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2017.05.11

[Research Plan] GIS in Education (Ｍ1 Tetsuya Hasegawa)

Hi, my name is Tetsuya Hasegawa. I'm very excited to join the Ylab! As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy at Komaba. However, an extracurricular project that I joined in those days made me more and more interested in Media Art as a way to represent thoughts. I was immersed in how IT and design could be utilized to awaken deep thinking and sharpen our sensibility. I hope researching at Ylab and Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies will be an opportunity to make the foundations for developing medias that could make our life more flavorful.

The aim of the project that I took part in my undergrad days, was to make the map of the 21st century so as to revolutionize the way we see the world. Looking back at the history of maps, we could see how maps worked as a media to represent the modern understanding of the world and how those visualizations have struck the worldview of the people. Nowadays, as the information revolution progresses, technologies such as satellite observation, world-wide sensor networks, and supercomputer simulations are making it possible for us to see the world in such dpi than any previous generation could have dreamed of. My passion is to design media platforms that interface this rich information to a human sensibility.

From these backgrounds, I am now focusing research on GIS in education. GIS stands for, Geographical Information System and is defined as "A set of integrated software programs designed to store, retrieve, manipulate, analyze, and display geographical data-information" (Fitzpatrick and Maguire 2000). Unfortunately, the current global landscape of GIS learning remains small (Kerski, Demirci, Milson 2013). However, previous research has revealed how GIS learning has various educational benefits which hold significant importance in the modern society. Such examples are, spatial thinking (Huynh 2009; Lee and Bednarz 2009; Bednarz 2004), constructivist problem-based learning (Audet and Paris 1997; Bednarz and Ludwig 1997), field research (Huynh et al. 2012), multi-disciplinary learning (Broda and Baxter 2003; Rød, Larsen, and Nilsen 2010; Lateh and Muniandy 2011), combining time-scale analysis (Science Council of Japan, 2014), and obtaining technical skills (Forster, Burikoko, and Nsengiyumva 2012, 213).

As like this, I am now conducting a broad literature review on "GIS in education" to develop a general understanding of the landscape.

[Tetsuya Hasegawa]