonated with what space. So that's going to dominate a whole bunch of, oh, easily through March, if not further, you know, into the sort of thinking For me, at least.
However, I discovered something about four or five, six, seven days ago, something like that. I don't think it's a week, but almost a week ago. Then that is piqued my interest. There's a guy that has a YouTube channel and the video that I saw, it was really interesting and I don't remember his name and I'll try to make sure we get a link in the show notes for it. He did a thing about, um, why is Edinburgh the way it is?
And he basically looked at the map of Edinburgh and he more or less goes through all the way from the glacier age till modern day, talking to a guy who's he's a prominent geographer, maybe the official geographer of Scotland. I can't remember which, what he is. But. And he shows the maps and how it evolved and how it changed despite that.
And I was like, this is really fascinating and kind of an old school way to think about geography, but I think it's really neat that he's doing that and talking about the historical context and linking that to the social development of the region. To the physical geography of the region, the whole thing and that has really intrigued me and I'm trying to think of how to do things like that for areas that I'm a little more familiar with, you know, how to engage on that.
So that's gotten me excited and I really want to try to do that at some level. This year, I don't know that that's, um, anything YouTube or very spatial related or anything like that. But, you know, it could be or maybe just fun for Frank. I don't know.
Well, I think for me and my, my cultural landscape focus that a lot of what I've been thinking about recently in, in terms of projects.
Working on and, and what I'm going to talk about with students and especially when I talk with them in the spring and even over, over Christmas because have a couple opportunities to do education abroad, but I've really started taking a look at a lot of the discussion on over tourism or on, you know, tourism numbers and people and thinking about one of the things I do is try to represent landscape and experience of landscape and It's really interesting that a lot of the
mechanisms that I've been using in my own work to say, well, this is how we can capture elements of experience, right? Are also, interestingly, those things as we see the social media explosion, right? That are looked at as, you know, I must go and get this. and capture this moment in this place. And it's driving a lot of people to visit places that they're not experiencing the same way. So that's always the catch 22. This is definitely not a new thing, right?
It's always the catch 22 of tourism is especially if you talk about, you know, idyllic landscapes or peace and quiet, or, you know, this, this, or that, as soon as you change the dynamic by having a lot of people there it, it changes the experience. And. And my, my question increasingly, too, is like in those moments, are you really having an, are you really experiencing the landscape and its elements and, you know, what might be different and going on, right?
So this is me kind of getting up to speed because there's a lot of work in this area from lots of different disciplines, but, but for me to kind of contemplate it as, as I think about replicating those things, you know, that's what I want to do.
And, and how the, my very act of doing it, you know, is capturing something different and maybe looking at that from, from a different lens might be, might be something that, that I think, you know, students should think about or, or people should think about when you're having a discussion on geography, right, and landscape and inhabiting landscape you know, what is, what is really going on there.
So, so anyway, I mean, obviously, I'm still kind of catching up to my thoughts on that, but, but it's something I hadn't thought about.
in doing this sort of work until, you know, I really started taking a look at that and especially, you know, some of the flashpoints that have been happening this year as we've seen the real ramp up, you know, a couple of years now to really ramp up post post COVID as people start traveling all over the world or have started and continue to travel all over the world.
I put the link in the show notes to the video and this shows how busy Frank has been because that actually just came out. Yesterday and for some reason, my brain, I had shot that back three, four, five days. I just apparently watched it yesterday. It's a gentleman, but I, and I think I've seen one or two of his videos before, and I'm not going to speak to how you know, name is Daniel's Steiner. If you take a moment to look subscribers, but I did like the way he presented it.
And I did, of course, I like old maps and he basically uses the old map as a mechanism for explaining why these things happen. So and the gentleman he engaged with is you find that he's got a book, it's expensive book, but he's got a book from the national library of Scotland. He works there and his name is Christopher Bleat. He's the author, one of the two authors of this book. So
go check that out. I don't know. You know, we've, we've got another year coming and at the same time that we're teaching, we're also doing stuff. We continue to try to do very spatial as we Lumber towards 20 years.
I know the thing that I want to do this year, and I've been wanting to do for about at least five or six years, but I really do want to jump on the reels, Tik Tok, whatever the heck they're called little short videos, but for an educational point, like, you know, w w what is scale? And there's just, you know, a 30 second, one minute quick thing about this is scale, you know, what is, you know, what is. What do we mean by color theory in cartography? You know, it's little things like that.
I really want to do those short videos because I think they would be useful for a whole lot of people. But it's just carving out the time is always the tricky bit. Got to write them. Yeah, that's the thing. I got to write them and then I got to video them and then I have to not look at the video and then go, Wow, I sound and look like an idiot. I just have a look at the video and edit it. So that's always a tricky bit.
