AnthroSpace

I have been teaching a GIS course for several years now and I have constantly tried to work towards a better integration of the technology and the substantive research. As I reported earlier, use of the Meyer 220 classroom has significantly impacted the way students interact with the tools as well as the material.

Last year I was approached by Political Science Professor Jonathan Rodden, who suggested to team-teach the class. I was very excited about this opportunity to expand into a multidisciplinary course, closely tied to faculty research. We applied for and received the Hoagland Award Fund for Innovations in Undergraduate Teaching to support this course, an additional recognition of our attempt to bring innovative elements into the class. In this course, now named “Spatial Approaches in Social Science”, we take a collaborative, project oriented approach to bring together technical expertise and substantive applications from the social science disciplines. We integrate tools, methods, and current debates in the social sciences in a course that enables students to engage in critical spatial research and a multidisciplinary dialogue around geographic space.

The course culminated in a digital poster session. We rolled in additional monitors, where students presented their term projects as digital posters in a public event. A number of social science methods courses deal with the issue of integration of technology and research, so my own teaching experience turns immediately into the benefit of other faculty I work with. I am currently supporting Anthropology Professor Ian Robertson, who is teaching his course “Quantitative Data Analysis in Archeological and Anthropological Research” in the same space.

This quarter I used iPad to work with digital copies of the assigned readings in my class. I used a combo of three applications, iAnnotate, NoteTaker and iA Writer to replicate exclusively on the iPad what I usually do differently.

I used two methods to load the readings, one directly from Coursework[1], through the Web download capability of iAnnotate, and via iTunes. iAnnotate needs some time to process the downloaded files, if they are large, but it is acceptable. The main glitch is that all downloaded files end up in one generic place, (depending on which upload methd you use it is in “Recents” or in “Web downloads”). I have a number of documents in iAnnotate, and all are organized in folders. It proved to be a real nuisance to have to find the files and move them into the folder I had created for the class readings. This could be easily remedied if iTunes recognized the iAnnotate folder structure, which it does not currently, and if Web download would allow to choose a download location.

Reading social science research papers is different from reading a novel. I find myself jumping back and forth a lot. What was the title of this section again? What was that model that the author used to run this regression? Sometimes, all figures are added at the end of the paper. Doing this in iAnnotate is a drag, as you are left with scrolling. I ended up adding bookmarks for each section, but it requires some marking up of your document simply in preparation to work with it. I also used the capability to jump to a certain page number, which of course requires you to know about which page number you want to go to.

Annotations is what iAnnotate is made for and they work reasonably well. I did fight with the interface at times, misinterpreting the “x” (for close annotation tool) as “x” for delete, for example. I worked with a stylus to mainly underline sections and I very occasionally used the free-hand drawing tool, which is not very precise. I additionally used iA Writer to type out more extensive comments, questions and summaries, which requires to add page numbers to refer back to iAnnotate, then switch between the two apps and find that page.

During class discussions I used NoteTaker to quickly take down additional comments, questions, or remarks. I am unable to type fast enough, and NoteTaker affords me the flexibility to include sketches or graphs, which I do quite frequently. Again, there is no way to directly link these notes to the article. The iPad’s multitasking capability has made it very easy to switch between apps, wich was very useful for my needs here. But what if applications like these could really talk to each other, and we could conceive of a modular toolbox?

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[1] For how to get articles in Coursework see my experience with JotNot, a tool I have come to really appreciate.

Sparked by Bill Rankin’s alternative approach to map segregation in Chicago, dot density maps of segregation in US cities have become popular (here and here).
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