[Ica-osgeo-labs] Open GIS Academics and educators please apply to AAG call before June 15th, 2015

Sun Jun 21 12:41:26 PDT 2015

Hi Diana,

Thank you for sharing your inputs. We want to make sure this AP course is successful in its intent and hence from the beginning making sure that steps are taken so that the students have meaningful learning experience each and every year (in the long term). Hence it is important to think  about the long term implications as there is "a heavy technology component" for this AP and the cost/sustainability implications of relying on any particular proprietary vendor ONLY.

Your reference to AP in Computer Science  (which has a similar  substantial technology component)  and why and how Java became the choice ( inspite of many other options ) is very important factor for AAG to look into carefully and make sure they do learn lessons from this . The vision and farsightedness of AP in Computer Science colleagues in choosing Java (over other options) in making sure  there is  GNU General Public License and cross-platform criteria  in the choice of AP Computer Science course is important to note for the planned AP in GIS &T  also as this is very key for the cost/sustainability  and long term implications as well empowering educators so that they are not at the mercy of any vendor alone due to any changed conditions later.

I understand from Dr. Christopher K Tucker (Chairman of the Board of Trustees, The MapStory Foundation) that when MapStory [3] is relaunched later in June, it will be an openly licensed data commons, an Open Educational Resource, that is OGC compliant, built on open source geo  .  It is intended explicitly for students to be able to organize and share what they know about the world spatially and temporally.  And, in the redesign, they will open up distributed versioned editing of change over time, so that students can collaborate on data collection projects, and then tell their own stories with this data. This is exactly the kind of spatial learning platform we need for expanding geoeducation for schools and empowering educators and also help design, implement, and analyze solutions to problems that have a geographic or spatial component.

We will be in discussions with Map Story Foundation and other learned societies like The American Geographical Society (AGS) and we will do our best to support this excellent initiative  for  Open Principles in Education. I hope AAG  will keep other learned societies like AGS in the loop and involve them and initiatives like MapStory in this AP in GIS&T initiative.

Also for info, I have not yet got a clear answer or guarantee from anyone  to my basic question  i asked

*  What is the guarantee that the proprietary GIS vendor will keep providing free service for the long term?
*  If the proprietary GIS vendor decides to change the costs and other conditions in say 5 years time what will happen to these hundreds of thousands of students? Can AAG or anyone give us any guarantee.?
*  If so, Who will be paying for this changed conditions later in say 5 years time?  Will it be the schools who have to pay or will AAG give them funding for any changed conditions by the proprietary GIS vendor?
*  If so, How much will be the yearly costs for the whole program  ?
 *  What will then be total costs be to transition this to Open Platforms later?

It is important that AAG really ought to discuss full details  about this before any software choice is made.

Vendors can change their mind any time and the poor schools ,teachers and students will be left on thier own. Either they have to pay and buy  (maybe they will get some discount) but the fact of the matter is academics , teachers and students are at the mercy of the vendor. If the properitory vendor decides to change the costs or terms, the schools and students will suffer.

I clearly highlighted this problem when i recieved info. from one list member  (Randal Hale, USA ) informing of proprietary GIS software update problems faced by a high school in USA  [1] and that example was a real eye opener of the long term costs/sustainability issues of properitory GIS software in geoeducation and hence i decided to take action and contact AAG on this. In fact, i would think there are many more schools in the same situvation which we dont even know of.

Education means empowerment of educators and students and that is very important to keep in mind. That is why it is important to have open discussions and debates on this. I hope AAG will not attempt to do any decisions under closed doors with any proprietary GIS vendor (because of sponsor pressure etc) as it  not good for educators and students interest in the long term .If a particular proprietary GIS vendor wants their software to be the ONLY one to used for this program that is not real education but  just a software training program designed to building their user base and agenda in the name of widening geoeducation.

I am clear that as Educators we have to keep focus on Open Principles in education. For us, who are supporting Open Principles in Education , we do not have the money or power as the vendors, so it is educators like you all who have to make sure the right choices are made as it affects hundreds of thousands of students.

Let me make this very clear, we are not  interested in any proprietary GIS vs open  debates BUT it is very important that we keep our eyes open on any developments that undermine Open Principles in education and make sure that is corrected . Other wise it will have long term implications. That is exactly why we had to take action when we realized that there was efforts to undermine Open Standards in LiDAR [2].

I have been advised  by some colleagues to ignore this development as there will be consequences  as the proprietary GIS vendor is very powerful and influential and opposing thier wrong actions and policies are not "adviceable".   But i had to take action  on this key geoeducation initiative as it is the future of thousands of schools and we just cannot afford to close our eyes and be silent.

I believe this new AP course  in GIS&T is a huge opportunity not only for expanding geoeducation opportunities for students across USA but also providing professional development for teachers and empowering them. We will strongly support this excellent initiative.

