[Ica-osgeo-labs] Paper about FOSS into geospatial education

[Suchith Anand]

Great work Vaclav.

I understand from Dr. Christopher K Tucker (Chairman of the Board of Trustees, The MapStory Foundation) cc in that when MapStory  http://MapStory.org relaunched later in June, it will be an openly licensed data commons, an Open Educational Resource, that is OGC compliant, built on open source geo  http://www.GeoNode.org .  It is intended explicitly for students to be able to organize and share what they know about the world spatially and temporally.  And, in the redesign, they will open up distributed versioned editing of change over time, so that students can collaborate on data collection projects, and then tell their own stories with this data. This is exactly the kind of spatial learning platform we need for expanding geoeducation for schools. 

I suggest that,  GeoForAll should support and make use of  MapStory.org  , as an alternative to proprietary ones like ArcGISOnline, so that students and teachers can make use of this for learning purposes without being dependent on the mercy of the proprietary vendor.

Please let me know your thoughts/ideas. We will add MapStory to our training resources section and promote this to all educators.

Best wishes,

Suchith



________________________________________
From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Mueller, Thomas [Mueller at calu.edu]
Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2015 4:05 PM
To: Vaclav Petras; ICA OSGeo Labs list
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] Paper about FOSS into geospatial education

Vaclav

This is awesome.  Thank you for the article.  I was thinking of doing something similar in my GEO 100 class.  I was thinking of comparing ArcGIS Online vs an Open GIS product.  Does anyone know of a similar product to ArcGIS online?

Thanks
Tom

________________________________
From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] on behalf of Vaclav Petras [wenzeslaus at gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2015 10:34 PM
To: ICA OSGeo Labs list
Subject: [Ica-osgeo-labs] Paper about FOSS into geospatial education

Dear all,

I would like to let you know about an open access paper called *Integrating Free and Open Source Solutions into Geospatial Science Education* [1] which our group [2] published recently in a special issue of ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (thanks Suchith and other for organizing it).

>From our experience, when teaching geospatial thinking and analysis, software is often or even always involved. However, students tend to mix the theory with software specifics. Our solution is to teach theory and general ideas in lectures and use two different software packages in labs. With this approach, students get hands-on practice while getting the idea what is general principle and what is specific to one or the other software package.

Our flagship course is *Geospatial Analysis and Modeling* [3] and we use GRASS GIS and ArcGIS but the principle is obviously applicable to any course and any software. This modeling course is well-established and well-maintained since it runs every semester for several years already. The course material is licensed under CC BY-SA. You can find more information and more courses in the paper and on our website and I'll be happy to give you more details as well.

In the paper, we focus on graduate education but we hope to apply similar principles in undergraduate education too. However, for introduction to geospatial sciences at earlier levels (including high schools and middle schools), OpenStreetMap seems to me like a very good option because students can do something which actually has local or humanitarian impact while having the opportunity to analyze the collected data later in the course. OpenStreetMap community has already some resources on that topic as well as case studies [4].

Best regards,
Vaclav

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijgi4020942
[2] http://geospatial.ncsu.edu/osgeorel
[3] http://courses.ncsu.edu/gis582/common
[4] http://teachosm.org



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