[OSGeo-Announce] "Geo for All" Newsletter - March 2016

[Jorge Sanz]

"Geo for All" Newsletter - March 2016 now published



Geo for All is the Open Source Geospatial Foundation's Open
Educational outreach with our mission for making geospatial education
and opportunities accessible to all. Our monthly newsletters are key
to reach out our ideas with the wider community and build new
collaborations. We request all OSGeo members to share any
updates/developments as short reports for next issue of Geo4All
newsletter.

Also we want to hightlight OSGeo SMEs and service providers in our
future editions of our newsletter. The aim is to get the wider
community know about the excellent companies and startups that make
the OSGeo ecosystem and encourage more collaborations and startups .
So please email our chief editor [email-   labrinos at eled.auth.gr   ] a
short article about your company and how OSGeo software has been
empowering you and enabling your growth . We also welcome usecases and
implementation examples of how OSGeo software and open principles in
education are empowering  universities, government organisations, NGOs
etc. We will get your articles published in our newsletter in
forthcoming issues. Please make sure you send your artcles before 24th
of every month to get it published in the next month's edition.

We will also be highlighting one OSGeo software project /community
every month [from the OSGeo live DVD] .Volunteers to lead this section
are welcome. We request the OSGeo community to please send any
reports, articles on OSGeo activities happening (events, new software
releases, summer schools, new courses, training events etc) to the
newsletter editors.

We are pleased share our newsletter at
http://www.geoforall.org/newsletters/  to the wider geo community.




Editorial - March  2016


Dear members of the Network/ readers of the Newsletter,


As you may find out, this issue has almost twice as much material from
the previous issues, thanks to the great job of all the co-editors and
the members of our network. You can find very interesting articles,
based on discussions done in February, about AgriGIS, Global School
Network, the Open City Smart project, and NASA World Wind.


>From these four, the newest one is the beginning of the discussion
about the formation of a Global School Network. As the discussion has
just started, I would like to share with you why I think there is a
need of a Global Network. First of all, this would put an order to the
situation we face of many people doing things with no coordination; no
“Central Instructions;” no “basic ideas” of what, when and how to do
it. Most of us work at a university or a research centre, and whatever
we do is for the students of higher education.


In my opinion, we have to focus on the base of the educational system.
It is very easy to teach university students. They know a lot of
things, and it is easy to teach them, using complicated words and
concepts, about spatial science. But what about the students in
primary and secondary education? How can we make them understand how
spatial the world in which they live is, and how can they use the
tools we have constructed in order to manipulate the spatiality of our
world?


We can't do this if we don't get all the help we can from their
teachers. But even the teachers have different ideas about the way
they can teach about this world. In fact, everything has to do with
the pedagogical part of the spatial tools we use and the curriculum of
each level in each country. This is why we have to work with the
teachers, as they work with their students, so they can let us know
what their needs are. In some cases we do have some information from
published articles, but it has to be more organized and, why not, more
guided.


Finally, there was an interesting telemeeting with Christopher Tucker,
Chairman of the Board of Trustees, The MapStory Foundation, in which
Chris let us know more about MapStory and what it can do for the
teachers and students. We all hope that Chris will share with us an
article on MapStory, and we will have the pleasure to publish it in a
future issue.


Have a nice reading.

Dr.Nikos Lambrinos, Chief Editor.