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Thursday, August 23, 2018

GIS Education Weekly: Understanding Open Source GIS and Digital Humanities

On and Off Campus

A bit of the GRACE interns' Calumet Visitor's Map
GRACE Program:  GRACE intern presentations on this summer's project, the Calumet-Laurium Community WebGIS, are available on YouTube in a one hour video. Via @GRACEProgram.

San Bernardino County Sun: Why UC Riverside, local students are writing life stories of veterans buried at Riverside National Cemetery - More than 1000 K-12 students from the Inland Empire, guided by 30 UCR graduate students and alumni, are compiling histories of individuals at the largest national cemetery west of the Mississippi River. The documents will ultimately be shared via a GIS app.

ArcGIS User: GIS and BIM Provide Life Cycle Support for University’s Assets - "In 2009, Ohio State University (OSU) announced the Buckeye Building Information Modeling Initiative to improve decision-making and management of the hundreds of facilities on its campuses." Via my colleague George Dailey.

For Students

LinkedIn: Is staying so long at a company a bad thing? Learning from my 20 years at Autodesk. - I don't know the author, Simon Gilles, but he makes some great points about making the most of a long career at a big company.

Students (and others) can help with the Kerala Floods. OpenStreetMap India has called for local mappers and other expert users for road network mapping to help improve OpenStreetMap road data in the most flood affected areas. Via @hotosm.

Thread of the Week

An interesting exercise teases out where different kinds of researchers look for information. The takeaway from @AmberFirefly:
Main aims are: (1) to decentralise research skills so a broader range of people are able to access/use scientific research papers, and (ii) to give the researchers direct experience of why open access is important and how hard it is to do research outside a wealthy institution.
Via @mukihacklay.

Resources

NOAA offers Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science. The second edition (2009) is available and aimed at learners of all ages. More resources are available from the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Via @NOAAClimate.

URISA: URISA’s Geospatial Fact Sheet on Open Source GIS - This is the latest fact sheet from URISA's series. I found room for improvement and hope the open source community and educators will help provide feedback to info@urisa.org. (I stand behind my Ten Things You Need to Know About Open Source Geospatial Software  from 2012.)

ArcGIS Blog: Story Maps and the Digital Humanities -  Allen Carroll shares definitions of digital humanities and some exemplary story maps.

NPR: How Archaeologists Play A Role In The Forest Service's Response To Wildfires - Yes, GIS is involved!

Knight Center: Instructional materials from Knight Center MOOCs now available after courses close - Of note:  "The Knight Center is happy to announce that material for Alberto Cairo's course, “Data Visualization for Storytelling and Discovery,” now can be accessed online. Cairo's course had 5,783 participants from 143 countries and was offered thanks to the generous support by Google News Initiative." Content from other Knight Center MOOCs will be similarly available.

Programs and Courses


University of Illinois: Groundbreaking CS+X Degrees Expand into Advertising, Economics, GIS and Philosophy - "The new CS + GIS degree will allow students to apply computational thinking to those problems [that involve location]."  Enrollment is open for fall 2018, but only a few students are expected in the first cohort.

Competitions and Grants

Esri: Student and K-12 Instructor Competitions - The 2018-19 school year marks the third year for Esri's "ArcGIS Online Competition for High School and Middle School Students." It is also the second year for Esri's "Teacher Video Challenge." Mark your calendars! Via my colleague Charlie Fitzpatrick.

The National Land Imaging (NLI) Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Land Resources (LR): Grants Available: NLI is soliciting applications from qualified Educational Institutions, State and Local Governments, and Non-profit Organizations (NPOs) to develop a U.S. national consortium to expand the science of remote sensing through education, outreach and research / applications development for environmental monitoring to include the effects of land use and land cover change on water quality, quantity and utility; societal adaptation and phenology; public health-related issues to include identification of potential indicators relating to vector-borne diseases and harmful algal blooms; natural resource management, agricultural applications, disaster risk reduction, and other land surface and surface water monitoring applications. Applications are due Sept 4. Via my colleague Joseph Kerski.