grant

=Cumulative Urban Environment Geodatabase=

[|Boricua College] Mission

 * Our 501(c)(3) institution is listed in [|IRS Publication 78], pursuant Section 170(c) of the IRS Tax Code.


 * We are a group of academics, scientists, and activists working out of a small experimental independent college in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known as Boricua College. Our college was founded as a Puerto Rican institution in 1974, and now is a truly multicultural, bilingual institution whose student population represents the world. One of our more innovative pedagogies is the Experiential Studies sequence. Affective, community-based, experiential learning serves as a fundamental lynchpin to ensure Boricua students achieve a synthesis and mastery of the skills, knowledge, and values required for life-long learning and for professional and scholarly competence. In the freshmen year the focus is on broadening the student experience by emphasizing sensory and perceptual capabilities with a focus on the arts and sciences. Students observe, record and study how the artist, social scientist and natural scientist works, and their settings of practice, products and findings. The student is also required to get in touch with their health through physical development courses in physical education or nutrition workshop, yoga, martial arts, aerobics or other guided exercises designed to increase body and sensory awareness and improve health.
 * Each Boricua facilitator is responsible for the educational development of twenty-two students, whom they meet with individually and in small groups each week of the learning cycle. For the past several years, several facilitators have required their cohort of students to walk about the Northside Williamsburg neighborhood, where the school is located, as a means to satisfy educational objectives for each facilitator's series of modules,

Contact Information

 * //NADINE ANDRE// is a full time faculty member at Boricua College in the Human Services Dept. Prior to that she has worked with various NGO’s in the fields of sustainable development, education, and interreligious and intercultural cooperation. In her tenure with the [|International Educational Foundation], she worked with Chinese educators, who came to the U.S. to co-create with their U.S. counterparts a character education curriculum. She managed the U.N. office of the [|World Association of NGO’s] and is now committed to developing the project that is the subject of this grant proposal.


 * //ROBERT K. LEWIS// has been engaged in the development and implementation of Environmental Education for almost ten years. He attended Bucknell University and received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a B.A. in History. At [|Urban Data Solutions] in the late 1990s, he was part of a team that developed 2D and 3D GIS/CAD datasets of major metropolitan areas in the US. He worked with [|Samara F. Swanston, Esq.] at the Watchperson Project in developing [|baseline aggregate environmental loading maps] for local communities. During the next five years, he was a high school science teacher, supporting students in the [|Working in Support of Education Quality of Life] and [|United Way Community Achievement Project] competitions. He also developed GIS curriculum as part of the [|Teacher Leader Quality Partnerships Program]. Mr. Lewis currently serves as the Curriculum Developer for [|The Consortium For Worker Education] and teaches science curriculum for the [|Harlem Educational Activities Fund]. He has been an Adjunct Professor at Boricua College since 2001.

Executive Summary
As part of Boricua College's committment to the experiential format, many facilitators design local neighborhood field trips to enhance student learning. Several examples of walking tour objectives include:
 * 1) The science theme of "[|community as living laboratory,]" searching the neighborhood to identify [|urban ecosystems], green business and practices,
 * 2) In math classes, using neighborhood census tract/block group/block maps have enhanced student's understandings of the rich mix of ethnicities living in our community, based upon Census 2000 data. Students can also identify the changes and gentrification of our neighborhood by comparing 1990 Census data. Using [|demographic maps] aids students in mastering the social, political and economic aspects of the changing neighborhood and the identification of human resources available in the communities.
 * 3) Art and English classes can experience a multiplicity of galleries, [|book stores], and public events.

Our students, many of whom have lived in Brooklyn their entire lives, are //de facto// data gatherers and provide local capacity for community Quality of Life analysis. Their analysis provides a “community mapping” function that can serve to inform our citizens' decision making and create a local database for community residents, offering an aid to shaping community public policy. As is often the case with community based learning, the students become valuable experts, helping serve the Northside community's desire to improve its Quality of Life.

At the end of each cycle, however, a problem emerged: how can Boricua College retain this information from cycle to cycle? Creating a cumulative geo-database, that each cycle of students can build on, updated several times a year, and offered to our local Northside community as a resource for local decision-making appeared to be an adequate solution.

