[Ica-osgeo-labs] Your ideas/inputs needed for online educational tools for Spatial literacy using OSGeo technologies and open data

[Suchith Anand]

Colleagues,

I had a Skype meeting yesterday with Maria Brovelli and she mentioned an excellent idea to impact education efforts through both International Map Year and Google OSGeo Summer of Code opportunities we have.
Thanks to Anne and others we have an excellent base for the Summer of Code activities. For example last year  Luciene Delazari (Federal University of Parana, Brazil),  Piotr Pociask (GIS Support Sp, Warsaw) and  Mark Ware (University of South Wales) joined together for supervising the  Schematization Plugin for QGIS project http://hub.qgis.org/wiki/quantum-gis/Nishithm that student Nishith Maheshwari (IIIT Hyderabad, India) carried out. It helped enable more collaborative research ideas for the map generalisation research community and provides opportunity for extending this as an open schematisation platform which other students in future can use to build upon. It is an excellent example of how we can build ideas for collaborative research for ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS labs for the future.

The idea is to use the Summer of Code opportunity to develop online educational tools for Spatial literacy using OSGeo technologies and open data.The target audience is school teachers in science, geography, biology (both secondary and primary education). 

We can use the existing expertise within our network to bring in excellent ideas for this. For example there is already good examples and lesson scenarios developed by Ela and colleagues at UNEP-GRID Warsaw through their GIS for Schools initiative which covers topics from biodiversity to educating climate change. Details at  http://www.edugis.pl/en/images/stories/guide/gis-at-school.pdf

If we can bring in good ideas and work on this, it will be a great resource we can make available to educators globally for spatial literacy using open technologies and data. It might need working together of 3-4 Summer of Code projects (all working on different components) that will be joined together to make this possible. This year's timeline for SoC is at https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2015

So please let us know your thoughts/ideas on this so we can work on this and aim to an excellent gift to educators and students worldwide from our community for the International Map Year.

Suchith




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