Recent calls to reform secondary geography education emphasize the importance of engaging students in inquiry driven, active, and authentic learning experiences. I believe that the vast digital resources (i.e., “big data”) associated with geography provide invaluable but underutilized opportunities to create such experiences for student in geography education. This paper presents the design of a curriculum unit for high school students that uses commonly available big data platforms and tools and a collaborative approach to knowledge construction to promote geographical reasoning. According to data acquisition methods, the unit contains two types of learning modules. The first module is to utilize public data platforms of governments and public institutions. The National Spatial Data Infrastructure Platform supports spatial analysis using social data such as news articles and Twitter data as well as traditional spatial data (e.g., population, traffic, health/medical, environment, disaster, industry, etc.). Using this platform, students can analyze blind spots in public services (e.g., area vulnerable to childcare) or areas where garbage is habitually dumped. The second is to collect big data directly from social media or websites using the Python language and relevant libraries. Students can analyze the location of Starbucks by crawling address information on the Starbucks website or crawl and visualize the location of an electric vehicle charging station in Jeju Island to suggest a new charging station location. This study might have implications beyond secondary school, suggesting the design of a learning trajectory for the introduction of big data to post-secondary students that can be used at any level.
Keywords: big data|inquiry|geography education
A104863JL