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6 Opportunities for collaboration and 
distance education 
Having just presented the major features of 
our web site, our software, and our course, we 
hope that you have seen something of inter 
est, and will take a moment to investigate. We 
would like to propose several ways in which 
our materials may prove useful to you: 
• As a touchstone to spatial/temporal statisti 
cal methods. We are striving to stay current 
with the world of spatial statistics, from 
new techniques to the latest links to web 
sites containing interesting material. Visit 
(and search!) our site; if you don’t find in 
formation about a topic, post a request to 
a discussion forum! 
• As a reference. We have a search facility for 
our site, and if you simply want to know 
more about the variogram, or see what 
we have concerning dengue fever, you can 
search our documents for those containing 
the keywords. Or you may seek papers by a 
certain researcher. 
• As a quick-start or a refresher for a partic 
ular area. You may just need to get a quick 
idea of the basics of geostatistics, for exam 
ple; in this case a visit to our site may be 
the perfect solution. 
• As a launch pad for your own analyses, 
techniques, methods, etc. As we have said, 
we seek interaction with colleagues who are 
also interested in spatial statistics, and we 
would be delighted to consider posting your 
work to our site. If you have a research pa 
per, or an example analysis, or a new statis 
tic to propose, let us serve as a platform to 
help you in disseminating useful informa 
tion. 
• As the basis of a course. You might decide 
to take four or five of our modules and turn 
them into the basis for a course. Our course 
plan is to assign the modules as “reading”, 
then discuss them in class, adding addi 
tional material and asking questions that 
derive from the modules. 
You may have your own ways of using our site, 
and we encourage you to discover them! We 
also have a mailing list, so that we can keep 
you apprised of changes and improvements to 
the site. Feel free to join! 
7 Conclusion: The Future 
We take an iterative or evolutionary view of 
our web site: because our needs will change 
over time, new modules and services must be 
added to the site. This will provide more and 
better choices to visitors to the site, and more 
answers to their spatial analysis needs. We 
anticipate increasing quality in each module 
with time - as we teach from a module, or 
as we get feedback from other users, we will 
incorporate the changes in our site. We hope 
that friends of the site will also provide addi 
tional modules. 
Module development is thus continuous: we 
are in the process of improving modules by 
adding on-line quizzes, which permit students 
to test themselves on their assimilation of the 
material. Modules are being redesigned to al 
low the student to dig progressively deeper 
into the concepts, with a range of treatment 
from the superficial to the profound. Fur 
thermore, in addition to improving old mod 
ules, we are developing new modules, giv 
ing teachers a wider choice of materials to 
include in their own courses. More student- 
inspired modules will be created (based on 
their needs), as we continue to expand the 
range of projects attempted, and analyses in 
dicated. This will go hand-in-hand with an ex 
pansion of the range of presentations on the 
web, which will provide grist for the mills of 
students seeking to explore and analyze their 
own data in new and spatial/temporal ways. 
As an example of a new module developing in 
response to formerly unmet needs, we are cre 
ating a module concerning Hierarchical spa 
tial models; it is being developed with Ge- 
oMed Consultant Dr. Dan Griffith, of Syra 
cuse University. As an example of a new ser 
vice, we are developing an on-line math tutor