[Ica-osgeo-labs] Building synergies for geospatial education

Wed Oct 30 05:47:12 PDT 2013

Hi all,

To update you on the telemeeting I had with UNIGIS Course Directors on 25th Oct. I gave a brief overview of our ICA-OSGeo lab activities in my short presentation.  

These are the key points i put forward

Teaching

We will be pleased to work with UNIGIS for further building up teaching materials based on OSGeo stack. OSLive http://live.osgeo.org/en/index.html   will be a good way to expand education and training opportunities for students worldwide. Especially for modules on WebGIS, Databases , Web Services , Geospatial libraries, Catalog Services etc, OSGeo stack will be of great benefit for both staff and students. UNIGIS colleagues are also welcome to make use of the ELOGeo repository http://elogeo.nottingham.ac.uk/xmlui 

UNIGIS staff and students should take advantage of the various initiatives that our lab members have done. For example, the NASA Worldwind Europa challenge that Maria Brovelli and others lead willl be a good opportunity esp. for dissertation projects. See this year's projects  at http://eurochallenge.como.polimi.it/?q=projects   We are hoping for 2014, there will be strong participation from UNIGIS students for these competitions.

Students can take advantage of OSGeo Google Summer of Code opportunities . Details at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2013 

I have invited UNIGIS members to join our monthly webinars.

With strong policy directives and implementation actions  supporting Open Source, Open Standards and Open data by governments across the world, it is important that  the students have the job skills for the changing geospatial and location based  industry and employers (esp.  government organisations)  requirements.

Joint organisation of educational sessions in major conferences.

I think the most fundamental benefit  by  using open source geo software is helping widening geospatial education opportunities rapidly and student empowerment. In addition to students learning GIScience and they also get the software to use after they graduate (unlike high cost proprietary licences!  ) . You can give away copies of OSGeo LiveDVDs to your students when they join the courses which they can use as they wish. That will also help UNIGIS expand and scale thier programs rapidly without being dependent on proprietary vendors.

Research

Each ICA-OSGeo lab within a university is also a focus for bringing together colleagues from other departments in the university who have interest in location based research and build synergies. For example University of Southampton lab brought together staff from Computer Science, Geography, Engineering etc .

We greatly welcome all UNIGIS universities to join the ICA-OSGeo lab network and join us for building research synergies in geospatial science. Building research based on open technologies enables global collaboration, scalability and sustainability (plus research funders such as EC are now having this as a major requirement). 

I can see synergies in both teaching and research collaborations between the ICA-OSGeo lab network and UNIGIS and i am pleased to report that Gemma Boix  will continue as a liaison between the UNIGIS board and OSGeo-ICA labs, and we will explore the idea of an MoU between ICA-OSGeo labs and UNIGIS Int'l as an umbrella organisation (while individual partner universities  are encouraged to explore the option of joining as labs).

Prof Josef Strobl (UNIGIS)  also suggested ' virtual lab' idea for accommodating the distributed nature of thier student communities  which i think is an excellent idea and i am looking forward to discuss and build more collaborations with UNIGIS and our lab network for both teaching and research for the future. I will also nominate  one representative of UNIGIS to our Advisory Board and it will be great to have UNIGIS colleagues inputs for the future.

Our planned telemeeting with OGC is moved to Nov 18th to accomodate travel plans of participants. I will keep you all updated.

Suchith

-----Original Message-----
From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Suchith Anand
Sent: 19 October 2013 19:22
To: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org; ica-opensource at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] Building synergies for geospatial education

Another thing i forgot to mention was  exploring collaborations with  UNIGIS International Association. UNIGIS is a global network of higher education institutions and the world's premier distance education initiative offering masters and diploma programmes in Geographical Information Science and Systems (GISc). Details at http://www.unigis.net

We already have key members of UNIGIS in ICA-OSGeo Lab network (for exampe SIGTE, University of Girona) and it is important to build synergies with UNIGIS and explore opportunities with our Open Educational resources (for example ELOGeo), so that UNIGIS colleagues can make use of these resources as they wish in their education also.

I was invited to participate in UNIGIS meeting in Krakow, Poland this week but as i have to attend a new FP7 kick off meeting in Belgium this week, i won't be able to go for the UNIGIS meeting but they have kindly arranged for me a telemeeting with UNIGIS Course Directors on 25th Oct in which i will give a short presentation of our activities and explore ideas for building future collaborations. 

I will keep you all updated and i think all these developments are excellent for accelerating the spread of geospatial education opportunities to wider community worldwide.

Suchith
________________________________________
From: ica-opensource-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [ica-opensource-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Suchith Anand [Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk]
Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2013 5:47 PM
To: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org; ica-opensource at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [ica-opensource] Building synergies for geospatial education

Hi All,

At FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham, there was informal meeting between OGC and OSGeo representatives for discussing areas for building future collaboration and clearly there is strong synergies in many areas (esp. In Geospatial Education).  OGC and OSGeo already have an MoU and we already work closely with OGC colleagues in geospatial education areas. For example Luis (OGC)  has done excellent work on his OGC Github initiative and we should be all working more  in further extending these collaborations.

ICA-OSGeo lab network has been building up rapidly (we have our 50th lab  now joining last Friday - press release to be send this week along with our new website launch ) and it is important we keep building geospatial education opportunities and we aim to work closely with OGC to make available resources for geospatial standards education more accessible to educators worldwide. There is lot of synergies we can build upon the ICA-OSGeo labs initiative by working closely with OGC for further building up geospatial education opportunities for all.

Jeff, Ian, myself (and any others interested) will be having telemeeting with Denise (OGC) on next Friday to build up ideas we discussed at FOSS4G Nottingham. I will keep you all updated on the developments. Thanks for your support.

Best wishes,

Suchith

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