"Agustin Diez Castillo" <agustin.d...@uv.es> wrote: > you're right we should teach techniques and no software packages but more than > that we should educate free citizens. > Truly, I can not understand why Universities teach closed knowledge when we > should knowledge [openness is required to be knowledge]. We should teach > how to fish instead of give away fishes because this is what our students > demand. > To sum up, Universities should be the perfect place for Free Speech and in GIS > packages Free Speech is FOSS4G. > Anyhow, High Schools are a good place to start.
You beat me to it Agustin. I agree with your points and was going to warn that we not try to play at the same game as corporations that seek to embed their products into schools. Since, in the end it is what is taught that is important, not what tool they learn. Instead, I suggest we come at it from the angle of providing additional tools to enable educators (at any level) to teach the liberal arts/science aspects of a geographic education. I could be wrong, but it's my impression that in the past when this was done, I believe universities were actually *producing* FOSS as an outgrowth of the knowledge the students learned instead of merely ingesting some product. Any truth to that? I'm proposing the education group help match up existing FOSS teaching material with a recognised curriculum. e.g. the curriculum might say that a student needs to learn about geographic coordinate systems - so we match up a module that provides sample data and shows how to witness the effects of transformations, projections, etc. using Proj.4 commands, then visualising it in a desktop app, etc. that they may choose. In the end maybe I do agree a bit with Ian, in that I don't think it's profitable to be trying to usurp particular existing software roles in academia - which many professors will have personally chosen. How do you fight a choice after all? But we should come at it from a totally different angle more along Agustin's philosophy and providing choices for foundational teaching aligned with curriculum. I'm personally not interested in taking on an anti-proprietary angle in the debate and encourage us to look at the problem afresh, with hope of possibilities :) Okay, that may be mostly just rhetoric, but we can't forget that even the big proprietary guys are users and supports of some of OSGeo products and libraries - a real success story for us. Please note, for those who are unaware, we do have an Education discussion mailing list where we talk about these things regularly too: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/edu_discuss Best wishes, Tyler p.s. In many universities I think we have been witnessing a move toward 'training' for careers as opposed to foundational concepts for critical thinking. I suspect it has to do with competing with colleges and independent training programs for student dollar$. I don't think it's the actual professors, but higher up that the mentality seems to set in. Consider also that all proprietary software has their own professional training courses, material and training providers already - perhaps even at lower cost and higher effectiveness than taking a full university course over months and months. Odd to think about in my mind :) But it helps remind me that there is also a market for education outside of established academics as well... how much of a market remains to be seen. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss