SaLIS abstracts

Vol. 61, No. 4, December 2001

 

Editorial Latitudes

Dr. Charles Ghilani, Conference Coordinator

 

The Surveying and Mapping Educators Conference is a forum for educators to openly discuss issues, problems, and solutions that confront surveying education and the profession as a whole. Papers on new and innovative pedagogical methods, new technologies, and informal professional networking have been the hallmark of the conference. The 2001 Surveying and Mapping Educators Conference was no different.

The first National Surveying Teaching Conference was voluntarily hosted by Iowa State University in the summer of 1937 at their surveying summer campsite. At that meeting, seventeen formal papers about the future of surveying education were presented and discussed. This original conference planted the idea of a national surveying organization which is known today as the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping. The tradition of institutions voluntarily hosting the conference has been maintained since that time. At the XVI Surveying and Mapping Educators Conference hosted by New Mexico State University, the attendees selected Penn State Wilkes-Barre as the host site for the XVIII conference and chose the conference title 2001: A Spatial Odyssey.

At the XVI conference, I was asked to collect and distribute contact information of surveying/geomatics faculty. This was accomplished with the creation of the conference web site at http://surveying.wb.psu.edu/suredu/. The site maintains a directory of schools that offer surveying/geomatics programs and shows their accreditation status. The site also has a second directory of surveying/geomatics faculty and brief overviews of recent conferences.

 

At the conference business meeting, the following resolutions were passed. (1) Delegates of the XVIII Surveying and Mapping Educators Conference express their sincere appreciation to Dr. Charles Ghilani and to his staff for hosting this conference; (2) A delegation of Dr. James Crossfield, Dr. Steven Frank, Dr. Steven Johnson, Dr. Gary Hunter, and Dr. William Hazelton should write a white paper on the definition of Geomatics; (3) Future conference hosts create an award to recognize one of the delegates for their contributions to Surveying/Geomatics education; (4) A clearing house be developed containing information on distance education opportunities in Surveying/Geomatics; (5) Future conferences send letters to two- and four-year programs in Surveying and Civil Engineering to encourage their attendance by their faculty at the Surveying and Mapping Educators Conference one year in advance of the conference; (6) Future conference hosts contact professional journals in surveying and civil engineering to advertise the conference; (7) Professional societies such as ACSM be contacted to financially support the conference; and (8) The 2005 conference be hosted by Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. The 2003 conference will be hosted by the College of Geographic Sciences in Nova Scotia, Canada.

 

This year’s conference had twenty-eight institutions from seven countries in attendance. There were thirty-seven formal paper presentations and five workshops. Unless otherwise requested by authors, papers submitted to the conference were peer reviewed for this issue. The selection of papers in this issue of Surveying and Land Information Systems represents a cross-section of the conference presentations. These papers illustrate the issues and topics that are of concern in surveying education. Because the conference had so many excellent papers presented, an additional set of papers was sent to Prof. Joseph Loon for inclusion in subsequent issues of the journal.

 

 

Geomatics Engineering Program Assessment for EC 2000

James K. Crossfield

 

A brief summary of the Engineering Criteria (EC) 2000 requirements precedes a handy checklist of ABET visit preparation steps. Numerous examples and a stylized timeline for visit preparation are also provided. As the other ABET commissions (Technology Accreditation Commission (TAC) and Related Accreditation Commission (RAC)) move towards outcome assessment, this material may provide insight for all educators who must now continue or create an assessment process that will be used to continuously improve their geomatics based educational programs.

 

 

Testing Professional Competence: Are Current Tests Sufficient?

