Ian,
there were many responses already but let me add mine:
I have been fortunate to have a different experience
(maybe due the the fact that NCSU has a strong open source community
thanks to RedHat headquarters here on campus - and they are doing
very well).
There were two core things that made the difference:
- I teach the Geospatial modeling and analysis class with both ArcGIS
and GRASS
which turned out to be very useful because the students can quickly
learn what is software implementation issue and what is core/principles.
Many students take the class to learn GRASS and open source in general,
but at the same time they get the "industry standard".
- availability of easy to install winGRASS - I used to dismiss the
huge effort that
it takes to get GRASS working on MSWindows (why bother?), but that
allows
our sysadmins to install it easily everywhere and students can
install it easily
on their laptops as well where they also run ArcGIS which they need
for other classes.
And I also have students running GRASS on Macs - here the binary
helps a lot too,
and they see the merits of portability when compared to ArcGIS.
So where we are now?
- the course has been just approved as a permanent course (quite a
procedure
as you know)
- it is a mandatory course for the graduate GIST certificate and
Professional MS in GIST -
so anybody with certificate or MS in GIST from NCSU gets some
exposure to
open source software (I try to go beyond GRASS)
- we just started to offer it through Distance education, so even
people who are not
enrolled at NCSU as full time students can take it
- and the most important - open source software is being added to
other GIST
courses that used to be exclusively Arc oriented
So - there is a hope!
No question that it has been a challenge to teach GRASS to people
who have 10 year experience working with ArcGIS, so I take my students
as heroes for their persistence and staying in class and learning the
new stuff
(we use nviz a lot to make it more fun), but I see great
opportunities at universities
when open source is offered along with the industry standard products
and merged seamlessly into existing curricula.
So this is very much in line with what Martin has written and I can
confirm
that there is a lot of interest in diversity of approaches, tools and
ideas -
apparently even as we are an ocean apart we are on the same wavelength,
Helena
On Oct 2, 2009, at 10:54 AM, Ian Turton wrote:
On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Peter Batty <pe...@ebatty.com> wrote:
I think that programs to encourage greater use of OSGeo products in
universities would be a great idea too - ESRI dominate in this
area at the
moment, but this would be another way to get the word out to a
broader
audience.
Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS
software in that the students demand we teach them on ESRI software
because that's what employers want and employers use ESRI software as
that is what the universities are teaching the students on.
The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for free (or nearly
free) doesn't help. I'd love to teach more (undergraduate) students
with FOSS but first I have to find technician time to install the
software on all the lab machines in the university (which is where
ArcMap is provided) for just one course (and any way why can't I use
Arc like everyone else will be the question). Of course we're supposed
to be teaching techniques not software packages but you still spend
most of your time sorting out the software issues.
So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on
high schools - but in many states ESRI has got there before us and has
signed deals with the state to provide arc in schools at no cost to
the school. When I query teachers as to how the kids will do their
homework they usually shrug and point out it's too hard for them to do
on their own or that they can use the school library. May be
elementary schools are the winnable battlefield?
Ian
--
Ian Turton
These are definitely my views and not Penn States!
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