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

[Vaclav Petras]

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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