Maryland School Information Mapping
Center for Geographic Information Sciences at Towson University
• Towson, MD
CONTACT INFO
David Sides, Project Manager
Center for Geographic Information Sciences
Towson University
(410) 704-5291
E-mail
Web site
Towson University’s Center for Geographic Information Sciences will partner with the online public policy site MarylandCommons.com to create a Web tool that will combine Maryland Department of Education data with user-friendly geomapping. M-SIM will give parents, educators, policymakers and journalists data and news about K-12 schools at the local, county and state level, and M-SIM maps will complement news and commentary written by Commons staff and citizen journalists.
Check back for future news and updates.
• June 2010
• March 2010
Kudos: Fern Shen, editor of the Baltimore Brew (a partner in the Maryland School Information Mapping project), was named one of “50 Influential Marylanders” in April 2011. The award is presented by The Daily Record, a business news publication in the state.
Mapping Project Continues on Course
June 2010
The Maryland School Information Mapping Project continues to evolve, and both the project leader and the collaborating news site, Baltimore Brew, remain hopeful that the mapping application designed for the site will improve its ability to attract audiences.
“Education was not an original area of focus for Baltimore Brew,” Fern Shen said. When she launched the site, the Baltimore Sun had a dedicated education reporter and Shen decided instead to focus on areas such as the environment, transportation, city government and other local-level issues of interest.
Now, Shen is seeking funding for a reporter to focus primarily on education, complementing the data that will be available through this application when it launches in Fall 2010.
David Sides, the project manager, explained the site will “allow users to navigate to and select Baltimore City schools of interest, and explore student performance and demographic data.” It will also include Baltimore Brew-generated content and allow readers to respond and share information.
Shen and Sides are anticipating the map will generate “lots of traffic”, based on their measurements of similar kinds of content. Neighborhood posts, on issues like a proposed Wal-Mart redevelopment, get some of the most traffic on the Brew. “A good number for us for page-views-per-day, per post would be 1,000 to 1,400,” said Shen. She expects education reporting will attract similar readers.
Sides explains that on the technical end, the launch process has been more complicated: “Establishing tie-ins between the GIS data layers and Baltimore Brew’s architecture, and solving disagreements between map layer projections in an open-source platform has required more troubleshooting time than expected.”
And Shen adds: “The geo-tagging has been trickier and more time-consuming than we had initially thought. Some posts are not geographically based, really.” Shen is also discovering that her initial plan to tag according to broad areas is not enough. Instead she needs to tag with a specific address and re-tag all older stories.
Both the Brew and the Towson team express difficulty in getting the map to co-exist harmoniously within the site’s content. It has taken more programmer time to address this issue than either anticipated.
And Shen expressed difficulty in finding writers to cover stories, particularly on a small budget. “Only so many writers are able to work for peanuts!”
Maryland School Information Mapping Project Takes A Different Route
March 2010
The team at the Towson University Center for GIS was left searching for another community news site after their original partner, Maryland Commons, abruptly ceased operations.
“We’ve decided to return to our original focus on education.”
“There was some concern,” said project organizer, David Sides at Towson University. They were in the middle of creating the mapping application where readers could view school districts and sift through data and information on a specific school.
“We looked for someone who would be a good fit…we thought of local TV stations with a dedicated education reporter…and we looked at other issue oriented publications.”
In time, and with the help of Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, they settled down with Baltimore Brew.
The new partnership forced them to rethink the project’s focus and scope.
Instead of a statewide mapping system, they decided to focus on Baltimore City and County.
“The initial plan,” Sides wrote, “was to change the focus on the site from schools and educational issues to a site which allowed users to search for and navigate to Baltimore Brew content via the mapping application.”
But that changed again, to better integrate education-related stories and school data into the Baltimore Brew site.
Since Baltimore Brew’s launch, publisher Fern Shen had never covered education stories because the Baltimore Sun had a reporter on the beat. But Shen believes coverage in that field is now lacking and welcomes this opportunity to add education-related content in a meaningful way.
It has not been the simplest transition. While with Maryland Commons, CGIS had spent part of its budget developing the public school performance database that the mapping application was to be based on.
When all is said and done, Sides said, “readers can click on a school and get data according to test scores…demographics.”
User-generated content will also be integrated into the map. Citizens can post data about a school or a certain event.
Once the map is complete, it will also show content that the Baltimore Brew had created for that school, from pictures to articles, allowing easy navigation based on location.
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