ITSRG

During the last four years, ITSRG has sponsored the BITS Program, an after school and summer intensive program aimed at increasing information technology skills among students enrolled in local public high schools. The program has involved over 400 high school students and reached out to their families across North Philadelphia to raise community technology skills and improve preparedness of students to pursue their educational aims. We focus particularly on broadening participation among underrepresented youth in science, technology, engineering and math - so called STEM fields of study.

Today, Barack Obama’s campaign held a rally at Progress Plaza, located in North Philadelphia - next door to ITSRG’s location on Temple University’s Main Campus. Our recent opening of the ITSRG Workroom, a community-university computer technology learning space located in University Services Building at the corner of Broad and Oxford Streets, is the culmination of our long effort to situate our community outreach and collaborative programs in a dedicated lab on Temple University’s campus. We have aimed to create a spot where students from the surrounding neighborhoods can join with Temple students and faculty in the exploration of the local community, gain an appreciation of the geographer’s eye for learning about people and places, and build information technology and geographic analysis skills through hands on learning activities that are fun to engage.

Our students have been studying Progress Plaza throughout these past four years. They have examined it in the context of the Charles Blockson-inspired program to demarkate sites of importance in the African American experience throughout Philadelphia. They have examined it in terms of its role in supporting community health because of the dental and chiropractic community services that are located at the shopping center. They have considered the magnitude of the loss of the neighborhood’s only supermarket ten years ago and its long term impacts on community nutritional needs and food security concerns. They have anticipated, along with the whole ITSRG staff, the promise of the return of a new grocery store. They have examined the use of Progress Plaza’s ramps to provide accessibility for wheelchair users to the shops and services and thus fostered an understanding of how built environments can shape social inclusion in the local economy. They have tested the availability of wireless Internet services through Philadelphia’s free wi-fi available through Wireless Philadelphia at Progess Plaza, concluding that the wall along Broad Street is not a bad spot from which to use an Ipod Touch!

As ITSRG begins recruitment for BITS 2008, we observe the dramatic changes that are occuring at this historic hub of local economic development in North Philadelphia. Who could have imagined when we began teaching students from the community how to take digital photos, create blogs, make maps using web applications, and use collaborative technologies to share their work with each other that this spot would be a backdrop in a presidential election of unprecidented historic proportions four years later? The event may be momentary, but the symbolism at this historic site founded by Leon Sullivan forty years ago will resonate in this community’s memories for years to come. Maybe that is why people stood in a half-mile long line beginning at 6:00 am this morning to catch a glimpse and be a part of the moment.

Michele Masucci, Director - ITSRG
Temple University

Michael Rovito's up close and personal encounter with the new media has been eye opening to say the least for those of us who know him well as a friend, co-worker, researcher, scholar, and mentor to high school students.  We have kidded him all week long that among the most unlikely bits of the stories surrounding his brief exchange with Sarah Palin last weekend was the fact that he was identified as a student because he was wearing a Temple University T-shirt due to having attended the Temple-Western Michigan homecoming game at the Link with his family. His reflections on the experiences of the past week are shared in a Huffington Post interview with Brett Ashley McKenzie that was published earlier today.

Governor Palin's choice to address the question he lobbed to her at Tony Luke's has provoked a series of issues for us to reflect upon as well. As a community of scholars, we at ITSRG seek to critically analyze the relationships among web 2.0 and geographic information technologies and digital inclusion and civic engagement concerns. The 15 second sound bite caught on camera has been the proverbial stone in the pond to cast a thousand ripples of impact across the various social, political and public networks of all of the stakeholders captured in the clip, not the least of which is the voting public itself in this election season.

Palin's sphere of impacts stems directly from her status as the number two person on the McCain presidential campaign ticket. Most of the mainstream media attention has focused on examining the content of her answer against prior policy statements of McCain himself. We know this because media attention has made public McCain's responses to reiterated versions of Rovito's original questions.

We perceive that the public at large is paying attention due to the voluminous blogosphere reactions expressed as posts, comments to posts, links, and views of Youtube videos related to the exchange.  We also have a perspective that reactions on the ground at Temple are ones of support and pride because one of our own had the temerity to question a candidate and agree to go on the record with his motivations for doing so. We are intrigued about what is happening between those two spheres; however, we are simply having difficulty assessing it because of our social proximity to the actual event.

Smaller ripple effects relate to the content of Rovito's questions as opposed to Palin's responses.  Michael Dorn has pointed out in his comments to our prior post that one of the least examined issues related to the Palin-Rovito exchange is how difficult it is for academic geographers, much less the voting public, to learn facts and access discourse about what is happening on the ground in Wasiristan.

Philadelphians are also trying to make sense of this moment in the recent political spotlight at the unlikely setting of Tony Luke's precisely because it is one of the few geographic locales where Palin has been relatively unguarded in her dealings with the public. At ITSRG, we have taken note of the curious geographic scale jumping involved in both the prior circumstances and aftermath of the 15 second interaction.

