ABSTRACT
GIS curriculum design has been the topic of many papers and conference sessions during the past ten years (for example, Kemp and Dodson, 1991, list eighty papers), and emphasis has been placed on the categorisation of students (future users) and course formats. Many of these works define a comprehensive GIS course to serve all possible students: a sort of minimum requirement of GIS ‘vitamins’ in a general educational diet. Unfortunately, many future GIS users will not be specialists, and will not attend traditional university courses or the other requisite courses – statistics, computer science, management, geographic problem solving, cartography, etc. – which all form a part of any comprehensive twelve to forty-eight month graduate degree programme in GIS. Is it reasonable to expect that the hundreds of thousands of users of Microsoft Office (which includes a subset of MapInfo) will invest in an MSc in GIS or even that they had attended a GIS course during their college days? The rapid evolution of GIS ease-of-use and functionality allows that users need not make this investment. Those few who wish to become GIS developers are a special case.
