Education BOF Notes

These are Jo's notes which loosely correspond to FOSS4G2006 Education BOF minutes

University curricula - step by step

Mention of OSGeo certification from speaker - levels indicating competency.

Venka: "postgres certified engineer" program. Is certification responsibility of educational people?

Speaker: tutorials and programs drive accreditation

another speaker: GISCI.org - certification institute - is about the principles much more than the "button pushing" certification about tools and specific projects

Ari: we don't want to limit osgeo educational activity only to osgeo incubating projects

Venka: geoinformatics publication in Thailand wants to make an osgeo/foss4g cc licensed issue of its journal (international journal of geoinformatics) - 4000USD support for 150 page publication http://www.j-geoinfo.net/

Ari states potential reservations about sponsoring a publication

Speaker suggests that osgeo should be operating a "clearing house" for tutorial material

cf Educational Resources - this would benefit from more structure / a kind of peer review backend

Speaker: italian language GRASS tutorials developed over 10 years. "best practise" can be very local - how can "one true way" be recommended?

Ari: university education is more theoretical

Markus: new dataset for GRASS in progress. replacement for spearfish needed. using North Carolina data, inc. municipal, agricultural data sources. It will be companion data for the third edition of the GRASS book.

Providing a ready-to-use GRASS location, also original sources, ability to build custom data packages for different distributions. Focus on finding as many different thematic types as possible in small area. NC chosen because of local data policy. Cf Edu Data Package North Carolina

Also could be used for implementation testing - common data set which one expects similar analytical results across packages - are the results the same across products?

GRASS6 has 150 page tutorial which also covers QGIS. been translated into chinese, italian, french others in progress. Looking for new home. SVN repos of latex texts. Could OSGeo host a service like this. web-based software message translation idea (granular edit of .po files, maintaining concurrency)

GRASS book is closed source - scripts and data are open

Markus has WikiVMap0 idea - reannotation of a verified-IP-clean subset of VMap0

Speaker: developing country teaching issues. Need local data to get point across. How can we work on data access issues to spread open source where it is most needed, outside of the eu/us context

Speaker: to what extent can tutorial material be separated out from data - data independent, tool independent problem sets. "plug in your local context here" - how big is this problem?