Education Committee Work Program

2008 INITIATIVES

TASK A. INVENTORY RELEVANT EDUCATIONAL CONTENT

1. Authors who have existing courses or are currently developing courses, please update or list your course (and modules, if possible) on the Educational_Content_Inventory. Our goal is to have a nicely updated page for the upcoming FOSS4Geo conference!
2. Status: ongoing
3. Subcommittee: Everyone with available content... PLEASE, EVERYONE UPDATE FOR YOUR CONTENT!!!

TASK B. DEVELOP MECHANISM FOR ARCHIVING AND SERVING EDUCATIONAL CONTENT Status: Completed. We now have a working Subversion system for our group, and an example of how to link modules from the above wiki inventory page to it (see available read-only modules. Authors are encouraged to upload modules to the Subversion system and link on the wiki page following this model. However, a new opportunity has arisen related to The wikieducator.org initiative which requires group discussion. Subcommittee members: Charlie Schweik, Ned Horning, Maili Page

TASK C. DEVELOP FREEGIS BOOK Status: Work on the Spanish FGB seems to have slowed somewhat as authors tackle other tasks. I'd like to get moving on a (somewhat) independent effort on the English FGB. I had originally hoped to just plug my metadata chapter into a translated version of the Spanish FGB, but I don't know how practical this still is. I need to talk with the spanish team about it more. Whether the Spanish material is translated or not, I'd like to move ahead with a Docbook version of the English FGB. This will depend on some Docbook tool chain work and on resolution of some branding issues. - Landon Blake See mail from Jorge Sanz to Edu List as a brief abstract of the current situation for the Spanish FGB. Current needs for Spanish FGB: return to the activity, maybe changing goals to a more realistic ones and getting involved past or new authors. For example, splitting the book in smaller parts to publish on the journal and catch attention of the community, etc. Current needs for English FGB: Coordinate with Spanish FGB to see if translation of material is possible. Work on Docbook tool chain so new chapters can be written. Work at recruiting additional authors. Subcommittee members: Victor, can you list active people on this? Spanish FGB: At this time there is not any activity but recent authors: Víctor Olaya Lola Arteaga Miguel Luaces Jorge Sanz Links: Wiki front-page: Libro SIG SVN main folder: https://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/book/es/libro_sig/LaTeX/ No-so-yet-updated PDF version of the book: https://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/book/es/libro_sig/PDF/Libro_SIG.pdf

TASK D. DEVELOP A MULTILANGUAGE OSGEO DICTIONARY This was proposed by Markus Neteler with several others supporting the idea Project working page is here: OSGeo_Multilanguage_Dictionary Subcommittee chair: The Sunburned Surveyor Status: http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/188 Status Update: The OSGeo contains a "starter dictionary" to hold content while we wait for additional software. I would also like to start a docbook version of the dictionary. - Landon Blake

TASK E. DEVELOP RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL LICENSING AND THE USE OF THE OSGEO LOGO IN MATERIAL See Edu Licensing and Logo Discussion Subcommittee: to be determined

TASK F. DEVELOP A PACKAGED CD FOR UBUNTU TO LAUNCH AT FOSS4G2008 in Cape Town This was proposed by Gavin and involves others in OSGeo not just education group. Gavin's ideas: One-click installation for Linux, Windows or Mac; Integrated software stack so teachers and learners have to launch a minimal number of applications; Simplified and customised GUIs to lower the entry threshold (for teachers to teach curriculum requirements of GIS; for teachers to use GIS to teach geography and other subjects; for learners to use for hands-on work); Free, integrated global and local data package; excellent documentation; framework for local contributors to structure and contribute exercises, lessons, etc; central website for resources; possible advanced options for network deployment, more sophisticated users, 'computer studies' learners (i.e. developers), school web map services, etc. These are expanded in School_GIS_Use_Cases. Current individual efforts: The live DVD for the FOSS4G 2008 "Practical Introduction to GRASS and related software for beginners" Workshop to be presented in Cape Town is available. The DVD, developed by University of Trento Italy, is based on Kubuntu live with GRASS GIS 6.2.3 and GRASS GIS 6.4 (snapshot_2008_7_12), R 2.7.0 with GRASS support, QGIS 0.10 with GRASS plugin, PostgreSQL 8.3.8, PostGIS 1.3.3, pgAdminIII 1.8.2, pgagent 1.8.2 and other application. A GRASS tutorial in English and the workshop slides are included in this distribution. You can find more info here. Download:ISO image of the DVD warning the file weights about 4.0 Gb, md5sums here The Ubuntu-based Ominiverdi Desktop Livecd 2008.0 will be available soon, which includes GRASS, QGIS, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, GDal, Proj, R and Pgadmin. Also bundled an installation package for windows system ( with an help page showing up on Autorun); the idea is to put inside also packages for Mac, but doing this will mean moving from CD to DVD. Poseidon Linux including many of these apps, including GRASS, QGIS, Terraview and more. Also includes main desktop apps found in a normal distribution. There is another OSGeo subcommittee that looked into this in 2007 Distribution_Special_Interest_Groups. There are specialized GIS groups connected to Ubuntu, Debian and others listed on that page. Subcommittee chair: Any volunteers? Subcommittee members: Any takers to try and organize such an effort? Interested Parties: The Sunburned Surveyor (OpenJUMP and JTS Debian Packages) TASK G. CONTENT FORMAT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL We've had ongoing back and forth discussions about whether some recommended standards regarding the format of education content should be established. Generally, our policy should be that we welcome educational material in ANY format that the author prefers to work in. However, at the same time, we might want to move toward developing some recommended standards, especially if we eventually move toward "official" OSGeo educational content. I've added a new wiki page to record our discussion of possible edu content format standards.

COMPLETED TASKS FOR 2007-08 Establish a wiki page with an initial inventory of available educational content and commitments for new material Deadline: October 31, 2007; Outcome: Completed with 16 entries listed on the Educational_Content_Inventory page. Commitments_for_New_Material_Development Investigate, vote on, and recommend a content management system for educational modules Deadline: October 31, 2007. Outcome: Task deferred and focus on develop tutorial using Wiki/Moodle strategy. We had a series of discussions on various approaches toward this over the group email list, but really reached no consensus. I (Charlie Schweik) concluded that given we have an existing wiki and also a Moodle site established, we should try to move toward establishing a recommended digital format and structure for future tutorials and where possible we try to convert old tutorials to this format (I intend to do so with my tutorials). For this reason, I took this item off the current to-do list. Subcommittee members: Ben Alden; Victor Olaya; Charlie Schweik; Scott Mitchell; Venka; Maria Brovelli; Rob Braswell Edu Content Management Platform Decision More detail: coming soon. But this task is for people to investigate various options that have been identified. These include (1) the Moodle example presented by Arnulf [1]; (2) the use of the wiki system (Tyler showed me some additional functionality after our BOF meeting); (3) Rice connexions [2]; (4) Encyclopedia of Earth; (4) lulu.com; (5) EduCommons. The group agreed that at this juncture we need to be inclusive and work with the needs of various content providers. So some material may be stored on an OSGeo platform with the capability for new derivative works, or it may just be links to external resources we are aware of. This subcommittee task is to figure out a recommended strategy within the next month (or less). Develop a suggested tutorial creation standard for group review Subcommittee members: Ned Horning (American Museum of Natural History), Charlie Schweik, Alexander Stepanov, Maili Page (UMass, Amherst) 1/18/2008 status: Our proposal (pdf) is here: Media:A_Proposal_for_OSGEO_Edu_Authoring_Summary.pdf. An example of one tutorial (pdf format, 845KB) built through this process is here: Media:db_foss_m1.pdf. (We intend to move the license and authorship information to the top in a next version). June, 2008. After working on this, it became clear that it is not in the best interest of the group to specify a standard -- different people may want to use different approaches (Latex, DocBook, Open Office, etc.) Through this task we came up with a DocBook process, which now has some documentation available if others want to use it, but we are not pushing for its use throughout our group. Archived tasks because they either had no activity or were similar to others listed above DEVELOP OSGEO EDU COURSES? CURRENT TASKS: This was suggested by Venka, and he proposed two: Intro to OSGeo Desktop GIS Software and Introduction to OSGeo Webmapping software.