Eric R. Zaugg and N.W.J. Hazelton

 

Surveyors occupy a world between mathematical precision and legal vagueness, between deterministic computation and ambiguous property descriptions. The technological side of the profession’s work has become progressively both simpler and more complex, while the presence of GIS and GPS are starting to bring home the vagaries and errors in the cadastral system. One of the primary duties of registered professional surveyors is to retrace and, in effect, locate boundaries. It is widely acknowledged that this work is at least as much related to experience and instinct as it is to computation and precision measurement. In a critical field in which there are frequently many potentially correct answers, why do we test professional competence using a highly deterministic testing process in which there is only one correct answer, and success can be heightened by the use of test-taking strategies and suitable memorizing of facts and simple procedures? Professional competence, or its absence, is a major concern for practicing surveyors in Ohio. This concern suggests that the current system for testing professional competence is seriously flawed. In this paper, we explore the short-comings of the current testing procedures, outline the consequences we have observed from other research, and suggest ways to improve the assessment of the professional competence of surveyors.

 

 

Using Matrices to Document ABET Self-Study Reports

Steven Frank

 

Writing a complex ABET self-study report can be made easier by the use of matrices to relate objectives to outcomes and other criteria.  Additionally, matrices can be used to find and identify possible shortcomings in a program of study.

 

 

Integrating Practical Field Exercises to Create an Enhanced Retracement Course

Wesley W. Parks and Thomas A. Seybert

 

SUR 313-Practical Field Problems is a free-format course at the Pennsylvania State University, Wilkes-Barre Campus, which offers instructors significant latitude in meeting the needs of students. The central course criterion is the inclusion of “practical field problems.” During the summer 2000 course offering, several practical field exercises were combined to create a practical field/office experience. The main course objective was to complete a retracement survey of the Penn State Wilkes-Barre campus, requiring results in terms of the State Plane Coordinate System.  Thus the survey included control survey aspects not normally found in traditional retracement courses. The product of the retracement was a report to the client documenting the control and retracement surveys in the form of an enhanced ALTA/ACSM land title survey report. The objective was divided into four primary tasks: (1) conduct an external control survey to transfer control from the National Spatial Reference System to the campus; (2) conduct an internal control survey to establish a campus control network to control the subordinate surveys; (3) conduct planimetric and topographic surveys of key campus features; and (4) conduct a retracement survey. This paper discusses the experiences of the instructors in this course, identifying elements that worked well, those that need improvement, and highlighting changes anticipated for future offerings.

 

 

Ensuring the Survival of Geomatic Engineering at the University of Melbourne

Gary J. Hunter

 

Although the Department of Geomatics at the University of Melbourne is the oldest Department of its type in Australia and New Zealand (having celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1999), for over three decades now both internal and external forces have threatened its existence. These pressures notwithstanding, the program in Geomatic Engineering continues to expand. This paper describes the actions that have been necessary to ensure the program’s survival in terms of changes made to course content and structure, the development of new courses at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, staffing, and marketing and promotion.

 

 

Exclusive Right to Writings: The Delicate Balance

Salvatore A. Marsico

 

From “work for hire” to “fair use,” educators are required to know the copyright laws as they apply to the educational environment. As many struggle to present groundbreaking information, the government imposes a gatekeeper function to enforce the federal copyright law. This paper focuses on issues of copyright and the impact of copyright on the teaching environment. 

 

 

Underpinning a Land Management Approach to Surveying Education

 Stig Enemark

 

The paper presents a global model for understanding land administration systems in support of sustainable development. The evolution of these systems is a response to the dynamic relation between humankind and land. Consequently there is need to change the focus in surveying education from predominantly an engineering focus to subjects teaching the new land management a more interdisciplinary approach. It is argued that any future educational profile should comprise measurement science and land management, and that it should be supported by and embedded in a broad interdisciplinary paradigm of spatial information management. An interdisciplinary approach to surveying education makes it possible to address issues and problems in their real-life context. The skills needed to solve problems in this context can be taught through a project-oriented approach to surveying education that focuses on developing skills for “learning to learn.” This paper describes the basic principles of this educational model and builds the case for re-engineering the role of universities to further this new IT-paradigm to surveying education.

 

KEYWORDS:  Surveying education, land management, knowledge management.