We have encountered cynical commentary suggesting that Palin's handlers may have assessed that South Philly would be a pocket of the city where residents sympathetic to her viewpoints as well as life story could be found. If that was the case, a quick glance at the Huffington Post election campaign donations map might have provoked a different conclusion, since the City of Philadelphia as a whole and its small South Philadelphia contingency of campaign donating "Joe Sixpacks" reads mostly blue.

Maybe the idea was to visit an "authentic" Philadelphia establishment in order to connect with the local culture. Tony Luke's is one of a multitude of must-go-to Philly destinations for visitors and tourists. Its geographic proximity to the stadiums makes it a particular favorite for event attendees.

The role that new media is playing in connecting - as well as disconnecting - local and national geographies is not yet well understood or theorized. Perhaps because of this, the degree to which the decentralization of information flows can reshape the dynamics of political discourse at the aggregate scale was unanticipated as well by the campaign.
 
Whatever the geographic thinking was or was not in the choice to stump at Tony Luke's last weekend, one thing has emerged since then. The word "gotcha" has become inextricably linked to the campaign rhetoric. Along with this has been an effort to delegitimize information entered into public discourse through so called gotcha journalism and journalists, gotcha questions and questioners,  gotcha voters and gotcha  derived content including gotcha geography.

Michele Masucci
Director, ITSRG
Temple University
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Update 10/06/2008

Michael's new blog is called Rovito Review - it can be found here.

Update 10/05/2008

Rumproast comments on Rovito Huffpo interview; plans podcast interview on Wednesday, 10/8/09. Read more here.

On Saturday, 10/04/2008, the California Democratic Party implemented an Ask Sarah Palin action, in which a live, streaming billboard fed Twitter and text messages in real time at a Palin campaign rally in Los Angeles. Messages were fed live throughout the event; a prerecorded video of the action can be found here. The action was reported by ireport here.

ITSRG Twitter followers are no doubt aware that we have been tracking the rapidly growing Internet and Mainstream Media (MSM) story of our Graduate Fellow Michael Rovito's exchange with GOP Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin at Tony Luke's in South Philadelphia this past weekend. It seems clear from the video captured of the Rovito-Palin exchange over US strategic interests in and around Pakistan that neither she nor her handlers anticipated that folks in South Philly would have the sophistication to be concerned and conversant about their campaign's foreign policy positions.

The Rovito-Palin exchange, now infamously referred to in the blogosphere as the Cheesesteak Gaffe, is of interest to the information technology and geographic blogging communities. We noticed that the entire exchange was captured and recaptured by others in the crowd on cell phone cameras. The end of the video footage shows Governor Palin helping one of those cell phone users to verify her identity to the conversational partner with whom he was speaking. We have all done it - we see something, someone, some place of great interest and immediately pull out our mobile devices and contact members of our social network to let them in on our mini adventures and encounters through sharing stories, photos, email messages and GPS-derived locations on-the-fly. This epoch decentralization of the technologies used to stay connected with our social networks and to exchange digital information illustrates the importance of understanding not only the viral way in which information is shared, but also the proxy arrangements that are embedded within those information exchanges.

That the actual questions posed to Palin by Rovito were so quintessentially geographic in nature highlights the importance for IT and geographic educators, scholars and policy makers to come to terms with the implications of the hyper-googled earth we live on. This exchange illustrates that at any time, in any place information can be brought to bear on issues and problems in real time. The explosion of news attention to the Cheesesteak Gaffe illustrates further that the speed of traveling information often obliterates the ability to interpret context. 48 hours after the exchange, political analysts like Michael Smerconish are conducting interviews with Michael Rovito  to gain a sense of why he asked those specific questions. That George Stephanopoulos drew from the exchange of a citizen's questions directed towards Palin on This Week to probe McCain further about his policy stance on tracking terrorists between Afghanistan, Waziristan and Pakistan is a breathtaking sea change in not only how journalism is implemented but also in how information is exchanged.

This is a story that started at the grass roots and was promoted via the internet, followed by the release of video footage taken by a CNN reporter. It is precisely because of the cell phones of ordinary people being put into use to share their excitement of a rare sighting and close proximity to Palin with friends and family that the story broke before the video footage was aired. During Michael Rovito's interview with Smerconish he reveals that he did not have time to digest the meaning of her responses until after the entire exchange was concluded. Only then did he fully grasp that he caught her on the record agreeing with Obama's position on Afghanistan. The MSM storm followed the citizen use of IT, which collapsed the geographic scales, boundaries, and protocols that accompany information flows. McCain's response has been to sequester Palin once again as the only answer to controlling the speed and power of information on the ground. His campaign failed to effectively harness social media when it opted out of the use of Twitter during the primaries; and now the strategy to geographically isolate Palin fails to recognize that the electronic footprint has already kicked up crazy amounts digital dust that cannot be contained.

Michele Masucci, Director - ITSRG
Temple University

Update: 9/30/08: Related Blog posts

Last night, Katie Couric interviewed McCain and Palin, questioning them about their reaction to Rovito's questions of Palin; McCain calls Rovito a journalist involved in Gotcha politics. Then Couric reminds him that Rovito is a citizen. Here are reactions; the video of the Couric interview is embedded throughout these posts.

