[Ica-osgeo-labs] Education at FOSS4G 2016

Charles Schweik cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu
Sun Oct 25 05:33:13 PDT 2015


Hi Ela,

See my thoughts below in-line:

On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 4:32 PM, Elżbieta Wołoszyńska-Wiśniewska <
ela at gridw.pl> wrote:
>
>
> There are two main options:
>
> No. 1 – *conference* itself (24-26th of August)
>
> Education will be mentioned as one of the special topics in the General
> track. So during the general program selection a special focus will be put
> on education-related presentations. The idea was not to make these
> presentations too much research-oriented (as in acadeic track) but really
> practical.
> As Volker (chair of program committee) mentioned:"My plan is to give the
> slots (3 talks in a row) some kind of topic. Those would be then be
> “education”.
> I really like this idea – it would help to make this topic more visible
> and help people who are interested to find proper time and room ;-)
>
I think this is a good idea.

In Como, you'll recall there was a paper by the NCSU team about their
educational material and how they made datasets generic, or perhaps people
could consider presenting issues such as how they are teaching various
topics like geocrowdsourcing, Volunteer geographic information, geo-sensor
webs, geo-temporal visualization, modeling, or some other area. Maybe there
could be a call for papers?

> No. 2 – *pre-conference, education workshop* (23rd of August )
>
> We have a chance to organise pre-conference workshop!
>
In Como we talked about two options: a) having workshop for German school
> teachers on use of FOSS4G (e.g. QGIS) in education, b) having workshop for
> teacher trainers to show them how they can motivate and attract teachers to
> open GIS.
>
I think these are both good ideas too.

One update on my end. The GeoForAll urban thematic has a grant proposal
under review right now. Like all grant proposals -- It's a long shot -- but
if funded it would provide funding to support a US GeoForAll scholar to go
to Bonn to offer a training workshop at FOSS4G 2016. The topic would be
either a 'Research Methods' workshop or a 'Train the Trainer' workshop -
probably targeting university researchers and educators. I don't know when
we will hear about the funding, but my guess is that it will be in early
2016, and if it comes in, we'll have a call for workshop topics. So I'll
let you know if it comes in.

I encourage others in our community to go after funds like this that would
help fund/support these kinds of educational or research workshops to
happen in future FOSS4G global or regional events!

Cheers,
Charlie
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/attachments/20151025/bbcdca53/attachment.html>


More information about the GeoForAll mailing list