Quote of the Week

[The Center for Spatial Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara is involved in incorporating spatial thinking and analysis into fields of study that range from marine biology to religious studies, and Director Michael Goodchild envisions a future where spatial thinking will be taught in high schools alongside history and algebra.]

“There’s been a democratization of GIS over the past couple of years,” Goodchild said. “It’s reached the point where everyone needs to learn it.”

- Goodchild quoted in “GIS: Cops Favor New Kind of Plotting” in Miller-McClure Magazine

I’m thinking out loud here:

Does that suggest that “if not for GIS and its democratization” there’d not be interest in teaching spatial thinking in schools? Did we have to get quick and powerful (and “flashy”) technologies to “prove” the importance of spatial thinking? Math did ok without computers for quite a long time… and I recall hand-draw “invasion of the life-savers” maps in my population geography class in 1987. Have any other disciplines “needed” computers to “prove their worth?”