What began to emerge from our questions was the need for a real-time, up-to-date, community-based online resource, documenting an amalgam of information, ranging from small, emerging green businesses, to proposals on how to enhance the East River New York State Park. An online list of student term papers is not sufficient—in order for future students to build upon prior neighborhood analysis, a mapping system that could serve as a visual index was needed to orient the student as to the location of multiple layers of prior research, linked to a specific city block. Examples of this proposed application are:
 * 1) monitoring urban ecosystems
 * 2) green business/building information
 * 3) visualization of demographic shifts in Northside (Census 1990, 2000, 2010)
 * 4) developing a baseline aggregate environmental loading to calculate Quality of Life

We seek funding and technological support to develop a cumulative urban environmental geodatabase, to archive our rapidly changing neighborhood for future generations, and help educate our students and our community about the rich, often unknown ecological components of an urban environment.

Project Goals

 * 1) //Create Community Mapping Capacity// – local community consituencies will initially define attributes of map layers, and offer feedback to completed student investigations in the form of surveys handed out at local meetings and blog postings.
 * 2) //Produce Curriculum Mapping Manual// – initial drafts, based upon Spring Semester mapping experiences, will be offered to Boricua facilitators, and meetings will be held to develop a simple manual for every facilitator to use when incorporating their students' field trips into the geodatabase. The number of students' audio/visual presentations uploaded to the web-app will be considered evidence of the project's success.

Full Description
The emphasis of this mapping program is educational, focusing on its process, rather than its products. To be sure, several new mapping layers will be established by the end of the program's duration, including a DEM hurrican flooding plan, "gray space" ecosystems, and small local business "green pages." But its primary objective is to develop a methodology for expanding our existing mapping capacities to satisfy future community needs. Linking student learning experiences to their surrounding community, both ecological and social, is the ultimate objective of community based, environmental education. Merely stacking layers of geospatial attributes cannot satify this pedogogical goal.

To date, we have created our own, unique basemap of the community that would ease a student's referencing a specific city block while on a walking tour of our neighborhood. The Northside streets, although part of the city grid, are rotated approximately 30 degrees off true east-west lines, and therefore can be difficult to read from a traditional Hagstrom map, or even a [|Google map]. Using [|Sanborn] scans and publically available street centerline vector files, a specially designed Northside Williamsburg Community Map was designed for student notetaking and tagging during walking tours. Students use this map to "tag" and take pictures of interesting neighborhood locations, in furtherance of a facilitator's module objectives, such as where a green business is located, where a "[|Tree of Life]" is growing through cement cracks, the location of old-law tenement buildings, etc. This paper basemap was a first step towards developing a standardized markup map that every class walking tour could use, which in turn could be consolidated into a cumulative geo-database.

In 2008, educational uses of "[|geotagging]" began to surface. We saw this technique as a solution to our problem of developing an online equivalent to the paper basemaps we were already using in our field trips. We begin our first tentative steps in this direction by developing the following procedure for community walking tours:
 * 1) After classroom instruction delineating group objectives, students designed their own walking tour through the neighborhood using the above basemap, making sure to identify "hotspots" to photograph events/images that would help their group achieve the objectives of the walking tour.
 * 2) Each group then implemented their own walking tour by walking the path they designed, and tagging the locations where they took photos on the basemap, including site views, and cataloging indices.
 * 3) Using the basemap markups as a reference and following an instruction page, students used Google Earth's "yellow thumbtacks" to create a ".kmz" file, which would "fly into" each group's walking path through the neighborhood.
 * 4) Once the walking path was drawn, each picture was geotagged by locating the precise building location in Google Earth, and using [|Picasa] shareware to attach lat-long coordinates to the .jpeg picture.
 * 5) Each class of 25 students then uploaded their geotagged photos to [|Panoramio], a website designed specifically for uploading architectural photography that included latitude/longitude data for each picture. Comments for each picture were then typed in.

What we need to further this project is technological support, specifically a way to streamline the above process, so that any student, in any class will be able to geo-tag their community research easily, both in the field and online. Additionally, we feel the following process is important to satify the ultimate objective of community based education: community empowerment.