Best wishes,

Suchith

[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-June/014310.html
[2] http://www.osgeo.org/node/1518
[3] http://MapStory.org

________________________________________
From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Diana Sinton [dianasinton at ucgis.org]
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2015 6:03 PM
To: 'Anthony Robinson'; ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
Cc: Ola Ahlqvist; Michael Solem
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] Open GIS Academics and educators please   apply   to AAG call before June 15th, 2015

These suggestions, agendas, and realities will somehow eventually blend if this AP course is ever actually launched AND successful in its intent. The desired outcomes are likely shared among GENIP, AAG, and all of these other voices discussing this (that hundreds of thousands of high school students have a positive experience learning how and why mapping, geographical thinking, and spatial analysis, through the use of modern and exciting technologies, can inform and support their knowledge, skills, and abilities to address local, global, societal issues and situations, etc.). But a clear vision for the curriculum and logistics for supporting it are going to be a super challenge, and opportunity.

1)      The College Board’s system of Advanced Placement courses must necessarily be highly structured and externally validated so that universities will be willing to accept the academic credit that a student may try to transfer, IF the student earns a high enough grade on the exam or other type of course evaluation. Currently, there is much more agreement across higher education in the US about what a student ought to know in “Biology 101” or “Spanish 101” than “GIS&T 101.” This is the list of current AP courses that the College Board supports<http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/descriptions/index.html>.

2)      The only Geography-related AP class is Human Geography<https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse/ap-human-geography/course-details>. First introduced in 2001, it’s become very popular and in 2012, over 190,000 students took the test<http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/members/courses/teachers_corner/220797.html>.  The class is often perceived to be an “easy” one, and it’s not uncommon for schools to allow or even encourage 9th graders<http://www.ncge.org/aphg> to take it. I couldn’t find the stats quickly online, but I believe that many more 9th and 10th graders take it than 12th graders.  What will it mean for 9th or 10th graders to be taking GIS 101?  How would that affect credit-transfer rates? If many students take the class, and get only a 1 or 2 on the exam, will that still contribute to the overall desired outcome?

3)      The only other current AP class that has a substantial technology component is Computer Science (pdf<https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-course-overviews/ap-computer-science-a-course-overview.pdf> of its overview).  At some point along their curriculum design process, it was decided that Java would be the programming language of choice, so that’s what students use, and schools must be able to provide “at least 3 hrs/week of access to a computer lab for students” to be able to apply what they learn. Who knows why and how Java became the language of choice, but I imagine there were people who promoted others then too. There may be lessons learned available from the experience of those who currently support the Comp Sci AP.

But more importantly, the first stated goal for the Comp Sci AP class is that students “design, implement, and analyze solutions to problems,” and use of Java specifically falls much lower on the list.  I imagine that’s the approach that we hope this new GIS&T course takes, that students “design, implement, and analyze solutions to problems that have a geographic or spatial component.”  Right?

4)      Somehow, there will have to be some kind of hands-on activities that are part of a GIS 101 class. Maintaining a computer lab with machines that support Java scripting is obviously a more trivial matter than ones that can run desktop GIS programs. If you have any experience with computer labs in US high schools, you will know that the individual machine capacity is only one of many issues. Access, permissions, bandwidth, data and project storage, etc., will all become part of the complicated details about how something like this will be handled across thousands of different school districts. Why is one reason why browser-based solutions will be critical if this course has any chance of success.

5)      In order for any particular school to offer this course, they will have to identify existing (or new) teachers within their district willing and able to lead it. Ultimately that might mean the need for many, many hundreds of teachers with the confidence and competence to do this. Geography and GIS are very under-taught and under-learned subjects by educators in the US, and the current cohorts of such teachers is not nearly adequate, to put it mildly. How teaching and learning GIS is specifically connected with traditional measures of “spatial ability” is a complicated topic, but meanwhile, one undeniable characteristic of our current population of educators is that they are not, as a group, known for their spatial abilities<https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201208/three-reasons-why-schools-neglect-spatial-intelligence>.  What are the implications of this for helping build their confidence and competence at teaching about coordinate systems, projections, methods of data overlay and intersections, least cost path routing, deriving slope and aspect from digital elevation models, etc.?  These are some of the more “spatial” things involved with many GIS 101 courses.

6)      Expecting teachers to have confidence and competence knowing and teaching across multiple GIS applications will be exponentially challenging for them and, frankly, will likely discourage some from taking on this teaching assignment.  This will be a *huge* opportunity and need for professional development for teachers.

7)      Students take AP classes so that they can get transferrable credit. That’s variable by the test score results and the colleges & universities considering the transferring in of that credit, and whether the credit is a general one or for a specific requirement at that university.  They are of little use at 2-yr schools<http://www.collegefinder.org/what-colleges-accept-ap-credits/>, and these days, a few selective schools don’t take these AP credits at all<http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/education/more-colleges-stop-giving-credit-ap-exams>.  So important conversations will have to take place with universities who currently offer “GIS 101” to get a sense of what type of credit they would grant, if any. There will be much scrutiny of the course content and the exam itself by lots of departments.  Articulation issues about GIS credits between 2-yr colleges and 4-yr colleges is already challenging, and this will be so too.

