Education Tidbits
The Spring 2009 Beth Maloan Outstanding UT Martin Student Employee Award was presented to Carrington Wright, a University of Tennessee Martin Department of Geology, Geography and Physics employee. Wright is a geoscience major who has worked for the university for three years.
Wright, of Clarksville, assists with rearrangement of material and laboratories, repairs equipment, sets up experiments and supports office tasks. One of the tasks that caught my eye: he “almost single-handedly reorganizing the department’s extensive map library.” This award should get this fellow’s resume to the top of a hiring manager’s list once he graduates!
Florida International University was one of fourteen university to received grants from the National Science Foundation through its Cluster Exploratory (CluE) program to participate in the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative. Grants total $5 million.
“Florida International University (FIU) researchers are leveraging cloud computing to analyze aerial images and objects to help support disaster mitigation and environmental protection. Specifically, the CluE effort at FIU relates to its TerraFly project, which is a web-service of 40 terabytes of aerial imagery, geospatial queries and local data. Students and researchers will now be able to precisely code these images in real-time.”
Two teachers from Westborough, MA were among the six recipients of a Google contest for school curricula based on Google Earth’s new 3D map of Rome. The interesting part of the story to me: the project, which involved having students write a newspaper about the rise and fall of Rome, initially didn’t include using Google Earth. But, after seeing the contest, the teachers added it in. I suspect that for a while integrating technology and geography into school projects may happen this way - as an afterthought. Still, in time, I hope their inclusion will become organic.
