Chapter 6: The World At The Student’s Fingertips

Despite the changes in GIS in education over the past 20 years, its model of delivery has held remarkably constant over much of that time. While it is true that more spatial data has become available and accessible, and while hardware, software, and computer networks certainly became more powerful and mobile throughout the period, the hardware-software model of GIS use was much the same. This model consisted of loading and running GIS as a desktop software application on a computer running the Unix, Windows, or Macintosh operating system. The model included the loading and use of spatial data from an outside source. At first, the source of this spatial data was from physical media—magnetic tapes, ZIP drives, CD-ROMs, DVDs, or some other external device, and later became increasingly downloaded from the Internet. However, the result was still the same—the data was stored on a hard disk. The hard disk was either local, externally attached to a local computer, or on a local network.