Read Rumproast's review of the Nguyen CNN interview of Rovito, in which she questions him twice about whether or not he engaged in "gotcha" journalism (he did not, he is a graduate student who works as a research fellow of ITSRG), here.

Michael was interviewed by CNN, see report here.

Michael was interviewed by Fox 29, see report here.

The Huffington Post discussed the gotcha comments of McCain and Palin with Couric here.

Rumproast points out that Rovito seemed more knowledgeable about current global politics than Palin. Read more here.

BL Rag also comments on the audacity of blaming a citizen for asking a direct question of a candidate; somewhat ironic given McCain's desire for town hall style debates. Read more here.

In his Stuff White People Like blog, humorist and cultural critic (to use both terms rather loosely) Christian Lander sarcastically sings the praises of 'raising awareness.’ Tongue held firmly in cheek, Lander defines ‘awareness’ as ‘the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it.’

Now, awareness isn’t all bad; in fact, it really is an important thing, an essential component to any kind of major movement for change. Lander’s point, and my own, is that awareness in isolation is pretty useless. A nice gesture, sure, but so was that 'Mission Accomplished’ banner we had flying over in the Persian Gulf a few years ago—and we all know how well that worked out.

National PARK(ing) Day, as it currently exists, is all about raising awareness. It’s a powerful communication tool, taking advantage of the high visibility of its PARKs to help engender a re-imagination of the urban landscape. And to that extent, it’s fantastic. The way a message is communicated is often as valuable as the message itself (as any post-Inconvenient Truth convert to climate change activism will no doubt confirm for you), and a PARK is a pretty memorable medium.

The problem, however, is that communication—even especially effective communication—can only get you so far. The message matters, obviously, but so do the various uses to which that message is put.

Ostensibly, PARK(ing) Day is supposed to be about making our cities greener, and thereby more livable. For a number of the participants in Philadelphia’s PARK(ing) Day, however, making our cities greener means making them more money. Of approximately 35 “official” participants in PARK(ing) Philly, more than fifteen were architecture, landscape architecture, design or engineering firms for whom “the greening of Philadelphia” also means the greening of their wallets. While it’s not my place to say whether the various national and international firms that participated in Philadelphia’s PARK(ing) Day truly did so altruistically, it’s also impossible to deny that for such firms, a purely monetary interest in greener cities most definitely does exist.

Whether or not much of Philadelphia’s “official” PARK(ing) Day event (organized, it must be noted, by the American Institute of Architects) violated the philosophical spirit of PARK(ing) Day, numerous aesthetic violations most definitely did occur, as “official” participants dispensed with possibly the most poetic aspect of a real PARK(ing) Day celebration—the meter itself.

Talking the Parking Authority into extending the two-hour time limit on a space is one thing; talking the Parking Authority into actually bagging off the meters is entirely another. As if the corporatization of Philadelphia’s PARK(ing) Day hadn’t done enough to kill off the anarchic spirit of the initial event, the AIA and PPA felt it was necessary to deliver this coup de grace. Working within the law to perform an act the legal establishment might not necessarily love (but can’t legally do anything about) is different from asking the same legal establishment to allow you, just this once, to “break” the law—with official sanction. It’s like shoplifting something you’ve already paid for: for all intents and purpose, an empty gesture.

Later in his entry on ‘awareness,’ Lander makes another interesting point: ‘Raising awareness is also awesome because once you raise awareness to an acceptable, arbitrary level, you can just back off and say, “Bam! did my part. Now it’s your turn. Fix it.”’ The humor in Lander’s statement, unfortunately, stems from its truth. For many of its participants, PARK(ing) Day 2008 is likely to be an isolated event; awareness raised, they can now go back to living their lives, and perhaps expecting a little more business to trickle in as a result of their “involvment.”

For the Temple students involved in this event, however, September 19th was just the beginning of a process about more than just “awareness.” It’s about investment, it’s about involvement, it’s about imagining our future.

And we’re not poised to make a cent out of the whole thing.

Peter A. Chomko
Temple University

Paving Your Way with Journals and Conferences and Web 2.0

The ITEST Learning Resource Center (LRC) is hosting a webinar event today that focuses on eliciting lessons learned related to disseminating ITEST project outcomes. I will share my thoughts about this based on my experience as PI of the BITS Program, ITSRG's ITEST funded initiative. Other presenters for the event are:

Len Annetta, Principal Investigator of the Highly Interactive, Fun Internet Virtual Environments in Science (HI-FIVES) project, a Cohort 3 grant; and

Leslie Goodyear, Research Scientist, ITEST LRC. Leslie will share conference and journal opportunities from her recent attendance at The Tenth National Technology Leadership Summit hosted by the Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education (SITE).

Stay posted here for updates beginning at 2:00 pm.

Michele Masucci
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1:10 pm Preliminary Thoughts

The BITS publication strategy has from the onset sought to affect the geographic discourse on community geographic information systems by investigating the degree to which participatory models can be adapted to shift the locus of the development and uses of GIS from technical experts acting as community advocates to communities themselves. Our program involves high school students to learn and use GIS technologies and their experiences are drawn upon to inform our contributions to theoretical and technical developments in community GIS research.

We employed three strategies as an explicit attempt to connect research goals and activities, BITS participant experiences and learning outcomes, and our community collaborative activities with contributions to academic scholarship.

1. We invited faculty and graduate students to embed their research in our project and provided workshops to train them how to connect their research foci with the BITS project scopes of work. This resulted in the creation of thematic content that has served to connect the BITS program experiences to a broader base of geographers.

2. We broke the publication pathway down into manageable  components so that we could broaden the base of participation in disseminating project outcomes. This resulted in our sponsorship of a large number of graduate student and faculty presentations about the project at conferences, extending the discussion of outcomes in interdisciplinary directions we had not originally anticipated, and reaching new audiences through adding university faculty partners in other institutions.

3. We eventually worked to identify an external evaluation specialist who is also trained formally trained in Geography; this means that as we approach the end point of the project time line we have the potential to publish in both educational research and geographic fields of study.
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1:30 pm Our emphasis on using Web 2.0 to build our audience

Our external evaluator, Lorena Munoz, recommended that we explicitly develop a web 2.0 strategy to disseminate our project outcomes on the web in addition to our conventional publication strategy. This past year - our no cost extension year - we have rolled out a series of web interactive tools aimed to accomplish the following tasks:

1. Connect threads of content developed across our program activities, including through participation of high school students, HCC mentor staff members, graduate researchers and project researchers. This has resulted in more cohesive connections between student digital footprints and learning outcomes, curriculum development and implementation and dissemination.

2. Create a social network among program participants. One of the most significant challenges we had was how to create meaningful dissemination points for all of our participant audiences - including parents and students, community collaborators, student volunteers and mentors, colleagues and scholars. Our use of social media has enabled us to both get the word about what we are involved in on a timely basis as well as to elicit information just in time for publication and conference events.

3. Use our web activities as a strategic hub for managing and tracking the long term sustainability of our program. Our web dissemination strategy purposefully coincides with our no-cost year. Our aim was to assess the degree to which we could use the web to continue the program but in a new, no cost and long term fashion. The key to this strategy has been to foster participation among BITS alumni as staff members at ITSRG who are now deeply involved in creating and publishing maps, assisting us with the use of web technologies across all of our programs, and linking their skills to the pursuit of their own educational pathways. We have showcased some of the maps and field exercises they created in our posts on Citizen Cartographers in this blog throughout the month of June.

4. We implemented Write Now, a month long initiative in May to generate new publication directions and include as many people in our network of program participants as possible. The result was a massive lift of generating abstracts for conferences and publications, manuscripts in working paper form, blog posts, and the underpinnings of journal articles. The first article to appear in publication since our effort began in May 2008 will be published by the Community Literacy Journal, showcasing the application of our community mapping strategy developed by BITS for consideration of the relationship between literacy and geographic elasticity among ethnic chinese immigrants living in Philadelphia's Chinatown. Michael Rovito, the first author, was a graduate research assistant in BITS working with students to develop the mapping approach used in the article. Other manuscripts have been posted on ITSRG's working paper series and are forthcoming in book and guide format.
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2:00 pm Webinar begins
The ITEST LRC's sponsorship of events like these has been invaluable for our program. We would never have been able to connect with other programs and assess what among best practices might apply to us if we had to investigate that on our own.
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2:05 Random Thoughts while waiting to get Started
We note our love of the use of Google Docs for collaboration around writing projects. Writeboard works great too. We prefer to use free, open source web 2.0 tools - those are most accessible to the broadest base of participation.
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2:15 Opening Comments by Sarita Nair of the ITEST LRC
This is a follow on discussion from last year's similar event; Len speaks first about successes and challenges for disseminating project outcomes. The ITEST LRC has a list of journals and outlets to consider for dissemination as well as conference events that may be of interest.  Check out http://www2.edc.org/ITESTLRC/ for that info.
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Len starts, from the Hi Fives project.
Len comments in the Hi Fives marketing and dissemination plan, which was the last push of project during the no cost extension phase. He also discusses how that will come together at the end of the project to meet the larger project dissemination goals. Hi Fives looks at how students create video games. The project supported students to created a modified game using Half Life 2, a first person shooter game. When you buy the game you get access to the source code. With computer scientists at NC State, the project team took out the violent aspects of the game and created their own game built on the software's game development engine; it features tools that permits users to drag and drop 3D environments, enabling middle school kids in their program to learn how to do game development.

Original plans called for the use of conventional publication and conference presentation pathways. The external evaluator was also supposed to publish learning outcomes. Science teaching and SITE conferences were targeted arenas for dissemination originally. Plans changed through hiring a different outside evaluator. The new evaluator picked up publication themes around new research questions that arose from his interests. Creating a commercial game was not necessarily the best approach; lessons learned from that has opened new areas for dissemination. There was also a project need to go beyond the data gathering, research and publication efforts of project Co-PIs due to the large number of questions to be asked and the high volume of data to assess related to the program. Graduate assistants worked together as a teams to address that need. Through working in teams, individual interests were coupled with enough critical mass of personnel to move forward with conference proposals and journal publications. By using working group methods, large numbers of publications and conference presentations were generated, and Len attributes the ITEST renewal they received in part to this effort.
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2:20 Questions for Len
What is your best paper?
Len: I am most proud of the edited book volume we published called Serious Educational Games. That volume markets areas of creating educational games. Students and collaborators in our project all wrote chapters. Each told their story and how their involvement in research unfolded.
How did you identify journals?
Len: Science Education journals are directed towards science learning from k-20 levels. Reviewers come from old school and dont understand technology, so even though science journals were targeted, only a few resulted in publications. AACE journals are now the focus of publication directions; ISTE journals too.
Did you publish in any online journals?
Innovate - is one of the online journals we used.
We are planning to implement game development that involves participants to create their own journeys and interact with other participants to help advance education and collaboration. What was your underlying subtext for game development? Did you feel you needed bells and whistles to compete with War Craft for instance?
Len: Yes and no. My prior experience using multi user collaborative platforms, we used active worlds. It predated Second Life. It was stable and a good environment for collaborative use from multi-sites. But, using with high school students meant that the lack of game elements of competition resulted in rapid disengagement of students.
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2:48 Leslie's talk begins
The National Technology Leadership Summit is a meta conference that brings leaders from memberships organizations related to educational technology, teacher education and educational research together. Examples of organizations that are represented are at the summit are SITE and Educational Technology and SIG leaders of AERA organizations. One outcome of note for those interested in enhancing their ITEST project dissemination efforts was that this group likes to have coordinated topics that can be thematic across all of the respective conferences sponsored by their organizations. The coordination effort highlights issues they want to emphasize.

The upcoming SITE conference and NET/ISTE conferences will include themes on the role of participatory media and the use of web 2.0 technologies for classroom instruction addressing the question: How can educators use web 2.0 and other media in their classrooms? They are interested in those lines of thinking; in addition they are looking at how formal and informal learning interact.

Also, there are publication opportunities related to journals of these organizations; discussions continued a theme that was introduced at the 2008 ITEST PI Summit related to the interest among ITEST projects and the ITEST LRC to tell a larger story about the impact of the ITEST initiative on education in a broad way. There will be a call for papers organized by some of the journals of these education organizations that elicits manuscripts connecting youth based focus areas for outcomes that can inform better how formal and informal learning experiences can be mutually reinforcing and improve student learning, as well as to shape the development of new pedagocial approaches for technology instruction.  The ITEST LRC will share information about those opportunities; in addition the LRC is organizing interest in specific conferences to create theme oriented presentations by ITEST projects, continuing an important role they have played throughout the past six years within the ITEST community.
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3:20 Michele's final comments
Thanks to Sarita Nair and the entire ITEST LRC team for organizing this event. Thanks also to Caroline Guigar for live Tweeting our involvement from the ITSRG direction. Please stay posted for more on our dissemination activities.

ITSRG partnered with students enrolled in Environmental Policy Issues, a course offered by the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University, to mount a Park(ing) Day space on North Broad Street last Friday. The students in the course planned and executed the event. ITSRG has supported the project dissemination through maintaining a live blog of the event on our Twitter feed last Friday and continuing to integrate feedback into the project blog found at: http://plantyourpark.tumblr.com.

Park(ing) Day is a once yearly event that has a simple premise: organize people to plant a one-day-only park in a metered parking space, preferably in a visible and high traffic locale. The aim of the event is to raise awareness about the implications of our automobile driven lifestyles and the quality of urban spaces. The day has expanded to become an international event from its grassroots start in San Francisco in 2005.

Our investigation of web activities related to Park(ing) Day reveals that very few universities explicitly engaged the event. We are aware of the University of Kentucky's GreenKY event because they followed ours via our Twitter feed and blog. We have also found information about the event organized by architecture students at the University of Southern California through their blog post. Students are clearly deeply connected with spaces that were created all over the country, however we found it interesting that little attention to their involvement per se is rising to the awareness of academic departments and researchers. We would love to catalog other events that students created in connection with their academic courses of study and student organizations, so please email us with your links.

We suggest that there are at three themes that provoke interest in Park(ing) Day and other web-disseminated environmental campaigns like it for the academic and organizing information technology, education and geographic communities.

First, Park(ing) Day illustrates the power of viral campaigning that characterizes web 2.0 dissemination approaches.  Nearly 70 cities participated, with multiple parks created throughout via the assistance of what is now the National Park(ing) Day organization. This illustrates the rapid increase in attention to the event that has been generated within the blogosphere. Interestingly, our local official organizers encouraged us to implement our site as a "guerilla" park because we only recently connected with them when classes started in September. Given that just three years ago, the entire event was uncoordinated by local and national organizers, we found their suggestion to work outside of the organizer and city-defined parameters quite intriguiging.

Second, Park(ing) Day represents the state of the blogosphere in terms of the connections between different social media to promote the event and call attention to parks created. Flickr photos are fed to national and local organizer websites, and individual parks garner attention from both mainstream and independent news media.

Third, the geographic implications of the event are also noteworthy. Because flickr photos can not only be geotagged but also geo-rssed (is that really a word now?), one can discover parks that were created well after the event occured and in concert with other photographs about unique locations situated nearby.

Finally, one gains an appreciation of the degree to which organizing is being reshaped by the blogosphere and interconnected web 2.0 technologies. Our stats related to this event include not only the thousands who drove by our highly trafficed locale, the hundreds who walked by, and the dozens who spent real time in the park throughout the day - but also our Twitterers followers, the news reporters who appeared because they followed our Tweets, their audiences, our student participants and their social networks, and our broader BITS and ITSRG program participants and their social networks who track us on our blogs regularly. We suggest that the magnitude of our individual event, along with the National phenomenon, illustrates that web 2.0 and interactive mapping tools exponentially increase the numbers of people and range of their interests exposed to these activities, while simultaneously illustrating vastly different levels of engagement in the ideas and substance of the event.

Michele Masucci
Caroline Guigar
Temple University

Jonathan Otto, Cartographic Intern at ITSRG created the map below of Green Spaces in Philadelphia along with Philly Park(ing) Day 2008 sites, shown in red. Our site was chosen because of the relative lack of parks and open spaces off campus in North Philadelphia.

Many women face a complex set of family, workplace and other social roles that they must balance against their own individual health and education interests and needs. We have found throughout the past four years of working to train women to use telemedicine systems for managing their health that most women care for their own health as well as the health and welfare of their families. This has a broad cumulative societal impact because of the compounding effects of the magnitude of each woman's daily dance on their lives, long-term health status, and participation in the workforce. Through training nearly 150 women in one-on-one settings to learn how to use ICTs for managing their health, we gained insights into society's needs for better understanding of the context within which women are learning and applying technology skills in their daily lives.

On a practical level, our efforts show the importance of providing access to ICTs in multiple settings. In particular, we find that settings where women use ICTs need to support them to manage their social roles as caregivers and workers with their individual health concerns. We also suggest that more attention to the socially-bounded movements of women is needed.

The women we trained during the past four years were extremely mobile, navigating multiple work and social environments often relying on more than one mode of transportation, despite the fact that most were poor, under-employed and disconnected from mainstream societal resources to advance their educations. We taught them to use e-health communication systems that were static in nature. Underlying this approach for improving patient-health care provider communications was a notion that women’s lives are situated primarily in their homes. Because of this, most of the emphasis placed on improving their ICT skills related to their potential to use computers at home and with the support of family members. However, upon working directly with women, we found that relying on the home as the primary and sole locus of computer access and use proved to be an ineffective strategy for many of the women with whom we worked.

Gaining a better understanding of the multiple contexts of women’s lives is an important step in overcoming incorrect assumptions about the geographies of their every day lives. Our societal failure to do so will render many rising health care policies ineffective at improving women's health (as well as their educational opportunities and economic livelihoods). We have found that health care providers are especially attuned to the challenges of communicating across language and cultural barriers. However, we suggest that as of yet this has not translated into effective strategies for overcoming barriers to digital inclusion with regard to managing health and the interrelated concerns that are at the forefront of many women's concerns.

Most of the women with whom we worked were enthusiastic e-technology learners and users, and recognized the potential of e-health systems to improve the quality of their health care. For some, it represented better care than they could receive in person because of the potential to reduce office visits and improve monitoring health conditions. It also represented one of the few opportunities that they encountered to gain e-technology skills they thought were important to advance their educations and work opportunities. Their efforts to use e-health systems meant that they worked to overcome language, access, safety and surveillance, and educational barriers in order to gain a foothold in the rapidly emerging e-health care paradigm.

In our new post on ITSRG Working Papers, we suggest that it is incumbent upon health care providers and technology specialists to account for women’s experiences using these systems to design ones that take into account their particular challenges and concerns. The rapid rate of improvement in mobile technologies holds promise for many, since transportability would seem to address many of the access issues we observed. More direct connections between technology and literacy training seem essential for improving the use of systems among women whose life experiences are situated at the societal margins. Approaches for implementing e-health monitoring systems also need to attend to the safety, privacy and empowerment concerns of women if we truly expect to improve their health outlooks using e-technologies.

Caroline Guigar
Michele Masucci
Temple University

On behalf of the Information Technology and Society Research Group of Temple University, we wish to express sincere thanks to the geo-blogging community for following ITSpace during the past six weeks as we have called attention to growing trend for citizens to share spatial information using web 2.0 applications. In particular, we wish to give a special thanks to the folks at Very Spatial for calling our series to the attention of their readers and pod cast audience. We are grateful for the insightful comments shared by the professional geographers across the country and members of online map user communities. Thank you also for the contributions of guest authors David Organ and Paul Schroeder. We will continue to welcome guest authors to post new discussions, so please do not hesitate to contact us about new post ideas related to the theme of Citizen Cartographers in the future.

Citizen Cartographers theme posts have highlighted examples of citizen involvement in creating and sharing maps online, the use of online map tools by citizens and advocacy groups, and the concerns citizens may have in how online spatial information may affect them on the ground. We have suggested that the magnitude of this trend warrants the attention of geographers, cartographers, community advocates and others to enter into a public conversation about the impact of the Internet on sharing spatial information, collaborating to create spatial data sets, geo-visualization and map making, and using maps. One of the challenges that we face in doing so is how to foster and engage a conversation that is relevant with respect to the rise of citizen cartographers and their concerns.

Now that citizen involvement in cartography is web-enabled, the participatory impact and geographic dissemination of projects engaged by citizens and in the public domain is greatly expanded. Maps as literal and metaphoric tools for illustrating community concerns, depicting contested spaces, visualizing analyzed geographic problems, and showing where the thing occurs are one of the oldest artifacts of geographic inquiry and representation. We have suggested that what makes the emergence of web 2.0 tools for creating maps intriguing is the ways in which collaboration, distance, and dissemination are mitigated for content creators. 

Our examination has also led us to theorize about how collaborative cartographic practices are redefining the focus of geographic inquiry and cartographic representation. The professional practice of cartography involves using skillful design techniques to locate and visualizing geographic information, define and classify geographic data sets, align those datasets with graphical representation traditions and formats, and critically examine what is communicated on maps. Many scholars have pointed out that embedded within the practice of cartography are political and ethical concerns. Maps can be artifacts of power relations (such as political redistricting maps) as well as tools for mitigating power among groups (such as zoning maps). Maps can be representations of places and they can be manifestations of how people identify themselves.

The traditional study of maps is quickly being supplanted by the rapid creation of maps (or maps-of-a-sort). Many web applications that permit collaborative mapping are quite simplistic in terms of how spatial data are represented. Most mash ups approaches supported by online map applications use simple x-marks-the-spot tools for geo-tagging features. Attributes can be attached to the point (line or area) markers with most of these applications. Most online map applications also support collaborative approaches that enable more than one contributor to create the spatial data set. This aggregation of spatial data through the inclusion of collaborators is one of the unique features of the process of online mapping, and represents one of the most important divergences from prior cartographic practices. Users can e-collaborate to generate data in virtually real time, so that the spatial data set itself is unbounded at the onset of creating the map. Most professional cartographers are accustomed to mapping a temporally static spatial data set.

More sophisticated forms of geovisualization, such as representing classes of spatial information, showing proportional representations over space, or creating isometric lines of equal value to model distributions of spatial information are not yet the domain of online cartography collaborations. Instead, the underlying objective of web-enabled citizen cartographic activities lies in two main areas: (a) participating to create and share new content that cannot be shared or accessed otherwise and (b) tailoring existing (online) content for new audiences and new purposes through adding new media components.

We suggest that a new research direction related to citizen cartographers and the cartographic products they create would focus on issues related to their participatory processes, the transparency and fairness of information practices, the privacy implications of citizen cartographic practice, the use of data sets and maps created through e-collaborative processes, and the implications of a proliferation of user defined content.

We will begin to explore these issues through the startup of an informal science education demonstration project that involves citizens in Philadelphia and other cities to map and share their walking and rolling routes using online social media applications. The project will be implemented in the Fall of 2008, with more details to come soon about how to participate.

Michele Masucci
Caroline Guigar
Temple University

BITS Summer Program 2008 is underway throughout the month of July. This year we are providing students with research and field experiences and information technology skills in mapping historic markers related to the African American experience in Philadelphia.

Charles L. Blockson, founder of the Blockson Afro-American Collection housed at Temple University's Paley Library has met with BITS students every summer for the past four years to instill in them an understanding of the importance of learning about the relationship between primary sources of information and analyzing the racial, cultural, and geographic histories of Philadelphia and beyond. Over 200 BITS Students have had the opportunity to examine first edition volumes of major works by African American authors, documents related to the historical underpinnings of the institution of slavery that are hundreds of years old, photos taken by John Mosely depicting nationally prominent African Americans, archives from the nation's largest collection of Underground Railroad documents, and the focus of our theme this year - one of Blockson's books depicting the locations and descriptions of historical markers related to African Americans throughout Philadelphia. It is called: Philadelphia's Guide: African-American State Historical Markers (1992). He has been gracious to donate this and other volumes of his work to ITSRG and the BITS Program.

Students are shown visiting the collection and interacting with Mr. Blockson on Thursday, July 11, 2008 here:

This summer, our students are focused on creating web-interactive maps of the entire marker collection documented by Dr. Blockson. Dr. Blockson has spent a great deal of time helping our students to understand the politics of marking by sharing some of the stories related to how and why specific settings are ultimately chosen to receive an official state historical marker. They have found that there is no single consolidated listing of markers, since more than one institution has programs to place markers at historical sites. And, since the various marker programs do not create meta-tags denoting categories for inclusion, it is difficult to search for maps of markers online. Here is the map one of our students, Hazreena Ali, has created drawing from Mr. Blockson's book detailing sites related to African American history designated by the State of Pennsylvania to be of interest within Philadelphia.

One interesting example of a setting that has been given a state historic marker is the Legendary Blue Horizon, located on North Broad Street, just a few blocks from Temple University's Main Campus. Many of the greatest boxers of the last century have fought and trained at the Blue Horizon. Surprisingly little information about it is found online, and even less is noted on the marker outside. Our approach for providing students with an understanding of its historical and cultural significance within the African American community of Philadelphia and beyond has been to visit, photo-document, and map the location during the past four years. Through this process, our students have come to understand that it is a living legacy that continues to host world-renowned boxing events, and that its owners are striving to compile archives of its historical significance and share them with the public. Newspaper clippings are framed behind the venue manager's desk, shown here in a photo taken by students in the BITS Program during the summer of 2006.

One block away is Progress Plaza, another site with important significance in the African American experience in Philadelphia and the nation. It is the oldest black-owned and developed shopping center in the country. It is currently in the process of being renovated. The renovation will feature the return of a neighborhood grocery store after a decade without one. The issues of local food security and economic development have been themes for the BITS Program during the past four years. Students have learned that these two issues are closely intertwined. They have visited and photo-documented this site, tracking the progression of change related to the renovation. No historical marker notes the significance of Progress Plaza for the local community or larger national audience. Students have discussed this issue with Mr. Blockson and BITS mentors as they learn about the process by which some sites gain distinction while other important sites are less noticed.

The facade and ambiance of the Legendary Blue Horizon are distinctive in many ways. Fancy grill work, well maintained brownstones, and a famous mural on the northern exterior wall all say "historically significant" to passersby. In contrast, Progress Plaza is denoted with a well worn, wooden sign. It is famous locally for the rapid rate at which cars unauthorized to park in the lot are towed. And, the slow transformation of the site is on the minds and in the conversation of locals eager for the new grocery store set to open its doors this fall. Yet, the continued presence of Progress Plaza in the neighborhood is vital to its economic stability, anchoring it to the massive investments that are being made in public-private partnerships along what is known locally as Avenue of the Arts North.

Our students have had the opportunity to gain a front row seat to the tensions between neighborhood transformation and historical preservation at work in our community of North Philadelphia. Through the basic geographic research tasks of field observations, mapping historically significant settings, and photo-documentation they have gained an opportunity to see their local community through different lenses.

Michele Masucci
Temple University

Over the past year, various Web 2.0 technology platforms have begun to provide its users with the ability to connect content they have created with a location, thus enabling not only keyword searches but location-based searches.   This experience has been further enhanced through geoRSS feeds and geotags which integrate technologies such as Twitter and Flickr with online mapping sites such as Google and Yahoo Maps.

Never before have citizen cartographers had such easy-to-use tools at their disposal to create meaningful maps that reflect not only the way they perceive their environments. Additionally, citizen cartographers are now able to share with others both inside and outside of their communities a much more nuanced view of their world through sight and sound.  In short, the map is in the hands of the masses and the opportunities for gaining new insight into place and space have never been more exciting. Further, the ever growing Web 2.0 technologies situated around online maps have  enabled people to develop online communities based on a share interested in geography and have brought to the forefront of the importance of understanding geography.

Citizen cartographers have used these new technologies to become empowered in times of crisis,  banding together to use online mapping tools and associated Web 2.0 content as a portal to organizing vast amounts of information from otherwise isolated areas. The 2007 California wildfires saw citizen cartographers taking their on-the-ground experience with the fires and sharing it virtually through Twitter, photo-sharing, and Youtube to the outside world as well as those isolated by the fires in their own communities. The 2008 Floods in the Midwest have seen the power of the map in a time of crisis, with organizations like the Red Cross using these Web 2.0 and mapping tools to send and receive information in the flood affected areas.

This growing movement shows the power of grassroots mapping to provide both a micro and macro experience of a vast crisis that assists not only neighbors but increases the knowledge base of those responding to the natural disaster.It is this grassroots effort coupled with technologies that hold promise for developing new and meaningful ways to respond to large scale crisis. It also serves to refocus the lenses of the discipline of geography and provides a unique opportunity to learn from and critically engage this exploding technology.

Geographers have much to offer in this new space of citizen cartography. As these technologies grow and becomes more and more ubiquitous there are substantial questions we must ask.

While we have seen an explosion of citizen cartographers actively contributing to grassroots mapping there is also a different map that is emerging that we must engage and critique. As web technologies enable and encourage location-based tagging and location-based searches,  we must begin to question and understand the long-term consequences of the electronic footprint being created by and about individuals, both intentional and unintentional.

How is the online electronic footprint becoming the unintentional electronic map, especially as  the roll-out of technologies that take advantage of GPS-enabled mobile phones  make tagging location seamless and more and more invisible to the user? How will governments and industry seek to use these electronic maps in the future? What are the ultimate implications for the growing level of transparency both intentional and unintentional?

Finally, an important tenet of web 2.0 is user-generated content which requires a level of computer literacy and technology access that vast sections of the population still lack. Will the those citizen cartographers who map and describe their own communities bring attention and resources their way for simply placing it on the map? Will communities forfeit resources and lose even more visibility in an online world because they lack the resources necessary to reestablish their communities on the virtual map? These are questions are where geographers have much to offer citizen cartographers.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University
June 30, 2008