You can use those little cartoon things.
I thought about that. I was like, and then it doesn't involve me and it wouldn't be a big deal. But we're actually cleaning up our podcast space. You can't see this cause obviously it's audible only, but we've cleaned up our podcast space quite a lot. Unfortunately, the particular angle that Jesse and Sue see looks like we're under construction or not. It is going to be a decent space to do those things. So I should really,
well, let's maybe, you know, get a, a, a. Not a laptop camera. Yeah, well, there's that too, but that would change the the angle. We've got the Recreatus podcast that we're doing on Digital Heritage and Hopefully I will be able to get dr. Bergeron to sit down sometime in the next three weeks to record the first two video episodes So we can start getting those up. That's a 10 episode series that's funded by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.
That is supposed to be done at this point, but we've had some issues getting students hired because they don't seem to want to apply for jobs. So we'll see how that goes. But I think I'm just going to heavy hand it in and have them involved, but just kind of press forward. Yeah.
Sometimes you gotta.
Yeah. Cause we have another year to get them done. And it's, it's a good topic to have a podcast and video series on. It's just starting it as we all know is. That's a problem. So if you want to listen to the first two episodes, which is me and a couple of the students that were working in the spring, but they both graduated, which is why basically we got them up to speed and ready to go. And then they graduated.
And they left.
It's a dilemma. Yeah. It's a dilemma in our world in, in, in a student working. Is that when we get them up and, well, what we're basically doing is, I guess, our job or training them to go elsewhere and, and be successful. And they are, it's just, we look back and go, I wish you were still doing that for me.
Yeah. Yeah. So keep an eye on that. You can go over to Recreatus which is R E C R E A T dot U S, Recreatus and checked out that. Podcast, which is, is, it's about virtual heritage, but we're doing kind of digital heritage broadly to give it context for the first couple of episodes of the video series. And again, we'll be doing audio short audio, at least not like these hour long, sometimes conversations more focused.
So another thing I'm doing is our institution's pushing micro credentials a lot and for good or bad, you know, that's certainly a debatable point, but it is something that, that our institution has decided is a focal point, a strategic point maybe. So what I'm going to try to do is work up some geospatial micro credentials. That, you know, use a mix of Edgery's courses in the virtual campus and stuff that we put out to kind of put it together into a cohesive unit.
And so I think that'll be kind of fun and kind of interesting to do to, you know, what, what is a micro credential? And so I'm thinking like enterprise GIS, you know, a micro credential and getting it set up and configured, you know, that type of thing. So that'll be fun and challenging to do. micro enough to be a micro credential, but macro enough to be meaningful and useful.
Do you want to try to define micro credential today?
I, I'm going to give you a half hearted attempt. There is a definition, but it is also very different from institution to institution. And it's in, in our institution, our state, it's still in let's just call it alpha form. It's still being pushed around and workshopped a little bit, but basically. The idea behind a microcredential is a body of knowledge or information that is cohesive, yet very directed at a specific topic.
So like an eight hour course would be like a day, a one day workshop type of thing. Equivalent content.
Good question. And this is where the scale problem comes in, in terms of education, because they've talked about a series of three of those may be a micro credential or a certain number of those things could count for a wide number of credit hours in a higher education institution.
The idea behind a micro credential really is to get you to sort of, once you bought into the micro credential and you've got enough of them together, maybe you should start thinking about a major or getting a degree or, you know, something like that. That's sort of the idea. They're not so hidden agenda behind the scenes. So there's a whole lot of math to figure out. How does a micro credential, you know, translate into a three hour course? Or does it? Or you know, all that stuff.
So that's why I said it's really, really on shifting sands, which is why I did a really terrible job of answering your very simple and very good question because we don't have one yet.
Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's the thing. There is no accrediting body for these things. at this point. So without that, you don't have anything to point to and say, that's what it is.
Well, there's also questions and not yet a consensus on who they're pointed towards, right? Because some of it would say, well, this is continuing education for professionals. Others are like, well, but these are things that, you know, students could tailor the, the undergraduate level and get out, you know what I mean? So, so even there, right, you run into definition questions because the micro credentialing and the length, right?
The number of minutes that you're, but all those things have very different meanings depending on. Depending on what level you're at because some bring in rules that come in the U. S. from our Department of Education, others, you know, are, are different professions that have like rules on that and it's, it's just very, it's tough to, tough to sort out.
Where of course you can just toss out the good old fashioned badges. We don't need no stinkin matches.
Now we tried the badges at, at at our university.
Yeah, we have, we have a whole, we have a whole software that does badges like the whole thing we subscribe to that and it keeps track of them and actually, it is in West Virginia Higher Education policy commission. They have, they're setting a policy for micro credentials.
And that's one of the things in there is that you do have to track of the badges and all that stuff as part of your, Documentation requirements, which is creating some its own headaches because we're used to documenting degrees and minors and stuff like that. But it's luckily I'm not directly involved in those pieces of it, but it is a big I'm tangetically involved, which is why I know a little bit about it.
But and on top of that, you'd say there's no accrediting body, but Accrediting bodies are now starting to look at micro credentials. And so as something they could accredit, but then that's going to throw a hole into the layer of definitions and whatnot on top of it. So if there's as different than, for example, the West Virginia higher education policy commission and whatever, Organization works in your state that, you know, governmental organization that keeps track of this stuff.
Then how do you reconcile that? It's it's a very fluid area.
They call that like a liminal space, right? It's not. Is that what the term is that they're floating in between? Like, because. They don't necessarily fall under the rules that we know of for programs, but if they're complete, if they're not within the space of the higher education body, then what's the point kind of thing. So they're, they're sort of in that space. It's like a Venn diagram thing. Yeah. But anyway, I was just, I was just laughing.
I was just thinking about like liminal space stuff that are just out there and they could float closer to things like attractors, but they could also be repelled by some of the rules in the program.
So now you're adding chaos theory into it.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's crazy. That's crazy.
And a lot of this actually is derived from basic demographic problems. You know, the demographic cliff that we're all dealing with in higher education in the United States, I think other places as well, but certainly within the United States of, okay, now we have a lot less students and we need to. You know, still keep the lights on. So how do we do that?
And so I think that to your question, Sue I think that a lot of debate now is happening between the, like you said, is it continuing education? And if so, you know, is this something for GIS professionals that are trying to get, you know, training hours for the GISP? Does it fit that need? Or, you know, teachers trying to pick up skills for their continuing education that they're required in many states and West Virginia is one where they are. That's one dimension.
And then the other, of course, is, is that, is it a recruiting tool to get students who, you know, decided not to go to college, but then, you know, pick up this micro credential and they go, Oh, I actually kind of like this. This is fun. This is enjoyable. Maybe I can continue on and then go to college a little bit later in life. And nobody, everyone seems to agree that both scenarios would be wonderful and we should focus on both scenarios.
But the problem is, is that who you market it and how you market it and how it's designed and you know, all that sort of stuff isn't the same for both audiences. And that creates its own. Tensions and problems. So it is a very fluid space that is kind of fascinating. And I just thought, Oh, wait a minute. GIS, this is a great place where you could do micro credentials. So, you know, if you just get it back down to brass tacks and you could go either direction, cause we can focus on.
Very specific skills and very specific outcomes and things that people can pick up, I think.
Yeah. I I've had the luck to work with a PhD student in education over the last year and luckily get the chance to work with her again this year. Who's looking at just completely forgot the gogy. It's not pedagogy. It's not heutagogy,
I don't even know them all.
It's the one that starts with an A, but it's basically looking at adult learners. And one of the things that she's been finding as she's looking at these things more and more, and she's really deep diving into some of the communities that are talking about it is the fact that we have so many people who are approaching or at retirement age who are. looking at doing not true retirement, but basically shifting to a new area and looking for training in those areas.
So yeah, it's just becoming a whole other thing that we think of adult learner as being someone who's looking for changes in job placement. But no, now we're talking about not the 30 to 50 year old or 30 to 60 year old. Now we're looking at that population of 60 plus and you know, the opportunities. to be a little bit. It's not Machiavellian. I don't know what it would be, but basically another pragmatic, pragmatic. Yeah, that would be a good way of putting it.
Another population to pull on if universities would do so now. It's kind of weird because also most states have low or no tuition. For people who are in an age group in every state's a little bit different. Some it's 55, our state at 60. I don't remember what it is in West Virginia. I did look it up, but yeah, it's just a whole other population. And if they become degree seeking, then they pay fees and things like that. If they're not, then they don't.
It's less that they pay and it's just a whole body of people that we could take advantage of. Yes.
That also adds another dimension to the content too, because some of them are just as much interested in enriching kinds of micro credentials, right? So we've focused on kind of the skill based ones, but there also is a whole rich area for these types of micro credentials in concepts or, you know, in, in areas like, you know, someone might go to a museum, but if they've had a little micro credential in art history, then they can.
I appreciate the symbolism and all that kind of stuff that maybe they didn't get exposed to, or, I mean, in our area, I was just talking with another faculty about, you know, someone trying to understand some statistics things, and their problem wasn't so much that they couldn't manipulate, you know, whatever the, the equations were, it's that they didn't have a good grasp on the other concepts. of, of data interpretation.
And so like a mat, you know, those kinds of micro credentials where, you know, I look at a data set and I see a regression line and what am I actually looking at? Right. What does it mean for hypothesis testing or what is the true significance, right? Those types of things some of it is practical, but some of that is also kind of concepts that, so even the content of what you would do with a micro credential is just, it's wide open and.
So I think it's, I think those kinds of things are somewhat cool, but they definitely fly in the face of the structure of higher education in most places, right, which is built around these lengthy terms and, you know, and time invested and, and so I think the balance is hard.
We have to, I shouldn't say the word change, we don't need to change higher education, we need to broaden what we think of as higher education.
Back to the evolve thing, right? Maybe evolve is not, I mean change is happening anyway, but evolve and how we conceive of it and what the goal, you know, what Anyway, there's been a lot, there's lots of talk about this, but, but it's one of those things, again, where when you're trying to apply it in your case, suddenly the talking has to have, it just, it, once again, I go back to one of my favorite metaphors, and most of you would never have seen this, but it was a Dilbert cartoon that had a
whole bunch of people sitting around the table, and then the first one says, my project is a paradigm, and the next one goes, my project is paradigmatic, right?
And nobody knows, or, The example from a TV show called Better Off Ted where there's this project that everybody's like getting on board with called the Javawaki Project, but it's made up and no one wants to admit it's made up, but then the last person gets it, they ship it off to research in Japan, and there's a folder on it that says Javawaki, and the response from the scientist is, I just wish there was a second page, right? I just wish there was a concrete explanation of what's going on.
I think it was. Is there a page missing?
Yeah, or is there a page missing, right? So where's the second page? But I feel like that with a lot of things and right in this discussion on microcredentials and just trying to like grasp something is so slippery, but yet could be so cool. I think it's something that we're just, we all grapple with, but.
So for those of you who are like, Jesse, you're an idiot. The word is andragogy. So I, my memory does come back eventually. So I didn't know what that was. Pedagogy. Heutagogy. andragogy pedagogy, of course, our traditional idea of what we do in K to 16 area heutagogy is how we self learn.
So that's really tied more into like the MOOCs and what we do is as adult learners, as we teach ourselves things, and andragogy is getting into that adult learner type of space where we're trying to, they're still talking about different ways to approach that. And this, you know, micro credentialing is Something that can be used in any of those three. Go, gees. I just, I did get a certificate in this stuff.
Well, there you, I just knew the one,
I, I learned something new. I'm excited. Yeah,
that's right. TIL right.
I don't know what that means.
That means "today I learned".
Oh, today I learned.
Yes.
See for me that's the old NBC. The more you know, but Okay,
nice. That works too.
Yeah, it works too.
I'm not as cool
and as gi I, Joe told us, knowing his half the bat, oh wait, that was He-Man knowing his half, half the bat?
No, that was, that was GI Joe.
Was it both?
It was GI Joe.
Wait, what did Heman say then? I don't know. You're right, but I guess it was GI Joe. No one thought the power It was, I can't remember what their catchphrase is, but perhaps someone will tell us. So, I mean, some stuff has to make way for new knowledge.
Okay. So that's we kind of drifted from the geography, but you, you get the idea. There's, there's a lot of ways that we, we have to think about these things and there's lots of different. Folks and things to talk to now onto the event corner. Of course, we want to encourage you to go out to events. These communities are back in person for a lot of them, even though some of them are still in online. First one.
GIS pros taking place October 7th through the 10th in Portland. No, not that Portland, Portland, Maine.
And then.
NACIS 2024 is going to be. October 16th through the 19th on the opposite coast in Tacoma, Washington.
Of course, if you want us to add your event to the podcast, send us an email to podcast at veryspatial. com.
If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at sue at veryspatial. com.
You can reach me at frank at veryspatial. com and you can reach Barbara at barb at veryspatial. com.
I'm available at kindaspatial and of course if you'd like to find our contact information it's veryspatial. com slash contact. As always, we're the folks from Very Spatial. Thanks for listening.
And we'll see you in a couple weeks.
Life's so quick without your gospel, I wouldn't know that I was sick. The spirit took me by the eyes. My selfish heart had lost its way. This way, when I saw the man of light. Your hands are always reaching out. Pointing towards the narrow road, so I don't drift out. God in spirit, I thank you. For holding me in the thick of it. And loving me through. Through and through your spirit is bullying on my soul on life, soul.
Been my eyes peeled For the plans that you are letting loose to be caught and fulfilled Spirit lead my changing heart Lead me by the light And pull me through the dark Spirit is a point On my soul On the bitter days of life You pull me closer, closer Spirit is a point Alright.
On my soul, Pointing me closer, Every day closer, Your spirit is pulling, On my soul, On the bitter days of life, You pull me closer, Your spirit is pulling, On my soul, Pointing me closer, Your spirit is pulling, Much closer.