A World of Cartographic Education

The ICA Education Commission reported last year in these pages on educational resources for cartography on the web. The ongoing project of creating material, summarising and presenting links to worldwide initiatives in cartographic education forms part of the commission's website at 1 Further content includes a regularly updated list of conventional cartographic courses in higher education around the world, and a set of academic papers relevant to education and training.  

Cartographic Education

The Commission has also been active in soliciting reports on cartographic education from a number of countries. These reveal a picture varying in strength and opportunity, but also reductions and decline in the provision of such education.

In the Netherlands, for example, there is no longer any full course in cartography. There are, however, programmes in geoinformatics, geography, GIS etc, incorporating varying cartography/geodata visualisation content. On the other hand, Germany shows a more promising picture: four schools of higher education offer cartographic education, both the Technical University and the Fachhochschule in Dresden, along with the Universities of Applied Sciences in Berlin and in Karlsruhe.

Greece has a mixture of focused cartographic courses, at the National  Technical University of Athens (School of Rural and Surveying Engineering), the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Schools of Rural and Surveying Engineering and of Regional Planning and Development), the Aegean University (School of Geography), Harokopeio University of Athens (School of Geography) and GIS education which includes cartography at, for example, the University of Thessaly (School of Regional Planning and Development). This motley European picture is repeated around the world, as revealed by the list of courses on the Commission's website.

Research Agenda

As well as monitoring such provision the Commission has a number of other responsibilities. Some are related to the ICA's Research Agenda, which presents a number of issues related to education such as Curricula on Cartography and GI Science; Distance Learning,
e-Learning, and Virtual Universities; Continuous Learning and Professional Updating; Access to Maps, Internet Datasets and Free Software; and Spatial thinking and Learning. The Commission intends addressing these directly, as well as offering its opinion on a wide range of other Research Agenda topics.

2009 Programme

All these aspects come under discussion at the regular Commission meetings. Planned events include a symposium in Madrid, Spain from 19th to 22nd April 2009, full participation in the 24th International Cartographic Conference in Santiago de Chile from 15th to 21st November 2009, and contributing to the ITC anniversary educational seminar in the Netherlands in 2010.

The Commission has an ambitious programme of work, to be found under the heading ‘Projects 2007-2010' on its website. Enquiries about the work of the Commission may be made via the website or chair David Fraser, Department of Geospatial Science, RMIT University, G.P.O. Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia, email: davi...@rmit.edu.au.

The ICA Education Commission monitors cartographic education around the world.