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MAPSTORY:AN OPEN EDUCATIONALRESOURCE FOR ADYNAMIC WORLD

For more than ten years, the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has been

redening learning itself, and the ways in which we deliver it to students. Early endeavors

like Saylor.org proved that courses could be posted to the world wide web for free. Legal

regimes like Creative Commons emerged to provide a licensing structure for the movement.

Education policy advances in states like Maine, Washington State and Utah proved that

institutions could change to accommodate OER. And with the Cape Town Declaration in

2008, OER became a global phenomenon.

MapStory seeks to advance the OER movement in two fundamental ways. First, we move

beyond the focus on open courses and open content to engaging students directly in the

creation and curation of open data itself. Courses are wonderful, and the newest platforms

like Coursera, MITx and Kahn Academy that couple courses with advanced learning

progressions, games and analytics are even better. But enabling students to collaboratively

construct open data about their world gives them something to do with real-world impact, as

well as content to master. Giving the pupils something to do, not something to learn, John

Dewey said, is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

Second, we add to the suite of existing OER resources one that is anchored on the

variables of space and time and seeks, to its very core, to be transdisciplinary in nature.

Everything that has ever happened on Planet Earth has happened in space and time. Andwhile the previous century saw the proliferation, specialization and often the balkanization

of knowledge in academic disciplines, a new consciousness has been raised by the

Geospatial Revolution that cross-cuts and even transcends these disciplines. Today,

space and time have the potential to serve as the anvil upon which we together can forge

inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary knowledge about our rich past, our complex present,

and our uncertain future.

TURNING A RESEARCH TOOL INTO A STUDENT-CENTERED PLATFORM

MapStory was initially created to serve researchers and professional geospatial analysts

seeking better ways to understand the world both spatially and temporally. With start-up

funding from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center (ERDC),

it did something simple, but powerful, extending the traditional Geographic Information

System (GIS) concepts of layers and maps and embracing the temporal dimension (e.g.,

change over time) with the concepts of StoryLayers and MapStories. StoryLayers are

crowdsourced and crowd-edited map layers that portray open data of various types

(statistical, descriptive, geographic only) over time. MapStories are narratives made up of

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one or more StoryLayers, layered and styled in a particular way, and matched by annotations

that superimpose a particular narrative about what was going on in this data. MapStories, belong

to the Storytellers that create them as their own creative work. All of this content (StoryLayers

and MapStories) then accrues to the global data commons under a Creative Commons and

Open Database License (ODbL) on the World Wide Web at MapStory.org where a global user

community can discover, curate and share the content, or download raw data for further analysis.

A minimally viable prototype of the mapstory.org platform went live in April 2012. About 200

individuals were then invited to begin loading data and pressure-testing the platforms ability hostdifferent le types and spatial and temporal extents. In January, 2013 mapstory.org was opened

to participation from the general public based on request and/or invitation. Over the course of

the year about 1,000 people experimented with MapStory and created new spatio-temporal data

and narratives to share with the world. And, some 45 millions people accessed this content. This

broad community of motivated MapStorytellers then provided a host of feedback on the limitations

of the MapStory platform, and in particular, the kinds of functionality that they need to tell the

stories that they are inspired them to tell. Needless to say, this global community of early adopters

had/has powerful notions of what the Art of MapStorytelling should be, and the technical

functionality that was/is required to reach their desired level of artistry.

As a result, a major redesign of the MapStorytelling Composer within www.mapstory.org

was undertaken, which will be deployed in Summer 2014. This redesign worked to incorporatemany of the insights from this community of MapStorytellers. And this Community feedback and

resultant redesign has spawned a new vocabulary that will shape how MapStorytellers create

narratives over the next several years. For example, one requirement was the ability for a regular

(e.g., non-technical) user to StoryBoard a complex, multi-chapter MapStory, where each chapter

is guided by a StoryBox that has its own spatial extent (min/max XY at a given resolution) and

temporal envelope (start/end date, interval, and replay rate). And, lots of thoughtful feedback over

the initial implementation of annotations led to a reimagination of multi-media StoryPins.

This new vocabulary of StoryBoards, StoryBoxes and StoryPins represents lessons learned from

2013 as they relate to MapStorytelling from a researcher and professional perspective. However,

much more work needs to be done to design the MapStorytelling experience with a student use

case at the center. Students, of nearly any age, possess sophisticated knowledge about howtheir world evolves, whether its the storefronts that dot their neighborhood, the sports teams

they follow with passion, the access to resources and services they and their families enjoy, etc.

MapStory, as a new dimension to the global data commons, and an Open Educational Resource,

enables students to share these observations with the world while also connecting them to a

global community of experts that can deepen their nascent observations by combining them with

authoritative big data.

Prioritizing the student use case will require MapStory to engage new education-minded partners

outside of the professional and academic GIS community. We look forward to working with these

partners and building a fundamentally new dimension to the OER movement that has already

come so far.