GIS Ed Weekly: "We need to prioritize tools that are free and open source"

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Bloomberg Opinion: This Is How Europe Can Push Back Against China and Russia - "A huge infrastructure project by 12 eastern EU states is an obvious geopolitical opportunity." Says @BrianTimoney: "dust off your Halford Mackinder Geographic-Pivot-of-History take..." I've not thought about Halford Mackinder for thirty plus years!

Twitter Thread: Madeleine Nicolas, PhD started the thread, which is pretty interesting. "Quick thought, for those of you involved in teaching geospatial and analytical modelling: we need to prioritize tools that are free and open source. In university I learnt using, for example, ArcGIS and Matlab, when there are suitable alternatives like QGIS and RStudio." Just this week I ran into this statement on an Australian university webpage: "There is an open source version of ArcGIS called QGIS which makes for an acceptable substitute for ArcGIS..."

On and Off Campus

UMN: Project launches to identify restrooms along bike paths in Minnesota - "Faculty and students at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing are teaming up with experts in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to identify the location of public restrooms and portable toilets along every bicycle path and route throughout Minnesota. The project—MN Bike and GO—is using crowdsourcing and mobile devices to identify the locations on an interactive web-based map." Via @UMNCTS.

Programs and Courses

GIS User: Top 10 GIS Certificate Programs ranked by industry needs - The author, Andres Abeyeta, Executive Director at Bootcamp GIS, uses the GIS Industry Value Index (GIVI) to rank the programs. His organization comes out on top.  

GIS User: Maximize your continuing ed requirement for GISP - This post, also by Andres Abeyeta, suggests taking courses at Bootcamp GIS as part of maintaining a GISP. The options for fulfilling the education portion of certification and re-certification are quite broad. Bootcamp GIS posted similar content on LinkedIn.

Events

You are Here: The grad students at the University of Arizona are behind "the virtual launch of you are here: the journal of creative geography's 2021 issue: BODIES & POLITICS." The event is May 29, 2021 11:00 AM (local Arizona Time). Via @YouAreHereUA.

The Call For Papers for the Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference. The Advancing Geography at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions Workshop is before the conference and those accepted will receive free registration, hotel and meals for both events. Proposals are due for REP August 1 as are applications for the workshop. The events are in Baltimore Oct 20-23. I was pleased to see while reviewing the webpages for these events that one of the listed financial supporters made the contribution in memory of George Floyd.

Esri

Esri Higher Education Blog: Teaching Programming for GIS, Part 1 - Michael Gould, from the Education Team starts a series. If one does not plan to become a programmer, I'm a big fan of learning program "as needed" to tackle specific issues.