CAT GIS: example of a new educational instrument applied to the geography teaching.

CATGIS is an approach to the knowledge of the physical and human characteristics of Italy as a result of the triennial research project “Dissemination and experimentation of the cartography, remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as an educational technology applied to the territorial and environmental study” financed by MIUR (Education, university and Italian research Ministry)1 that involved five research units, as CSSAS2. The aim was to develop a prototype for a new didactic methodology, far from the mnemonic teaching of the geography, opened to a different educational graduation (school, university) and also to the refreshing (technicians) on cartography, remote sensing and GIS. The research was conceived in order to join the informatic dissemination to the knowledge of the tools and method to reading the landscape and analyzing the territorial evolutions in its urban and rural reality, in order to a correct estimation of the conditions and the characteristic of the ecosystem. Due to the complexity of the coexistence of natural and antrophic elements, a multidisciplinary approach was important: cartography, aerophotogrammetry and remote sensing improve the geography teaching, linking scientific subjects and humanistic, are a new instrument of territorial transformations. The CATGIS website (http://www.dista.agrsci.unibo.it/catgis/) is organized into 5 topics (cartography, aerophotogrammetry, remote sensing, census data, GIS) , opened by web link. The first three topics contain: 1. the text, divided into chapters, developing and refreshing the specific subject; 2. the didactic files, summarizing the previous section; 3. the atlas, including cartographical, aerial and satellite images. Census data is organized only into the section “didactic files”, with the evaluation of statistic processing for some Italian Region and Provinces compared to demographic census at the beginning and finishing of XX century. There are also the dynamics of the land use (residential vs. productive areas) of some chief town compared with demographic density. The GIS topic is interactive and presents an informatics reading of the Italian territory, divided into Regions trough the e morphology, hydrography, land use, city boundary and landscape units theme. By the CATGIS web site it is possible to surf on Italy through the 119 landscape units homogeneous in morphology, geology and land use, with the knowledge of the main antrophic aspects and dynamics. There is also a possibility to open and download a georeferenced images selection with a short description of the subject. CATGIS can be easily opened by anyone trough simple surfing, with accurate contents and good quality images by which you can quickly download documents in .pdf format. It promotes a global approach to the environmental problems, acquiring critical knowledge by geographical reading of land, studying relationships between human and natural environment, knowing and using new technologies and web site production to support training, diffusion and data interchanges with interested didactic operators.