A colleague who lectures on GIS at the university asked me if I'd give him some advice on open-source geospatial so he could at least introduce his third year geography & environmental science undergraduates to the idea. Thanks to the joy of site licenses the students get to use ACME Proprietary GIS System without having to worry about the cost.
So anyway, I offered to teach the lecture for him. What can I do in 50 minutes (and possibly a workshop) for 90 undergraduates? Here's a brain dump: Compare and contrast: Free/Open/Proprietary/Closed/Commercial. Copyright/Licensing/GPL/Copyleft etc. Open Standards: formation and importance - talk about the OGC, general goodness of interoperability Open source development advantages/perceived disadvantages and rejoinders to those. Commercialising Open Source, open source in industry. Open Source in Education - reproducible science, 'climategate' as a failure of openness? Case Studies: Open source in government - global deployments as case studies Open source in the UK: Ordnance Survey/Met Office case studies - thats probably enough for 50 minutes. If I can do a workshop I'd probably just get them to boot up OSGeo Live and play with QGIS for an hour, maybe try and duplicate one of their GIS exercises from an earlier module (load layers, buffer, overlay, report...). Any thoughts? Barry _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss