[Geo4All] Vision for an OSGeo education program

[Tom Roche]

Cameron Shorter[1] (rearranged)
> [folks] tapped into the teaching profession,

Unfortunately I am not one (and IANAT[2]), but I try to pay attention to anyone breaking out of the Microsoft/ESRI private prison.

> Do you have [access] to teachers who are prepared to take this material into the classroom, and are prepared to help refine material based on their experience?

No--but again[3], this is why I favor working (wherever feasible) with folks in the education-research community who are already testing their curricula (etc) on Real Students. To do this, they need classroom access: in the US, this kinda "formal intervention" can require slogging through reams of paperwork, which is one more reason to ally with a group that's already working this space. (In some cases, ed depts have their own "in-house classrooms" à la Dewey's "Lab School"[4].) Dr Lambrinos presumably knows more about European primary-ed-research community; Randal Hale has "rolled his own" intervention in this space[5] (and if his school is in eastern NC, his experience should be directly transferable to much of the Third World); I'm guessing there are other folks on the list working in this topical domain in other linguistic and spatial domains, as well as targeting other age groups. But contacting the ISU primary-ed team[6] (who, just to be clear, I know only from the web) seems like one reasonable start, not least because they're already got some funding[7].

> If we can have a clear definition of what we need to create, and have teachers offering their commitment to take what is created into the classroom,

Umm ... empirically, that procedural order is vulnerable to BDUF[8]. Better (though more time-intensive upfront) to start working with teachers who already have a problem (e.g., "my kids {should, need to} be able to do <tasks/>"), start deploying/testing functionality for quick/direct feedback, and build buy-in before scaling up. The alternative, far too often, is writing a beautiful design that is either never implemented or never deployed ("shelfware").

> Is it possible to create training material which is targeted, but also useful for an international audience? (So that it can be used and maintained by an international user base)

As a coder I'm more attuned to the maintenance side of i18n[9]. Wiki can work for this if appropriately managed (notably, for spam prevention); to better integrate documentation with software development (and therefore version control tools), you want something like ReadTheDocs[10]. But for some tasks, nothing beats screengrabs/video; that's easy to author but harder to maintain (though a lot easier now that Git LFS[11] is increasingly available).

Just OTTOMH, I'm guessing that doc for {teenagers, secondary education} will be easier to write, and we might even be able to "rope them into" helping {maintain it, create new material}, but I Am Not A Teacher and ICBW.

HTH, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>

[1]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-October/003265.html
[2]: I Am Not A Teacher. Not that there's anything wrong with teaching, it's just not for me ...
[3]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-October/003237.html
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Chicago_Laboratory_Schools
[5]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2016-October/016868.html
[6]: https://education.illinoisstate.edu/nsf/curriculum/
[7]: https://education.illinoisstate.edu/nsf/timeline/
[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Design_Up_Front
[9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization
[10]: https://readthedocs.org/
[11]: see (e.g.) https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/git-lfs/ , https://github.com/blog/1986-announcing-git-large-file-storage-lfs , https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/23/announcing-git-lfs-support-in-gitlab/