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Thursday, April 27, 2017

GIS Education Weekly: Five Geo Companies Support Education!

Articles and Resources

Locate Press has announced a book for students aged 10-15 featuring QGIS: Open the Door to GIS
by Toni Fisher. There's a student and teachers edition with learning materials that focus on a single story for each week of the semester. It'll be available in Q2 of this year.

Introduction to web programming for GIS applications is a $100 course on Udemy from Michael Miller. Check social media for possible discounts.

Geospatial Brainstorming Blog: Why QGIS should be part of everyone’s GIS toolbox - The same Michael Miller noted above offers the "why" of QGIS. Of note is this comment on the post on LinkedIn: "My agency is so far behind in technology, I don't even know what this is. No training and lack of support for GIIS [sic] is my situation."

University of Cinncinatti: UC map captures diversity of America - Tomasz Stepinski from University of Cincinnati applied NASA mapmaking techniques to 20 years of data collected by the US Census Bureau to build one of the most detailed racial-diversity maps ever created.

LinkedIn: How we Hire at MapBox - Nate Perkins of Mapbox explains how the company hires.

John Oliver: Last week Tonight - Lessons in geography - A minute and a half from 2015 about what the world does not know about geography.

The NC State online Geospatial Information Science & Technology program hosts a blog with monthly posts.

Cartography and Geographic Information Science: There's a call for papers for a special journal issue on The Power of Mapping for Science in Primary and Secondary Education. h/t @0mgould

MapMart: Satellite Imagery Search tool h/t @mapninja

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine, pre-installed with  open source geospatial software. It can be used without installing any software. Version 10.5 of the OSGeo-Live GIS software collection has been released in preparation for FOSS4G-Europe 2017 conference in Paris Marne-la-Vallée, France.

Quote of the Week

Per @Spatial_Punk, aka Peter Mercator, "the GISP had about a 90% drop off once they implemented the exam." GISP is the credential from GISCI, aka "they." Of the 9154 people who ever had the credential, 6955 currently are, per the Jan 26, 2017 spreadsheet from the website. I'm not clear on the source of the 90% number.

The New Google Earth

Reading the ABCs from Space is a voyage to find letters of the alphabet.

Google Earth Blog: A Tour Maker for the new Google Earth - The post describes Josh Williams' (tool to create a rudimentary tour.

Programs, Degrees and Courses

Jennifer Harrison, President, TeachMeGIS.com, announced that TeachMeGIS is partnering with Midland College and the Petroleum Professional Development Center to bring regularly scheduled GIS classes to Midland, Texas starting this summer. It seems specialized courses like those for petroleum or to take ArcMap users to ArcGIS Pro are in demand.

Salem State College (MA) is offering two courses in May:

GPH 946 - Computer Assisted Cartographic Modeling (pdf)
GPH 953 - Seminar in GIS Application I (Web Mapping) (info from listserve)

For both:
  • 3-credit summer course 
  • stand-alone course or as part of the graduate Certificate or Master of Science in Geo-Information Science 
  • MA residents: $1,198.50 per three-credit course 
  • Non-MA residents: $1,468.50 per three-credit course 
  • Registration

In and Out of the Classroom

A report from Education International suggests donors to Syrian refugees trying to support education are more likely to offer education technology than anything else.

Chris Zaleski, a UC Davis graduate who interned at the California department of land, air and water resources, built a 32,000-piece Lego topographical map of California. It will be on display during a campus picnic, and then tour the state.

Albemarle High School Students Using Mapping to Solve Problems is a 1:19 video about student work from the Charlottesville, VA, NBC affiliate.

Geo Companies Supporting GIS Education 

The American Geographical Society announced the second annual AGS Geography Teacher Fellows Program funded by Boundless. The program funds registration (not travel or lodging) for the organization's conference and provides other perks for AP Human Geography teachers.

The Business Geography Specialty Group (BGSG) of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) announced the winners of the 2017 Student Paper Competition in Business Geography at the 2017 AAG Meeting in Boston, MA. The Maptitude mapping software team (the company is called Caliper) provided corporate sponsorship for the competition.

Stuart Bonthrone, Esri UK MD, announced ArcGIS Online for Schools is now free for U.K. schools.

Planet (formerly Planet Labs) announced its Education and Research Program. "Now, any college student, researcher or professor can gain access to Planet’s unique dataset for non-commercial research purposes."

Friend of Planet, Safe Software, reminds students via Twitter that "Students anywhere in the world can get a 4-month free license of FME Desktop. Once you fill out the form, we’ll verify your student status with your academic institution, and send you your license!"