Wednesday, October 28. 2009

Education Tidbits

GIS training is underway in Ghana's in Koforidua in the Eastern Region. About 20 Health Information Officers are learning about GIS use for medical delivery. All 21 district health directorates should be trained by next year. There's no discussion of the nature of access to the tool once training is over.

- Ghana Broadcasting System

The N.H. Police K-9 Academy meant well. It bought 15 GPS receivers, computers and mapping software, then figured out it didn't know to use them. "There's more to this GPS stuff than we'd realized. We started looking around for someone who could teach us to use the equipment," reports Mark Ericson, who chairs the board of the Working Dog Foundation, a nonprofit that founded, operates, maintains, and raises funds for the academy. That's good news for Shane Bradt, UNH Cooperative Extension geospatial technologies specialist. He's been tapped to "teach the academy trainers and some local K-9 police handlers to use hand-held GPS units to mark trails, collect information as their dogs attempt to follow a pre-laid scent trail, and map the collected information."

- Foster.com

Chris Castiglione has a valuable Google Maps/Earch in education post on his blog. While he is excited about using Google Maps to teach visualization, simulation and play, the examples are far more interesting to me in context of using GIS across the curriculum. (His paper is here in pdf.)

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Education at 06:32 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Friday, October 23. 2009

Quote of the Week

"It's like a big swap meet."

David Lanegran, chair of the Macalester geography department and the coordinator of the Minnesota Alliance for Geographic Education (MAGE) on GEOFEST to be held at Macalester on Saturday. The "conference is to bring together geography teachers, pre-service teachers and students planning on going into teaching, to exchange ideas and learn new techniques, strategies, and applications for teaching geography."

- The MAC Weekly

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Education at 07:51 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, October 21. 2009

Education Tidbits

Central Piedmont Community College (NC) and its geomatics program is part of this week's Advanced Technological Education Television (ATETV) episode. ATETV is "a Web-based video series and interactive network designed to connect students and professionals with careers in advanced technology. An Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Project funded in part by the National Science Foundation, ATETV aims to show how ATE is relevant to the modern workplace and to attract students to this growing field."



- via @BKeenan

The College of William and Mary's Associate Professor of sociology Salvatore Saporito received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create a database of school attendance boundaries for the country’s largest school districts. He and his students will work for two years to collect data from 800 school districts, about half of the districts in the U.S. It's not clear how the data will be disseminated.

- Flat Hat News (and I heard it on Very Spatial, too)


Wheeler Ruml, assistant professor of computer science at the University of New Hampshire is member of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) prestigious Computer Science Study Panel. The yearlong program sends 12 junior faculty from around the country to visit the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) among other military sites. Ruml's research's shortest path algorithms. The program aims to point researchers in the directions the military may need and for Ruml included a grant of $99,220 and possible future grants.

- Fosters

Consider the Community Planning Fellowship Program in New York City. It's mostly funded by the non-profit Fund for the City of New York. Each fellow receives a $5,000 stipend and is expected to work 15 hours on a community project.

Grad student Preeti Sodhi was one of a dozen graduate students who was part of it last year. Each fellow is assigned to a community board in Manhattan; Sodhi worked on several projects with Community Board 3 on the Lower East Side.

She mapped liquor stores and her board's district manager says she used it during her testimony on a liquor license application.

- NY1

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Education at 06:36 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, October 20. 2009

Podcast: Attracting Students to be the Next GEOINT Workforce

The opening sessions of this year's GEOINT Conference had a running theme: the need for new, well trained workers to fill open jobs within the industry. The need was echoed by all the morning speakers in particular, Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md, who wants to make a "local push" for geo-education. Editor in Chief Joe Francica attended the sessions and swaps ideas with Adena Schutzberg about how to get young people involved in science, technology and geospatial technologies for GEOINT.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Education, GIS Jobs, Directions on the News Podcast, GEOINT 09 at 01:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Monday, October 19. 2009

Education Tidbits

The AP Geography class at Stillwater Junior High, MN, is using GIS, which the local paper describes this way: "GIS is simply technology that merges data with maps. Something as basic as Google Maps can be considered GIS because it links a map to data, in that case street addresses." Teacher Sara Damon seems to get geography: "That's really what geography is all about: Where is it? Why is it there? What difference does it make?" I like the idea of AP geography in ninth grade; when I was in school the only AP course for niners was AP Bio.

- Stillwater Gazette

Dr. Becky Starnes, associate professor of public management at Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN, made a presentation, titled "Incorporating GIS Technology into Public Administration Education," at the 2009 Southeast Conference on Public Administration held Oct. 3. I continue to believe the future of GIS education is not teaching more students GIS per se, but integrating it into whatever specialized (like Public Administration) or general (liberal arts) curriculum they choose.

- The Leaf-Chronicle

Youth organization Rede Jovem has chosen five young women to map the favelas of Rio and upload the information to Wikimapia. Each mapper receives a monthly stipend and GPS-enabled phone. They will compete to see who can obtain the most information over the next six months. The winner will receive a grant to study journalism.

- AFP

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Education at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, October 14. 2009

Education Tidbits

The Challenger Center is offering a Webinar focussing on the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) and how its used to explore the continent. It's free and on October 21 at 12:00pm ET.

- press release

This sounds like an interesting paper for those considering using GIS in liberal arts. It'll be presented at the Geological Society of America’s (GSA) annual meeting beginning later this week:

Additionally, Mike Taber, professor of education and director of CC’s [Colorado College] environmental program, will present his work on “Using GIS to Support a Data Driven Construction Approach to Teaching Global Climate Change.” Taber and collaborators at Colorado State University developed a curriculum that utilizes data-driven learning modules and challenges students to thoroughly understand climate change. Their work was sponsored by a grant from the Center for Multi-scale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes (CMMAP).

Six NIU students and their professor, Richard Greene, have volunteered to gauge downtown Riverside's potential for economic improvement through a method of planning known as geographic information systems.

GIS is a complex system of collecting and computing geographic data, in this case to come up with a practical and sustainable business scenario for downtown.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Education at 06:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |