[Geo4All] Vision for an OSGeo education program

[Cameron Shorter]

Tom,

I agree with your suggested approach as viable and achievable.

Cheers, Cameron


On 2/11/2016 7:19 AM, Tom Roche wrote:
> Sergio Acosta y Lara[1]
>> I have direct access to teachers who are prepared to take FOSS4G material into the classroom.
> ...
>
>> I have full support from the institution where I work (Ministry of Transport and Public Works)
> Excellent! Note that I am *not* trying to "dump on" Cameron Shorter here, but I strongly suspect we should not try to do this "top down," e.g.,
>
> Cameron Shorter[2]
>>> If you had access to scores of people to help build everything required to create a GIS training program, what would it look like?
> Personally--and I say this as someone with exactly zero experience in this domain=developing and deploying FLOSS GIS tools for "formal education" or "classroom settings"--I suspect we will be more productive if we work "bottom up": find out what a (relatively small number of) educators want, deliver what we can in those cases, test the "user experience," and eventually assemble working pieces into something that scales into a more general "GIS training program." Specifically:
>
> Firstly, we should try to develop a relatively short list (3-5?) of "target groups" with whom we could work, who could provide
>
> 1. access to students. What we most need are testbeds. This should be easily understood by folks on this list, since a/the big problem for many folks seeking to work on problems involving GIS specifically and scientific computing more generally is *platform access*: inability to use hardware and (FLOSS GIS) software necessary to address their task. In this case (FOSS4G education), platform=students--gotta have that.
>
> 2. committment. We should seek to work with groups that have demonstrated prior and ongoing interest ("track record" in US English) in this task.
>
> 3. funding. I'm guessing that we will not be able to self-fund as much as we want, so IMHO we should look for groups that already have funding toward this task, or who seem reasonably able to acquire it.
>
> 4. diversity. To the extent we can, with the resources we have, we should probably try to work with groups targeting various age (e.g., grade level), language/culture, and spatial groups, since we (IIUC) want ultimately to go global.
>
> Note that we probably don't need to get a full list together before starting to work with any group; I'm emphasizing more that we don't want to "spread too thin." So I'd personally recommend starting toward identify candidate groups from among those who have already "bubbled up" on this thread:
>
> * Randal Hale's school[3] (or other contacts)
> * Sergio Acosta y Lara's Plan Ceibal[4] contacts
> * the ISU primary-ed team[5]
>
> Secondly, after we have identified at least one target group, we should meet (virtually or F2F) with them and try to intersect
>
> * what they want to do
> * what we want to do
> * what we *can* do with available resources
>
> We should be able to do that in parallel with identifying other target groups, but we will need to stop--or at least prioritize--before we stretch our implementation resources too far. Because implementation (for each target group, "scratching their itches") will be a very big Step 3.
>
> Iff[6] we can do *that*, scale up to a general-purpose FOSS4G training program that can assault the Microsoft/ESRI monolith worldwide.
>
> FWIW, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>
>
> [1]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-November/003271.html
> [2]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-October/003265.html
> [3]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2016-October/016868.html
> [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceibal_project , https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Ceibal
> [5]: https://education.illinoisstate.edu/nsf/curriculum/
> [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if
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-- 
Cameron Shorter
M +61 419 142 254