[Geo4All] Vision for an OSGeo education program

[Massimiliano Cannata]

Thanks Nicos for the arguments you put in the table.
A provocative question... Why a teacher using a web application to teach
and produce a map should care if the server use open source or not?

More, esri pushing geospatial need and industry is working also for us ;-)

Maxi

Il 29 ott 2016 12:28 AM, <labrinos at eled.auth.gr> ha scritto:


Dear all,

I follow your emails these days and I can see two things: a) enthusiasm and
b) anger.
The first is good the second is bad. Both are reasonable. They are
generated from a kind of an undeclared war between proprietary and FOS
Software.
I have the feeling that many of us feel ready to declare war against
proprietary software but ... don't do it. We need it. Propriery software
makes us priceless. We do need something to compare with.
Someone wrote that ESRI has a lot of people working on GIS and education.
So do we.
The problem lies on how we are organized. ESRI looks better organized than
we are. They are focused and they know where to strike first and how. We
don't.
Take a look at the emails. Each one is talking either about middle or high
school and (in my turn) I would talk about primary school. Each level has
its own needs.
What do we want from the teachers and from their students? It isn't enough
to show them how to use GIS. We have to convince them that they need GIS.
This is what ESRI is doing. In order to do so we have to show them a very
simple way to use it. ESRI gives free licenses, we give free software. So,
we give more.
Teachers and especially students love to show the results of their work. If
they have to take many courses and 10s of teaching hours (no matter if it
is webinars or f2f courses) then many of them may get disappointed or
consider GIS difficult to begin with. Because they don't get quick results
(for example a newly constructed map).
In my opinion, we have to begin building a real global network with schools
of any level of education. This is something I had proposed few months ago
but I got almost no answer. We can do that the same way that GeoForAll was
built. With patience and vision.
I am almost 23 years talking about GIS in school teachers (starting back in
1994) and I think that the difference was made since the beginning of web
mapping. This is because they can see their efforts go public. Everyone
loves publicity. It will be easier to go from the very simple keystrokes of
web mapping to more complicated procedures (teachers don't like much
georeferrencing systems etc) of GIS.
Who thinks that we can start with these two thngs? a) forming a well
organized global school network and b) web mapping as a starter?
We have to have system and patience.

Best wishes
Nikos




-- 
Δρ. Νίκος Λαμπρινός
Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής
Τμήμα Δημοτικής Εκπαίδευσης
Α.Π.Θ. 54124 Θεσσαλονίκη
Τηλ.: 2310 991201 / 991230
Email: labrinos at eled.auth.gr
Web Page:       http://users.auth.gr/labrinos/
                http://www.digital-earth.edu.gr/
                https://www.auth.gr/univUnits

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Nikos Lambrinos
Associate Professor
Faculty of Education
School of Primary Education
Dept. of Science and New Technologies
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
GR-54124 Thessaloniki, Greece
Tel: +30 2310 991201
Email: labrinos at eled.auth.gr
Web Page:       http://users.auth.gr/labrinos/
                http://www.digital-earth.edu.gr/
                https://www.auth.gr/en/univUnits

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