=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1557/paper2
|storemode=property
|title=Crowdsourcing Spatial Thinking Resources across Disciplines and Educational Contexts
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1557/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-1557
|authors=Marinos Kavouras,Margarita Kokla,Eleni Tomai
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/cosit/KavourasKT15
}}
==Crowdsourcing Spatial Thinking Resources across Disciplines and Educational Contexts==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1557/paper2.pdf
Crowdsourcing Spatial Thinking Resources across
Disciplines and Educational Contexts
Marinos Kavouras, Margarita Kokla, Eleni Tomai
School of Rural and Surveying Engineering,
National Technical University of Athens
9, H. Polytechniou Str., 15780, Zografos Campus,
Athens, Greece
{mkav, mkokla}@survey.ntua.gr, etomai@mail.ntua.gr
Abstract. GEOTHNK is an online repository and an authoring environment for
the collection, creation, and sharing of educational resources and scenarios that
treat spatial thinking from a wide range of perspectives – disciplines. The
approach is based on crowdsourcing: (a) the collection of open resources and
tools, and (b) the development of educational scenarios that enhance spatial
thinking. The paper discusses the analysis of resources and the semantic
organization of spatial knowledge within the GEOTHNK environment.
1 Introduction
Spatial thinking has been acknowledged as critical for increasing participation and
success in STEM disciplines [1], but also highly relevant to social sciences and
humanities [2]. Spatial thinking is defined as a constructive synthesis of three
components [3]: (a) concepts of space, (b) tools of representation, and (c) processes of
reasoning. For example, in order to identify areas vulnerable to flooding due to a sea
level rise, learners should grasp spatial concepts such as location, distance / proximity,
and elevation, use representation tools such as maps and terrain modeling, and be able
to perform reasoning processes, such as combining maps and evaluating multiple
criteria (e.g., the location of settlements) to make inferences about environmental
consequences. However, research has shown that the components of spatial thinking
are not treated equivalently in education; low-level spatial concepts are given priority
relatively to higher-level spatial concepts and spatial representations, whereas higher-
order cognitive skills are rarely promoted [4].
GEOTHNK 1 is an online repository and an authoring environment for the
collection, creation, and sharing of educational resources and scenarios that focus on
enhancing spatial thinking. Through its authoring environment and the semantic
organization of spatial knowledge, GEOTHNK promotes this consideration of spatial
thinking as a synthesis of spatial concepts, representation tools, and reasoning
processes.
1 http://portal.opendiscoveryspace.eu/community/geothink-community-400866
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2 Organization of Spatial Knowledge within GEOTHNK
GEOTHNK is incorporated within Open Discovery Space (ODS)2, a multilingual open
learning platform for sharing eLearning resources; however, it has its own authoring
environment, semantic structure, search mechanisms, and visualization tools. Beyond
English, GEOTHNK is developed in five languages (Bulgarian, Dutch, German, Greek,
and Romanian).
GEOTHNK is based on crowdsourcing educational resources and scenarios mainly
from: teachers and teacher trainers, university students, science center educators, and
adult learners. It may apply to different educational contexts (primary, secondary, and
higher education), both in formal (school or university) and informal environments
(science centers or independently on the web). The crowdsourcing approach is
supported by organized implementation and validation activities such as Workshops,
teachers training courses, competitions, and summer schools.
GEOTHNK includes two types of resources: educational objects and educational
scenarios (or pathways). Educational objects are individual, and reusable digital units
such as text, images, maps, websites, and interactive and multimedia materials.
Educational scenarios describe a whole lesson plan or any other formal or informal
activity and rely on the inquiry-based educational model. The authoring environment
offers two templates for designing educational pathways: (a) a pre-structured template
mainly for formal activities and (b) an open template mainly for informal activities.
Educational scenarios are designed based on the definition of spatial thinking as a
synthesis of spatial concepts, representation tools, and reasoning tools: users are able
to enrich their scenarios with these components. For example, Fig. 1 shows the addition
of concepts accuracy, map, and scale to an educational scenario.
GEOTHNK includes 342 concepts, defined by the consortium, both spatial (e.g.,
coordinates, altitude, and distance) and non-spatial (e.g., natural resources and
alternative energy), concepts referring to tangible objects (e.g., city and canal) and
concepts referring to abstract notions (e.g., form and connection). This set of concepts
is developed based on a analysis of existing vocabularies, including TeachSpatial3, the
Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT)4, the Canadian National Standards for Geography5,
the Open Discovery Space6 controlled vocabulary, and the Geography Dictionary &
Glossary for students7. Each concept is described by three elements: (a) a term, (b) a
definition, and (c) links to useful resources (Fig. 1). Concept terms and definitions, as
well as their between relations are derived from WordNet [5].
The concepts and their between 802 taxonomic relations form a semantic network
which supports an alternative, graph-based way of searching for educational resources
(Fig.2). It is also an integral part of the development of educational scenarios since
users are able to add concepts to their scenarios by selecting them from the semantic
network.
2 http://opendiscoveryspace.eu
3 http://teachspatial.org/
4 http://scot.curriculum.edu.au/index.html
5 http://www.cgeducation.ca/programs/geography-standards/default.asp
6 http://www.opendiscoveryspace.eu/
7 http://www.itseducation.asia/geography/
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Figure 1. Attaching concepts, representation tools, reasoning tools, and other resources to
educational scenarios.
GEOTHNK provides also links to various categories of online representation tools: (a)
maps, map viewers, and map making, (b) country maps, (c) atlases, (d) historical maps,
(e) virtual globes, (f) satellite and areal imagery, (g) data visualizations, and (h) models.
A reasoning tool may be any kind of tool (educational game, learning activity,
interactive application, etc.) that may facilitate the understanding of a concept or
scenario and prompt reasoning processes. Reasoning tools, due to being scenario-
specific, are added by users.
Users contribute to the repository in different ways: they are able to create new
educational objects or scenarios, reuse educational scenarios developed by other users,
tag educational resources, and create new reasoning tools. The aim is to underpin the
collection and creation of educational resources relative to spatial thinking from
different perspectives - disciplines. For example, some educational scenarios that relate
to the concept scale are:
Distances and scales
Earthquake – A natural phenomenon
Geographic coordinates and maps
Geographical orientation for 6th grade
Logarithms in science
Maps and Diagrams
Moon travelers
Night Sky
Perceptual image of an urban environment
Spatiotemporal evolution of the Aegean Archipelago
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Figure 2: Graph-based search of GEOTHNK resources.
3 Conclusions
An underlying assumption of the project is that the geospatial domain is inherently
transdisciplinary. This assumption was overly verified by the variety of educational
scenarios related to diverse subjects such as Geography, Mathematics, History, and
English teaching. Another assumption that remains to be verified in future steps is
whether the enrichment of educational scenarios with spatial concepts, representation
tools, and reasoning tools may indeed enhance the spatial thinking skills of learners.
Acknowledgments. With the support of the Lifelong Learning Programme of the
European Union Pr. no 543451-LLP-1-2013-1-GR-KA3-KA3MP.
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