Education Committee Work Program
NEW 2008-2009 INITIATIVES FOR DISCUSSION
Hi OSGeo education folks,
We had a very good year as a group last year. Thanks to everyone's efforts who contributed, especially to our educational inventory page. It was good to see some of you in South Africa!
Below is the list of our potential group tasks and goals for this next year after discussions with others at the FOSS4Geo conference in South Africa. Please take a moment to review. If I have missed anything please add to the list.
What I'd like to do is either call a group vote to prioritize, and/or establish a leader for each of these tasks to try and take the lead on the initiative.
Cheers,
Charlie
TASK A: Collect educational material to go on an OSGeo Live DVD
Identify educational material to accompany a DVD related to the use of OSGeo software.
Tim Bowen (the person who is organizing next year's FOSS4Geo conference in Sydney) is working to develop such a DVD for Ubuntu (building on the work of the Ominiverde DVD). Someone else might be developing one for Windows. The wiki page on this project is http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc.
It would make sense that we package up some good tutorials to go one these DVDs. The idea might be that for each associated OSGeo software project, we identify two or three good sets of tutorials that can be licensed with a Creative Commons license.
So we need to come up with some process to identify 2-3 high quality tutorials for various software packages. We should also inventory tutorials that might exist that are written by the software groups?
TASK B: Move our educational material listed in our inventory page to our subversion repository to support a “new derivative works” system.
We should be proud of the content we have inventoried on the wiki inventory page. But there is a lot of material in there, and I think we really need to try and move what we can to a content management system (subversion) where we could move to a “new derivative” system. What I am thinking is mimicking open source projects where the author who developed the material is the “maintainer” of their content. If someone else wants to derive a new version of it, they need to contact the author.
But two obvious situations could occur:
a- where the tutorial reflects an older version of the software and needs to be updated for a new release; b- where someone wishes to translate the tutorial into another language.
I am going individually start asking people who have tutorials on our inventory whether they are willing to do this and when they might be able to move their material to subversion.
Note: One important issue we will need to address is the licensing of this tutorial. Storing tutorial content on the subversion system raises new issues related to ensuring no copyrights are broken.
TASK C: Support Victor Olaya (and colleague's) FreeGIS book effort
The wiki page is here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Libro_SIG. They have over 500 pages of text written. Victor was going to prioritize chapters needing to be written. Two types of assistance are needed:
a) People could help write the new chapters in English and he or someone on his team could translate them to Spanish.
- Team members: Landon Blake
b) Help is needed to translate the Spanish chapters already written into English.
TASK D: Contact local OSGeo chapters – recruit – how can they help?
At FOSS4Geo 2008 there was a sizable list of OSGeo local chapters. Many of them were doing work related to translation of OSGeo wiki pages and other related efforts. We should systematically contact the leaders of these groups, and encourage them to have at least 1 representative on our list, and see if anyone is willing to translate any of our tutorials into their native languages. Spanish speaking local chapters should be encouraged to help translate the FreeGIS book chapters.
Task E: Data inventory for educational purposes
There was several discussions at FOSS4Geo about inventorying free data, so that people using tutorials could find data more relevant to their particular region. Could we try to do a “data inventory” page like we did in 2007-08 for the educational inventory page?
Task F: Develop recommended “template” for tutorial structure?
Related to the above, in one of our BOF meetings, the request was made that tutorials we develop be written in such a way that it wasn't data or location specific. That is, that instead of requiring the user to use data from one part of the world, the user could get the required dataset for their own particular region of the world, thus making it more interesting and useful to the students.
The idea I had here is that we come up with a suggested structure for any OSGeo-related tutorials where all figures with data in them are shown as Appendices, so that someone
Task G: Grant proposal to foundations?
In the OSGeo Annual General Meeting, there was a discussion about selling OSGeo to companies to get financial support for them. Given the potential utility of OSGeo-related technologies for the developing world and the free and open access nature of what we are doing, my thought was there probably is non-profit foundations who might help support OSGeo and in particular, our educational efforts. The global network we have established and our proven ability to work together gives us some real potential and strength, I think.
Should we try as a group to write a generic proposal for funding that we could then shop around to some foundations?
Task H: GIS Curriculum guidelines?
Our group's name in OSGeo is actually the “Education and Curriculum” group.
In a BOF meeting with participants from South Africa, there was an interest in inventorying GIS curriculum guidelines for various levels of GIS education. The South African participants were saying they had made a lot of progress in this regard that they would be willing to share. Another participant noted that there were a number of groups who have already developed GIS curriculum guidelines (e.g., NCGIA).
In short, the question is whether we want to move in this direction this year. After some contemplation on this, my thought was we don't want to compete with other curriculum guideline groups. But we could develop an inventory page on our wiki of various curriculum guidelines that groups worldwide have developed.
Task I: Multi-language OSGeo dictionary
We propose the idea of a Multi-language OSGeo dictionary. The scope is to collect over the years geo* related terms in a multi-language style to facilitate reading/writing in other languages, to help with software internationalization, to help when writing proposals in non-mother-tongue languages. Since we are an excellent group of experts covering many languages, we could run this as long-term project.
We could use the Wiktionary software (http://www.wiktionary.org/) and keep it running. Possibly an OSGeo hacker could also fetch translations from Wikipedia from a handcrafted terms collection of terms to populate an initial dictionary (using the box on the left side which references translations). Installation request sent to OSGeo-SAC on 2 Oct 2008.
Once a reasonable amount of terms is available, download should be enabled in Docbook or other formats. Page to better collect further suggestions: OSGeo Multilanguage Dictionary.
OLD 2007-2008 INITIATIVES (for archive's sake)
TASK A. INVENTORY RELEVANT EDUCATIONAL CONTENT
- 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!
- Status: ongoing
- Subcommittee: Everyone with available content... PLEASE, EVERYONE UPDATE FOR YOUR CONTENT!!!
TASK B. DEVELOP MECHANISM FOR ARCHIVING AND SERVING EDUCATIONAL CONTENT
|
TASK C. DEVELOP FREEGIS BOOK
|
TASK D. DEVELOP A MULTILANGUAGE OSGEO DICTIONARY
|
TASK E. DEVELOP RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL LICENSING AND THE USE OF THE OSGEO LOGO IN MATERIAL
|
TASK F. DEVELOP A PACKAGED CD FOR UBUNTU TO LAUNCH AT FOSS4G2008 in Cape Town
TASK G. CONTENT FORMAT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL
|
COMPLETED TASKS FOR 2007-08
Archived tasks because they either had no activity or were similar to others listed above DEVELOP OSGEO EDU COURSES? CURRENT TASKS:
|