Just a few thoughts to keep in mind as the discussions continue. The authoring team will have its work cut out for them with this exciting and worthy opportunity.

Best,
Diana

p.s.  I share these perspectives based on my own knowledge: my own 3 teenage & young adult children have collectively taken almost 20 AP classes since 2008; I’ve been teaching intro GIS to non-geographers for almost 20 years; I have run GIS workshops for middle- and high-school teachers in their own computer labs before; I designed and taught in the University of Redland’s Spatial Literacy for Educators<http://www.redlands.edu/academics/school-of-education/10237.aspx#.VX8Bx_lViko> program (currently on hiatus); and I also taught in Elmhurst College’s program to provide PD to people teaching AP Human Geog<http://www.elmhurst.edu/admission/school_for_professional_studies/certificate_programs/ap_human_geography>.  I am a regular user of both proprietary and FOSS programs, and I trust the authoring team will be taking these kind of issues into account as it makes recommendations for the course design.  This email message contains my own thoughts and does not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

______________________
Diana S. Sinton, Ph.D.
Executive Director, UCGIS
PO Box 612
Ithaca, New York  14851
607.252.6851 (v)
dianasinton at ucgis.org<mailto:dianasinton at ucgis.org>
dianasinton at gmail.com<mailto:dianasinton at gmail.com>

From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Anthony Robinson
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2015 11:28 AM
To: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] Open GIS Academics and educators please apply to AAG call before June 15th, 2015

I’m sure you’ve seen this stuff before, but for others watching this thread, a lot of ground is already covered by the existing GIS&T body of knowledge, which is currently under revision to provide new foci around web mapping, dealing with big data, etc… The pre-revision BoK is still highly useful for course development, in my opinion: http://www.aag.org/galleries/publications-files/GIST_Body_of_Knowledge.pdf

Here’s an interesting network viz of the BoK, too: http://carto.byu.edu/bokviswiki/

Another source of learning objectives in GIS&T is the Geospatial Technology Competency Model, which has also been recently revised (Tiers 4 and 5 are most relevant for this discussion, I think): http://www.careeronestop.org/competencymodel/competency-models/geospatial-technology.aspx

I know Sterling Quinn struggled with this notion when developing his new course for us on Open Web Mapping. We worked hard to try and sort out objectives around learning design patterns while making use of open source tools, anticipating that while the individual tools may change over time, the fundamental need will probably still be there to understand how to use libraries to create web map tiles/vectors, do spatial computing on the server-side, and make the leap from desktop GIS into layers that will work for web mapping.

Cheers,

-Anthony

From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> [mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Charles Schweik
Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2015 2:09 AM
To: Cameron Shorter
Cc: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] Open GIS Academics and educators please apply to AAG call before June 15th, 2015

+1...

I am starting to develop a web-GIS class with some colleagues and it is my hope that we can separate out conceptual/theoretical from technology-explicit content. It is interesting to try and thing of what the pure learning objectives are in this area. If anyone has ideas on this let me know off-thread...

Perhaps obvious, but the separation of conceptual and tech training examples s is important for OSGeo too, for, for example, there are multiple desktop packages.

Cheers,
Charlie

On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 10:38 PM, Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com<mailto:cameron.shorter at gmail.com>> wrote:
On 13/06/2015 1:14 am, Anthony Robinson wrote:
So what I mean is that the
learning objectives should be pure learning objectives. For example:

YES to “Students should be able to explain projections and choose an
appropriate one for making a thematic map.”

NO to “Students should be able to explain projections and choose an
appropriate one for making a thematic map using QGIS (or ArcGIS Online, or
whatever).”

+1 to this explanation Anthony.

Once learning objectives have been created, it will make it much easier to develop relevant training courses for specific products, which can reference back to the training objectives.

And if the development of base course material is set up along similar collaborative principles to Open Source development, then the relatively high effort of maintaining training material could be absorbed by the product's community (probably through a combination of developers, users and trainers).

--
Cameron Shorter,
Software and Data Solutions Manager
LISAsoft
Suite 112, Jones Bay Wharf,
26 - 32 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont NSW 2009

P +61 2 9009 5000<tel:%2B61%202%209009%205000>,  W www.lisasoft.com<http://www.lisasoft.com>,  F +61 2 9009 5099<tel:%2B61%202%209009%205099>

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--
Charlie Schweik

Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Dept of Environmental Conservation and Center for Public Policy and Administration

Personal website: http://people.umass.edu/cschweik
Publications: http://works.bepress.com/charles_schweik/

Author, Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Software (MIT Press, 2012) - see http://tinyurl.com/d3e4545

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