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1. INTRODUCTION
The National Center for Geographic Information and
Analysis (NCGIA) in the U.S.A. has developed the
NCGIA Core Curriculum (Goodchild and Kemp, 1990)
for the instruction of Geographical Information Systems
(GIS). The curriculum consists of seventy-five units of
GIS materials associated with sixty slides covering
topics from GIS components to GIS applications. How-
ever, teaching these materials, even selectively, cannot
be easily done because of the complexity of GIS and
because parts of these materials need to be updated from
time to time in order to match the latest developments of
GIS. Traditional methods of instruction rely on linear
media such as textbooks and lectures (Nix and Spiro,
1990). Computer-assisted instruction has made practica-
ble utilization of multimedia in instruction and is mak-
ing impressive progress as an education approach. For
educating people the problems and issues of environ-
mental protection, Purdue University in cooperation
with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
developed seventeen computed-based educational
decision-support systems (Engel et al., 1992). These
systems are being used for the instruction of environ-
mental issues in high schools and have been adopted for
the National Network for Environmental Management
Studies program supported by EPA. Hypertext and
graphics have been used to present information in all of
these systems.
As part of a project utilizing multimedia technology in
GIS instruction, Srinivasan et al. (1991) have developed
a system for teaching GIS applications in water
resources management. The first application describes
the integration of GIS with runoff estimation methods
using the SCS (Soil Conservation Service) curve
numbers techniques (Srinivasan and Engel, 1991). The
second application shows how to assess agricultural
non-point source pollution using the AGricultural Non-
point Source Pollution model integrated with GIS
(Srinivasan, 1992). The third application demonstrates
the integration of GIS with the Aerial Non-point Source
Watershed Environmental Response Simulation
(ANSWERS) model (Rewerts and Engel, 1991). A
multimedia development tool, HyperNeWS, was used to
develop the multimedia systems for GIS instruction.
The NCGIA GIS materials have widely been adapted in
GIS instruction. For example, the Department of Geog-
raphy at San Diego State University uses most of these
materials in their GIS courses (Wright, 1991). However,
students can not learn themselves with the NCGIA Core
Curriculum because these materials were not developed
for self-teaching. In order to make the NCGIA Core
Curriculum wel suited for self-paced learning, we need
to incorporate multimedia technology and to create
hyper-linkages among individual units of the materials,
and we also need to digitize the associated slides and to
link them with a corresponding unit.
The objective of this study was to incorporate mul-
timedia technology into GIS education and thereby
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develop a GIS instruction system. We re-organized parts
of the NCGIA Core Curriculum based on multimedia
organization principles, digitized the associated slides
and stored them in a graphic database in support of the
re-organized materials, and created hyper-linkages
among the materials and slides.
2. NCGIA CORE CURRICULUM
The NCGIA Core Curriculum includes three volumes of
GIS materials, covering an Introduction to GIS, Techni-
cal Issues in GIS, and Application Issues in GIS, respec-
tively. The first volume (Units 1-25) introduces
hardware, software, and operations of GIS; The second
volume (Units 26-50) describes GIS algorithms, data
structures, advanced computational topics, and analysis
of errors; The third volume (Units 51-75) deals with the
applied aspects of spatial analysis, spatial decision mak-
ing, and management issue. The electronic version of
NCGIA Core Curriculum was written in plain text
(ASCII) format without any graphics and hyper-
linkages.
3. MULTIMEDIA
Multimedia (Hypermedia) refers to an evocative conver-
gence of text, audio, graphics, still images, and moving
pictures into a single, computer-controlled product. A
multimedia system offers potential for linking
knowledge units of interest, such as individual chapters
or illustrations of a book. The hyper-linkage allows a
user to access individual knowledge units in diverse
approaches in a repeatable style. The access with educa-
tional materials improves students' ability learn. The
knowledge to be learned can be best taught through a
multimedia system in many cases.
The multimedia tool used in this project was Hyper-
NeWS (The Turing Institute, 1990), which was
developed by The Turing Institute, Glasgow, United
Kingdom. It is a stand-alone hypercard-like multimedia
tool. HyperNeWS runs under a computer-window
environment of OpenWindows2.0 or higher and is writ-
ten in the PostScript language. It can be easily inter-
faced to external languages such as C, and the codes can
be modified to enhance its ability since HyperNeWS is
public domain.
4. HYPER-GIS INSTRUCTION SYSTEM
4.1 System Configuration
Based on the NCGIA Core Curriculum and our experi-
ence in GIS, we configured the multimedia system of
GIS instruction (Hyper-GIS ) in five parts, including an
Introduction to GIS, GIS Applications in Water
Resources Management, GIS Applications in Water
Quality Control, GIS Applications in Soil Conservation,
and GIS Applications in Other Natural Resources
Management. The Hyper-GIS system is hierarchical.
We re-organized the NCGIA Core Curriculum because
we wanted the Hyper-GIS system to be suitable for the