Schedule with Milestones
Initially, community outreach meetings must be planned, to gather questions that locally based constituencies have about improving the Quality of Life in the Northside Williamsburg community. After these neighborhood meetings, community workgroups will focus the research objectives, and offer final recommendations. Subsequently, experiential data gathering modules will be designed for Boricua students by facilitators. The modules will be open-ended, allowing students to create their own paths of inquiry, while satisfying the modules' objectives, as shaped by community needs.

Part of these experiential modules will include training students to be proficient in creating .kmz files, using geotagging software, and uploading audio/video medias as well as journal logs.

Upon completion of each module objective, students will present their "layers" back to the community. During this meeting, students will help train local citizens how to use the map-app, and gather observations and recommendations on how to enhance subsequent cohorts' implementation of the module. Ultimately, these layers will not be completely finished, as future students' educational, environmental experiences will be appended to this community resource.

What will be finalized is a manual of curricula memorializing the process by which this map-app was created. The manual will be designed so that any educator, in any community will be able to avoid mistakes learned during the project's development. The simple five steps listed above can easily be learned by a students in one class, but it took us several days to boil down the procedure into its current "simple" form. An analogous process will be implemented during this proposed project, so that future environmental educators will be able to refer to the manual and avoid the pitfalls that often face the educator seeking to design and implement innovative pedagogies.

Our students are visual learners. We need to incorporate multiple assessment tools into our curriculum to ensure we can measure their successes and needs. What we want is an enhanced geodatabase to include student podcasts, video stories, and alternative forms of anecdotal evidence and testimonials, linked to our "basemap." We want to offer the results of our students' learning to our local Northside Williamsburg Brooklyn community, as a living testimonial to the way things have been, the way they are, the way we want them to be in our neighborhood.

These results strongly lead us to understand how this “community mapping project,” can have a great potential impact and provide possibilities as a community-based resource that can be duplicated in communities around the world, aiding sustainable development. We believe our mapping project is beyond the prototype stage. We have already incorporated it into several facilitator's modules. We seek to enhance our mapping project by incorporating community objectives into a multiple layered

We believe that by partnering with Google, we can expand this model and prototype that we are working on. Distance learning and interactive learning are the way of the future. No longer is the classroom bound by four walls. Boricua College, that was founded in 1974 as a private, independent college has taken revolutionary steps in applying a student centered model of learning that transcends anything that is being done in higher education today.

This local mapping, documenting and archival project, while slowly being developed in a local region of Brooklyn, can be a model for local mapping around the world. If local communities began their own mapping projects, identifying resources, needs; matching resources with suppliers; demographic information and human service orgs. and NGO’s; educational needs, etc., this “community-based mapping” model can be transformational. In addition, with the 2010 Census, around the corner, we believe that local mapping science can aid and help the census takers, in areas and situations where there have been greater margins of error.

We would appreciate the opportunity for you to review this proposal and are asking to be included in this “mapping tools” grant. We have set up a prototype and are willing to answer any questions to elaborate the work we are doing.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Detailed Budget

 * Proposal Budget ||  ||   ||
 * Staff and Training ||  ||   ||
 * Site Visits and Data Collection Program Development ||  || 2,000 ||
 * Training and Volunteer Program ||  || 1,500 ||
 * Creation and Duplication of Manuals: Collecting data and geotagging ||  || 3,050 ||
 * Digital Cameras and Equipment for Volunteers ||  || 1,750 ||
 * **Category Total** ||  || **8,300** ||
 * Research and Development ||  ||   ||
 * Community Development/Meetings and Outreach ||  || 1,000 ||
 * Development of Web Interface and Data Collection Methodologies ||  || 3,000 ||
 * Refining and Implementing Community Based Mapping Techniques ||  || 1,500 ||
 * Pilot Program Launch ||  || 3,500 ||
 * Database Management ||  || 2,500 ||
 * **Category Total** ||  || **11,500** ||
 * Evaluation of Program ||  ||   ||
 * Peer Review ||  || 1,500 ||
 * Use of Technology by local residents and business ||  || 500 ||
 * Survey Research ||  || 1000 ||
 * **Category Total** ||  || **3,000** ||
 * **TOTAL BUDGET** ||  || **22,800** ||
 * Survey Research ||  || 1000 ||
 * **Category Total** ||  || **3,000** ||
 * **TOTAL BUDGET** ||  || **22,800** ||
 * **TOTAL BUDGET** ||  || **22,800** ||