Hi Renee,
My experience with trying to teach GeoWeb skills to GIS students is that
1) Their development skills are extremely diverse and unreliable, and
2) they are very map-centric in their thinking.
The hardest challenge for them is usually to make the jump from making a map
(picture of data) to building an application (software behavior that interacts
with a person). Their first attempts at this are usually ArcMap compositions
which assume GIS analyst users. The simplest possible development methodology
which allows them to work iteratively up to an understanding of user
applications seems to be best. Over the last couple of years, I've had to
continually scale back the technical challenges to make more room for the
conceptual ones, e.g. configure an already installed GeoServer, choose from
among already prepared datasets, modify existing web map clients.
The other accommodation which seems to work well, at least for the student
population I seem to work with, is to try to team them up on projects so that a
more development-savvy student works with someone who is more of an expert on a
project subject. It's a little delicate to avoid too much work falling on one
or the other, but the results and the interactions can work out well.
-Josh Lieberman
On Jul 18, 2011, at 2:32 PM, R E Sieber wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I'm teaching a new course on Mapping Mashups and Beyond in the Fall. It's for
> second year undergraduate geographers and I hope it can set them on a path to
> being part of the next generation of geospatial data
> handlers/modelers/developers. I could use any help in helping me make this
> course successful.
>
> What I'm thinking of teaching is
>
> Exploring digital earth architectures (e.g., Google Maps, Google Earth,
> Microsoft Bing Maps, OpenLayers, NASA WorldWind)
> Writing KMLs and KMZs for digital earths
> Contributing volunteered geographic information (VGI)* via Open Street Map
> (entering, editing, examining metadata)
>
> Using geospatial Application Program Interfaces (APIs)
> Geotagging and harvesting other geographic content, for example via web
> scraping
> Developing online databases
>
> Installing and deploying the WAMP software stack
> Developing server/cloud-side geospatial applications
>
> Collecting real time data (e.g., Twitter)
> Working with location based services, for example with the iPhone SDK** and
> ushahidi
> Exploring social, political, and legal issues of using VGI
> Remember that these are geographers so they'll have near zero
> computing/software engineering skills. Moreover, having been taught GIS,
> they'll be biased towards a particular way of thinking about geospatial data
> handling: it's only about making maps; it's desktop bound; and it focuses
> mainly on spatial analysis. So any advice you have on what I should be
> teaching and how I should be teaching it (e.g., how much of any of these
> bullet points) would be vastly appreciated!
>
> thanks,
> Renee
>
> * I know, I know. I don't like the term either.
>
> **I doubt I'll get to the SDK. It'll be hard enough to get them through WAMP.
> Here it's probably just ushahidi.
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