Lex Chalmers

Communities of practice and professional development

The Internet has had a transformative effect on many aspects of contemporary living. While there may be a tendency to overstate the impacts of this technology, workplaces and work practices in many societies have been greatly affected by almost instant access to massive amounts of information, delivered through broadening bandwidth. This paper embeds a discussion of professional development in this technological context, and comments on the emergence of a range of Internet‐based tools designed to assist with the delivery of professional development programs for secondary teachers. We argue that the tools by themselves are not enough to guarantee effective professional development and that building ‘communities of practice’ will become significant in lifelong learning models. We discuss some work undertaken in a professional development project with secondary school teachers distributed at a distance from the host institution.

E-learning for Geography's Teaching and Learning Spaces

The authors embed their advocacy of educational technology in a consideration of contemporary pedagogy in geography. They provide examples of e-learning from a wide range of teaching and learning contexts. They promote the idea that considering best practice with reference to educational technology will increase the versatility of teaching geography in higher education. On the basis of reviewing the pedagogic options associated with e-learning using a variety of technologies, and their promotion of versatility in the use of e-learning approaches, they find and illustrate the new spaces that have become available to teachers and learners of geography.

Internationalizing Professional Development in Geography through Distance Education

This paper assesses the value and relevance of geography education in the realm of professional development. It explores the potential of distance education to support lifelong learners through courses or modules that operate across international boundaries and incorporate materials from local and global contexts. The authors argue that Internet-enabled distance education offers the potential to extend access to many prospective students who are unlikely or unable to participate in full-time residential courses, and that distance education can facilitate international collaboration among educators and educational institutions. A case is made for an internationalized programme of study for continuing adult education, as opposed to the primary, secondary and higher education sectors that are the focus of most existing geographical education programmes. Next, the authors document the ways in which recent commitments to internationalizing teaching and learning in geography have brought us to the point where professional development of lifelong learners is demonstrable, particularly in the fields of geographic information technologies and teacher professional development. They outline some of the main challenges that must be addressed if the potential of distance education as an enabling tool for professional development in geography is to be fulfilled: specifically, collaborative development and delivery of curricula and the articulation of quality assurance standards and certification agreements among participating institutions.

Geographical Education in New Zealand during the Last Decade

The restructuring of the national economy of New Zealand in the last decade of the 20th century left its mark on education generally, with some quite specific consequences for geographical education in the secondary sector. This review of commentaries and research on geographical education considers debates about curriculum development, the changing assessment regime and the influence of geography educators on contemporary pedagogy.

Virtual Spaces and Networks in Geographical Education and Research.

This paper relates developments in the use of Internet-based communication technologies to contemporary exchanges of geographical ideas and content. A brief history of the Internet provides the basis for a review of uses of broadband Internet in contemporary Geography. Two themes are explored: the first is the concept of virtual communities of practice, and the second describes the nature and use of virtual research networks, with a focus on Access Grid. The key argument is that the enhanced Internet capabilities facilitate virtual communities in Geographical Education. The paper is based on five years of experience in developing in-service support at the University of Waikato and the in-class use of tutorial software over the Internet.

Local economic impact modelling: TIEBOUT, tourism and training

Abstract This paper describes the use of a sophisticated computer model in university teaching. TIEBOUT is a PC‐based program which assesses the economic impacts of expenditure in National Parks. The program has been used extensively by Parks Canada, but it has had even greater use as a teaching tool at the University of Waterloo. The paper documents the development, features and use of the TIEBOUT model, and then outlines the way students were asked to conceptualise, execute and comment on various scenarios using the model. The real world basis of the model, and the elegance of its formulation, allowed some fundamental concepts in the operation of multipliers to be fully explored. The final section of the paper reports on student and instructor evaluations of the TIEBOUT teaching program.

Teaching and learning about difference: the geographies of the “Other”

In January 2010, the New Zealand Geographical Society (NZGS) sponsored a conference on the theme of Positioning Geography at the University of Waikato. The conference brought local, regional and national teachers of Geography together with three International Geographical Union (IGU) Commissions (Gender and Geography, Geographical Education, Geography of Tourism, Leisure and Global Change) to discuss issues of importance to the discipline in this place (the Pacific region) and time (an era of repositioning in the discipline). The Department of Geography, Environmental Planning and Tourism hosted the conference at the University of Waikato with the Conference Organising Committee made up of Waikato branch members of the NZGS and staff at the University. There were several strong themes in the Conference, with teaching and learning about the “Other” being notable for the challenges it provided the discipline at both secondary and tertiary levels. In this introduction to the focused conference papers that follow, we provide a commentary on the theme, we relate this to the mechanisms for delivering Geography in the contemporary secondary and tertiary sectors and we introduce the three papers and authors.

Congresses, commissions and change

I am pleased to have the opportunity to write what will be a valedictory editorial for IRGEE in terms of the 2008–2012 Commission on Geographical Education. As most will know, the Commission on Geographical Education is one of about 40 such bodies that carry out the work of the International Geographical Union. John Lidstone reports that the prototype IGU Congress was held in Antwerp in 1871, that ‘Geographical Education’ appeared as a focus for discussion in the third Congress in Venice, and Geographical Education formed an independent commission first in the US meeting of 1904. Since this time the IGU has supported such a Commission repeatedly, making the CGE the longest running of all the IGU Commissions. IGU Commissions each have a Steering Group and a wider body of corresponding members; our corresponding membership of around 400 is found in more than 30 countries. Commissions have a life of four years, with the term of the 2008 Commission elected in Tunis expiring at the end of the 2012 Congress in Cologne. At Cologne, a new IGU Executive will be elected, and the current IGU Executive has indicated that a new Commission will also be supported. The proposed 2012–2016 Commission will be chaired jointly by Professors Joop van der Schee of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and John Lidstone from the Queensland Institute of Technology in Brisbane. The proposal for activities to be undertaken in the 2012–2016 period is lodged on the website of the Commission at www.igu-cge.org. The proposed Commission offers a range of interesting activities, not the least of which is a change in the governance structure. The balance of this editorial is a reflection on the successes of the current Commission, an assessment of what can be done from here, and an endorsement of the proposal advanced in the name of the incoming 2012–2016 Commission. Since 2004, the Commission of Geographical Education has promoted and supported a significant number of international events, many of them offered with support through the good offices of Commission Steering members. Since the 2004 Symposium in Glasgow, there have been Symposia in Brisbane in July 2006, in Tunis (August, 2008), in Tel Aviv (July–August, 2010) and Santiago (November, 2011). There have also been wellattended sessions at meetings organised by members of the Commission. In April 2007 the Commission met in London, in July 2007 we met in Lucerne and in August 2007 the venue was Beijing. The August 2009 meeting of the Commission was in Tsukuba, and we met in Waikato (January) and Istanbul (July) in 2010. In 2011 there was also a substantial meeting in London at which the proposal for the 2012–2016 Commission was widely discussed. Such a sustained and significant programme is maintained by making the activities as accessible as possible to national communities far beyond the European ‘heartland’. Both the widening membership and the authorship of papers in International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education testify to the success of this intent. Conspicuous, too, are the edited collections of papers from regional meetings of the Commission. Proceedings have been published from meetings in London, Lucerne, Beijing, Tsukuba,

Counting for everything: research productivity in geographical and environmental education

In many countries, the state is a major funder of research, whether directly or indirectly, through state-like organisations known as parastatals. Research in geographical education is a beneficiary of such research funding, although seldom at the levels of biomedicine and applied science. Where the state funds research, it is entitled to ask for evidence of benefits from such investment. One of the consequences of this relationship in the last 15 years has been an increasing interest in systematically monitoring research productivity, and during this time, we have also seen the impacts of the revolution in information technology flow into research. The outcome has been the advent of sophisticated research management and modelling tools that are both a threat and an opportunity. The most obvious impact of information technology has been on the research supply side. Some journals have moved from paper-based publication to digital publication, with library systems offering the digitally presented research publications through sophisticated search engines with catalogue access. Generic systems such as Wikipedia and Google Scholar are also well-known tools for finding and accessing published research. The state monitors of research have kept up with this information revolution and have seen the prospect of national systems of research assessment. The Research Assessment Exercise (or RAE, http://www.rae.ac.uk/) in the UK is perhaps the oldest of these national systems, with the first iteration run as long ago as 1986, and the results of the most recent round (2008) published in 2010 (http://www.rae.ac.uk/news/2008/results.asp). While the British system rates individual institutions, the 2003 Performance Based Research Exercise (or PBRF, http://www.tec.govt.nz/) in New Zealand assessed the performance of every researcher in the tertiary education system, initially for the period 1997–2003 and currently in a 2006–2012 cycle. Recently, the original Research Quality Framework in Australia was replaced with a second-generation system for institutional assessment. The Excellent in Research for Australia (or ERA, http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era 2012/era 2012.htm) assesses institutions, and this system has just reported on an assessment carried out in 2010. Organisations that fund research are paying attention to the counts that presumably reflect quality as well as productivity. Research excellence and its assessment are laudable, but the methodologies are often crude, contentious and political (David, 2008; King, 2010; Thorns, 2008). The bureaucracies established to run the research assessment are responsive but generally need to have “objective” measures of excellence. When the number of research outputs to be assessed is measured in tens of thousands, quantitative methods are held to be the most efficient in parts of the system and the assessment of quality in other parts of the system becomes problematic. Corbyn (2009) in the Times Higher Education Supplement reveals that the citation indices used as a measure of research excellence in the “bibliometric” methodology have fallen out of favour, and a paper prepared for the New Zealand Vice