[OSGeo-Edu] Update on curriculum effort

Tue Jan 12 16:39:38 EST 2010

Hi Cameron,

Cameron Shorter wrote:
> 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.
This is a great vision, and there was this vision articulated last year 
as well, but it seems we are struggling to actually make it happen. 
Somehow, it seems to me, that we need a systematic process of looking at 
what will be on the DVD, and then someone looking through the 
educational content we have in our inventory to see if any of it could 
be used in this fashion. Is it possible to get a point person assigned 
to each software product on the DVD to do this kind of search?
>
> 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.
Two years ago, we tried very hard to come up with some documentation 
standards. We investigated the use of Docbook, for example and a couple 
other approaches (latex was one I remember). From my own perspective, I 
was thinking open office writer was the easiest format for others to use 
with little learning curve. But the conclusion that came out of that was 
people tended to want to use the format that was most useful to them. We 
can try to do this again, but it has been challenging to gain any group 
traction.

It would be fantastic if the project developers could help with this 
effort. I've been wanting to get a closer relationship between the 
project developers working on documentation and the education group's 
efforts. Is having a developer from each project being a point person 
for their software a possibility to make this happen this year?

What software and versions will be on this years DVD, Cameron?

Can we try and get people to sign up and take the lead (one for each 
software package, perhaps) to gather or encourage others in the 
development of material to go on this DVD?
>
> 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.
I hope everyone will encourage others who might be doing this to use our 
educational inventory submission page and the educational subversion for 
material.

Those are my thoughts....

Cheers
Charlie
>
>
> 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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>>   
>
>

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