Don't stop learning

An incredible lesson in life-long learning from one of our landscape architecture students.

CIP Codes

 In case it comes up, here are the CIP Codes for a few of our programs:

B.S. Landscape Architecture 040601
B.S. Environmental Planning and Design 040401
M.L.A. Landscape Architecture 040601

Hands-on student learning in food production

Here is a great story about students getting hands-on experience in research and agribusiness here at Rutgers SEBS. It shouldn't be a big surprise. It shouldn't be a surprise, these students are getting help from people with a deep concern for students. It is interesting to read it with an eye to how we sustain these successes during a time of isolation.

Different scenarios for the fall

Inside Higher Ed has come up with 15 different scenarios for the Fall semester. And, having already posted those, they are now exploring each with a deeper dive (e.g., The Late Start). For planners, scenarios are an important first step in addressing uncertainty.

Presentation tip

A great presentation tip from the GradHacker Blog:

Are you giving a talk to cats? No? Then you should probably put the laser pointer away.

Get better at studying

December 1.
It is time to get serious about studying.
The semester will be over in days.

Instead of dreading the final push, maybe you should take the advice from this author and learn how to enjoy studying.
The A you get in organic chemistry will just be icing on the cake.

Growing negative views of college

The Pew Research Center reports that between 2015 and 2019 colleges and universities have seen their popularity drop from a 63% positive viewpoint to 50%. This is something about which all of us in the higher education community should be aware and concerned.

Emotional response to teaching and research

A new paper by Stupnisky, Hall, Pekrun is summarized by Inside Higher Ed. The paper takes a deeper look at the emotions of faculty engaged in teaching and research and presents findings that suggest that paying attention to the emotional state of faculty could help the university improve outcomes. For example, the article, "Professors Have Feelings, Too," suggests that tenure-track faculty might have negative feelings about research that are caused more by the tenure process than by research. Also, the paper talks about ways that collegiality is impacted by research emotions:

In terms of implications for institutions, Stupnisky found that perceived collegiality correlated with both teaching and research emotions, and perceived balance correlated specifically with research emotions. Collegiality was also a significant, direct predictor of control and value and an indirect predictor of success in both the teaching and research domains via faculty emotions.

As universities continue to evolve, this could be a valuable element to making new faculty more successful and better adjusted.

Trendy ideas

"Apart from technology, fashion is one of the means by which young people reserve the right to torment the old."   - Chris Fleming

A new post at The Chronicle, "The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas," describes/decries a longstanding issue for academia. And, while some of the specifics are hard to translate into GIS, landscape architecture or environmental planning, the essay captures some feelings that will be familiar to many of us.

As we are confronted with new terms and ideas and theories, we have to keep evaluating them to figure out which will linger and which are little more than vapor. But, as Fleming points out, some of them turn out to be useful. If you initially ignored urban agriculture or green infrastructure when the ideas first emerged, the penalty probably wasn't that high. But even if those ideas get renamed/rebranded/redirected over the next few years, you can see that they have been very useful. And for now, they have become important threads of conversation and practice.

Maybe it is because our fields place such heavy emphasis on application, but even conversations about ephemeral issues still often seem to be useful. I remember a couple academic papers that made way too much of a popular Malcolm Gladwell book. And, while their effort capitalize on the author's popular ideas may not have been terribly meaningful, the result was a reframing of some ideas in our field that sparked real conversations about our need to re-examine the assumptions and driving forces of GIS, landscape architecture or environmental planning.

For us, I think that the warning about chasing trends is real, but the dangers might be less than other fields where dead ends seem to collect far more people.

An educational loss

The Wall Street Journal (free for Rutgers students) reported on the closure of Green Mountain College. While losing any school after 185 years is hard, losing a school with a focus on sustainability is especially concerning. Much of the story in the WSJ (an other papers) focuses on the impact on Poultney, NH where jobs and real estate and a sense of identity and community are all severely disrupted. But coming on the heels of the most recent UN report on the environmental crisis, it is curious that there isn't more reporting asking about what this could mean as a larger trend.

Free Webinar

WEBINAR #4: Co-designing sustainable land systems with spatial analysis and mapping tools

TOMORROW! Tuesday, 4 December, 2018 8:00 AM - 9:30 AM EST 
Attendance is free!

The GLP working group on co-production is pleased to invite you to the fourth webinar of the webinar series on co-production in the field of land-system science.

The webinar is open to people already engaged in co-production, as well as to newcomers to the topic, who are not currently engaged in this exciting work. The webinar will focus on co-designing sustainable land systems with spatial analysis and mapping tools.

Description
Land systems are inherently spatial. This means that participatory land use planning and management involve negotiation and decision-making processes on issues such as the location of things, activities, and responsibilities, or the connections and complementarities of functions among different areas. Therefore, tools that help visualising past and current, or modelling future states, extents, and interactions of spatial elements, can play a crucial role for the co-production of sustainable land systems.

Speakers
The three speakers will provide examples on how various types of mapping and spatial analysis tools can be used in participatory processes:

Joan Bastide (Senior Research Scientist, Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), University of Bern, Switzerland. Coordinator of OneMap Myanmar project): In Myanmar, the allocation of land to large-scale palm oil plantations have generated severe conflicts between local communities, government, private companies and ethnic armed groups. In order to address the complex land disputes, stakeholders are now collaborating towards the co-production of land use assessment data and tools by mobilising drones, interactive web mapping, participatory data collection and validation, and multi-stakeholder dialogue platforms. Based on this process, unused land will be redistributed to landless communities and internally displaced populations.

