[OSGeo-Edu] Re: UMass Amherst educational material -- a status report

[Charlie Schweik]

Hi Puneet-

> You might want to convert the slideshows to something platform
> agnostic such as PDF, or even the html generated by Powerpoint. 
Well, if I made those available, I'd probably offer them in Open Office
Impress. The issue for me is that I need to check for copyright issues
on some of the graphics. They fell under fair use when I use them in the
regular classroom, but putting them on OSGEO would obviously need to
make sure they were all graphics from the public domain.

> > OSGEO site. This would be sometime this summer.
> 
> I would encourage you to put whatever you have sooner instead of
> later, unless you have other restrictions or reasons. If your material
> is still in flux, you can always link to it from the OSGeo wiki. You
> have all the flexibility.
That's the main issue -- we're still developing the second half of the
course. If I make a link to our wiki and material, it is easy to get to
the main page and see the material not yet complete. I'd rather not
allow that.

If you'd like me to move the completed stuff to the OSGEO wiki, I can,
but we should begin the review process. I thought I would do this after
my students have gone through the material so that they sort of act as
one level of review to help clean up problematic text. 

But let me know if you want me to move completed exercises and
assignments over to some OSGEO "not reviewed by OSGEO" section of the
OSGEO EDU wiki. I'd be happy to do that. It will require moving
Mediawiki pages, uploaded images (graphics) and data. It might be a
little tedious unless there is a way to batch copy from one mediawiki to
another.

I'll also look into how I can check copyright issues on lecture slides
and see if I can do anything to clean those up so those can be made
available. But this will take some time, and might not be until the
summer.

Cheers
Charlie

> 
> ..
> > Finally, we're running into an interesting issue that relates to
> > eventual OSGEO hosting. In the section where we are trying to show
> > attribute database work, (Week 8: where we are using data from Spatial
> > Data Engines -- PostGreSql, PostGIS) we are hosting a database on a
> > server that students are supposed to use for the exercise. So if we did
> > want to eventually move these exercises to be hosted on OSGEO, we would
> > need to have a server hosting the PostGreSQL data. We'll learn in a few
> 
> If tutorials involve live data (as good tutorial should), yes, this is
> something OSGeo webcom will have to consider, unless, once again, you
> want to continue hosting the tutorial on your server and just link to
> it from OSGeo. It would be nice if OSGeo were able to provide
> MapServer/PostGIS facilities, but I guess the administrative overhead
> would be tremendous.
> 
> Many thanks for your efforts.
> 
> 
-- 
Associate Professor 
- Department of Natural Resources Conservation (www.umass.edu/nrc) 
- Center for Public Policy and Administration (www.masspolicy.org),
- Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government (www.ncdg.org)
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003
Phone: (413) 545-1824
Website: http://people.umass.edu/cschweik