[OSGeo-Edu] Update on curriculum effort

[Cameron Shorter]

Charlie and others,

I'm involved in the development of the Geospatial Live DVD which is 
handed out at geospatial conferences like FOSS4G. http://arramagong.com

The DVD contains a suite of most of the most popular Geospatial Open 
Source applications. We currently have installed brief instructions on 
how to run each application, but I would like to see much more 
comprehensive documentation.

In particular, I'd like teachers to be able to hand out a DVD to each of 
their class, and then have the class walk through tutorial material 
developed by the education committee and installed on this DVD.

I also believe that project developers will help develop this training 
material, if they are given clear guidance on what needs to be 
developed. Ie, we need to tell the community what format to write 
documents in (ooffice, docbook, html, word?), and provide a template 
with headings and instructions about what needs to be in each section, 
then have an example that people can follow.

If we have a clear statement about the deliverables we require, and a 
target date for when the material needs to be developed by (FOSS4G 
2010?) then we should be able to move the greater community to create 
the material.

Note also that there are a number of Australian educational institutions 
interested in creating this material too whom I'm expecting will 
contribute to the material development.


Charlie Schweik wrote:
> Hi edu folks,
>
> Happy New Year all! I'm hoping we all can commit ourselves to making 
> some great progress as a group over the next six months in advance of 
> the next FOSS4Geo conference, related to developing a framework for 
> organizing OSGeo-related curriculum and educational material, and 
> continue to strive for a working system where we share content and 
> build on each other's content. As you forge ahead in your own work in 
> 2010, please think about how that work might relate to what we are 
> doing and you try and contribute to our joint efforts...
>
> On my end, I just wanted to report in that I've been working on my end 
> to get permission for us to possibly use the University Consortium for 
> Geographic Information Science and Association for American 
> Geographer's GI S&T Body of Knowledge [1] as an overarching framework 
> for guiding our future curriculum efforts. The framework is under 
> copyright by both UCGIS and AAG, but *I've received permission by the 
> UCGIS folks to use this material*. I'm now contacting AAG to get their 
> permission since it is under joint copyright.
>
> I struggle a little bit with this because of the copyright issues and 
> the philosophy of openness and sharing. But this seems to be, in my 
> view, a very good guiding framework for us to follow. I'm thinking 
> that somehow we would connect this to the discussions we've had about 
> material that demonstrates how to do some particular function or 
> process using open technologies.
>
> If anyone has any objections to this direction I am taking, let me 
> know, or let me know if we need to open this up to a vote.
>
> Finally, two other things:
>
> 1) Don't forget about adding new educational content to our inventory 
> page [2] through the submit function [3]. The last postings were 
> September of 2009 -- someone surely has other material developed since 
> then.
>
> 2) We need people to start building on what Helena has done related to 
> the process of putting material in Subversion so we can continue to 
> move toward a "new derivatives" type system of sharing content. Can 
> somebody step up and build on Helena's work to get that process 
> documented for others to use? Here's what we have linked on our group 
> education/curriculum page [4].  What we want, I think, is to more 
> clearly connect this process to our submit function [3].
>
> Cheers
> Charlie
>
> [1] http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp
> [2] http://www.osgeo.org/educational_content
> [3] https://www.osgeo.org/node/add/edu-content
> [4] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Subversion_edu_instructions.
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>   


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
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