Digital Resources to Enhance Soil Science Education Via the Web and in the Field.

Students in our soils courses have a new Internet tool available to them called Isee - Integrating Spatial Educational Experiences, which has been developed here at Purdue. Many of the concepts that our students must master are inherently spatial, but our ability to make these spatial patterns clear to our students has been limited. Students, however, need more geospatial skills to understand and address the increasingly complex societal problems that will confront them throughout their careers. We have developed a web-based geographic information system based on Google Earth that will allow students to access a large variety of soil and other maps for any area of the state of Indiana and we are continuing to enhance its capabilities.  We are integrating this new spatial educational experience into our curricula for our soils, crops and environmental sciences. We have two goals: (1) to develop the ability of our students to use geospatial information to understand how and why soils and landscapes vary spatially at scales ranging from individual fields to a region as large as Indiana, and (2) to develop our students’ understanding as to how the spatial distribution of soils and landscapes impacts the distributions of crops, cropping systems, land use, and environmental and natural resource issues. The Isee web site can be accessed at http://isee.purdue.edu/.   Technology has also been an important part of our students’ field experiences.  In the summer of 2005 we purchased 3 rugged tablet PCs with the goal of incorporating a “teaching with GIS” approach into a number of our soils courses, in particular, AGRY 565, Soil Classification, Genesis, and Survey. We developed the GIS data sets for the new equipment in the summer of 2005, and incorporated the new technology into our class for the first time that fall. We now routinely go to the field every week during the fall semester with 14 tablet PCs that allow our students to see and understand Indiana’s soil landscapes as never before. Our students have enthusiastically embraced the technology. They are learning important concepts of how and why Indiana soils and landscapes are distributed across the state, and how that impacts land use on many different scales. These are concepts that we ourselves had difficulty grasping clearly before we embarked on this project. Our work was highlighted in ESRI’s ArcNews publication in the summer of 2008 (http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/summer08articles/purdue-university.html).