On Nov. 17 2010, as part of National Science Foundation’s Distinguished Lecture series, the world-renowned geographer Michael Goodchild discusses the changing face of GIS. He discusses how individuals are using distributed, real-time data enabled by social networks to define landscapes that have been suddenly altered by floods, hurricanes and other acts of nature.

New methods differ sharply from map-making tradition and they’re forcing geographers to shift their thinking from analyzing geographic information to synthesizing it from many sources.

Ultimately, Professor Goodchild discuss what these and other changes mean for geo-education, grounding his argument in fundamental spatial concepts that hold the key to simplifying the GIS user interface and redefining the goals of GIS education.