What a great opportunity, and responsibility, you have with this student! It seems that big chunks of the 'Geoweb stack' have been settling down, so it is now relatively easy to set up real geographic apps, so the challenge is now to create compelling applications.
I think it would be reasonable for your student to set up an instance of feature server and open layers and create a database backed site to capture, map, and report on crowd sourced environmental observations. I'd love to see 'mytoxicstew.com' or 'toxicplume.com' come into existence is something of a platial for personal observations of pollution. Like "The small smoke stack was emitting a thin grey smoke for 1/2 hour this morning" (Think of what Neal Stephenson's 'Sangamon Taylor' could have done in _Zodiac_ if only they'd had openlayers and feature server!) The student would have the fun of hacking on some solid existing code, could experience the magic of researching additional data layers and then being able to map them simply by updating a single point in the code, and potentially create something cool. And it would vaguely fall within the terms of your grant :-) Cheers, Rich On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 2:14 PM, R E Sieber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Everybody, > > I need some advice. I've got a second year geography undergraduate doing > a three month internship. I want him to do something with the Geoweb and > with Python. He knows ESRI products (okay, ArcGIS 9.2) and a tiny bit of > programming/scripting but that's it. As some of you know, I've got a > grant to investigate the potential of the Geoweb to enable a dialogue > between government and the public around issues of environmental/climate > change. So it'd be good if his work could support the grant. Can you > think an encapsulated thing that he could do in that time? > > On another related matter, I'm part of a Microsoft initiative to > determine what computer education should be taught to the next > generation of scientists who are not computer scientists or software > engineers. Obviously, I'm interested in the kinds of computing skills > that geography/environment students would need to move from Web 1.0 > GIS/mapping to the Geoweb. It's a challenge because of the limited > number of non-major courses a student can take and the number of > pre-requisites that are often required of cs or engineering courses. > It's also a challenge because I would want them to essentially learn how > to learn about software so even non-geeks can move with the innovations > in Web 2.0 (3.0?). I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have. > > Thanks, > Renee > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking > -- Rich Gibson Chief Scientist (and bottle washer), Locative Technologies http://mappinghacks.com http://geocoder.us http://testingrange.com AIM period3equals _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
