Professor Nagarjuna G from the Gnowledge lab of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education and hist team are mapping nine villages in Raigad district of Maharashtra Statea in India and adding the data to OpenStreetMap The project grew out of a "one laptop per child" effort in the remote villiages, areas G and his colleague regularly visit. But how to gain access to GPS devices?
It was a year ago that a team led by set out to map these villages in Khalapur taluka of the district bordering Mumbai. With some basic engineering, transparent spectacle cases were turned into Global Positioning System (GPS) devices at a cost of Rs 6,000 each; the contraptions are cheaper than GPS trackers available in the market at Rs 25,000 upwards.
Teachers are developing wikipages about their villages and students are recording stories told by parents and grandparents to document their hometowns.
The Mapping Montana lecture series will take place in Helena at 6:30 p.m. on four Thursdays in January and February. Topics run from the historical to the current.
DAT/EM Systems International donated 16 licenses of their SUMMIT EVOLUTION Professional digital stereoplotter to the Geomatics Department in the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) School of Engineering. Valued at over $300,000, this gift forms part of DAT/EM’s on-going initiative to sponsor higher education through software, software support, student training and consultation to the faculty.
The Geospatial Information Research Center opened in Beijing in early December. It's a partnership between the Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping and the U.K. University of Nottingham.
This new joint venture will promote innovation and technology transfer, leadership training, and staff and student exchange. It will explore funding opportunities and new project work, integrating resources to support long-term collaboration; and it will act as a world-leading incubation centre to realise beneficial combinations of research and development, production and commercialisation.
[Matthew] Huffine, 53, of Victorville [CA] has been teaching for 24 years, including nine years at Hesperia Junior High and the past 11 years at AAE, the Apple Valley charter school run by the Lewis Center for Educational Research. He has three children, ages 26, 22 and 14 — the youngest now an AAE student.
He started his career in the Forest Service and USGS and come to teaching later. Nows he's being honored as a local person who made a difference in 2011 and a great teacher who brings education beyond the walls. Among his students is one studying GIS at the University of Redlands. Lesson learned: we need GIS users to go into teaching to grow more GIS users.