Michael Uwemedimo (Project Director, CMAP, Nigeria). Michael’s project endeavours to give excluded communities in Port Harcourt (Nigeria) the power to put themselves on the map, to identify and analyse key problems and potentials, in view of giving focus to future planning interventions. Youth-led participatory mapping teams are leading the citywide data collection component. Their efforts have ensured that informal settlements across the city are now included in the most ambitious water and sanitation infrastructure project in Nigeria. In his presentation, Michael, will provide insights into this project, which will form the foundation of an inclusive City Development Strategy.

Giacomo Rambaldi (Senior Programme Coordinator, Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation, Netherlands). For the past 20 years, Giacomo has been animating a large community of practitioners engaged in the conduct of participatory mapping, later on dubbed as participatory GIS (PGIS). He will illustrate the diversity of PGIS practices with practical examples and then focus on the use of participatory 3D modelling and on case studies in the Pacific region where the participatory process and follow-up actions have led to profound positive change.

You can also view recordings of the first three webinars and download supplementary materials on the working group's homepage.

Registration Information
Registration is open to 1,000 people, but attendance is limited to the first 100 participants who join the meeting the day of the event, regardless of registration order. 

If you would like to receive copies of all presentations as well as a meeting recording link please register for the event even if you cannot attend.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

REGISTER HERE

Berlin's Floating University

As part of the Bauhaus centenary celebration, Berlin floated a new idea: a university on the water.

Get the most

Frank Bruni recently published an essay on how to get the most out of college. It sounds like it is quickly becoming required reading, because it hits such important notes. Make sure, he explains, that  you learn skills that reach beyond your major:

Another of those skills, frequently overlooked, is storytelling. It’s different from communication: a next step. Every successful pitch for a new policy, new product or new company is essentially a story, with a shape and logic intended to stir its audience. So is every successful job interview. The best moment in a workplace meeting belongs to the colleague who tells the best story. So take a course in Greek mythology, British literature, political rhetoric or anything else that exposes you to the structure of narrative and the art of persuasion.

Of course, cartography is another form of storytelling. And some of our students enrich other experiences with that skill, too.

Expert advice: Picking a major

Each summer Places and Spaces gets discovered by a whole new group of students looking at majors like landscape architecture or environmental planning and design. While many of our readers are well those pre-career days, some will appreciate this bit of help.

A few years ago the NY Times published a helpful piece on Four Steps to Choosing  Major. (It should also include a minor with that)  I like the section on why you should ignore people telling you to follow your passion. But also the quote from Veronica Belmont saying: “If you’re really passionate about a topic, and you want to work in that field, you should already be doing it.”

Spatial learning

Our Geohealth Workshops are reaching more people than I had imagined, when we first started. A recent morning with some high school students in Elizabeth, NJ gave me a chance to share more about geohealth while we talked about the challenges of spatial learning.

One of the tools we used to spark a discussion about spatial cognition, was a seemingly simple 21 piece wood puzzle. How hard is 21 pieces? Plus, we made it based on a county map of New Jersey. We've all seen the counties of New Jersey, right? How hard could it be? Pretty hard it turns out.

Wanna' try? Come to the CRSSA Open House on April 29th at part of Rutgers Day. We'll have several of the puzzles for you to try out and test your skills. Plus, you can learn more about Geohealth

Still a state university?

If schools like New Mexico State University and the University of New Mexico don't get any state funding, are they still state universities? Should NMSU go ahead and drop the S and sell its naming rights? Since Governor Martinez is not an obscure figure (she is chair of the Republican Governors Association), it is worth asking whether any other states might follow suit and abruptly end all state funding for state schools.

Going in the wrong direction

A school in Maryland has banned students from walking to school.

Navigating a post-GPS world

Slate has a piece linked to the announcement that the US Naval Academy is reinstating the teaching of celestial navigation as part of its curriculum. Because, as Lily Hay Newman writes, "someone in the Navy knows how to navigate without GPS if the lights ever go out."

Picking a major

I see a lot of columns on how to pick a major. I never post most of them because they are either bad advice or not very useful (too vague, too specific).But this one from the Nathan Gebhard in the NYTimes education section was actually pretty good. In particular, I like his comments about the difference between following your passion and following your interests. And I thought many students might be well served by following a path a little bit like the one he describes for RadioLab's Jad Abumrad.

Assistant/Associate Research Professor

There is an assistant/associate research professor position posted down at Drexel University. It is close enough to our area that some of our regular readers might find it worth sharing or applying.

The Center for Spatial Analytics and Geocomputation at Drexel University is seeking outstanding candidates for openings as Assistant/Associate Research Professor. Preferred applicants will have a Ph.D. in Geographic Information Science, Computer Science, Remote Sensing, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, or related engineering disciplines.

The College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) is highly interdisciplinary, focusing on basic and applied research spanning information technologies, intelligent systems, visualization, simulation and data analytics. We are seeking candidates with research, development and/or programmatic experience in spatial analytics, geocomputation, remote sensing, spatial decision support systems, open-source geocomputation, high performance and cloud computing.