The aim of this workshop is to explore how the GI community can work together to develop an Interoperable or Open environment in which educators can exchange resources and add value to these resources for use in their own unique educational settings while at the same time retaining intellectual (and commercial) copyright. Can such an enterprise provide a framework for collaborative education which allows GIS educators to stay on the leading edge of both the technology and the changes happening in higher education? Both technical issues, such as metadata, data formats and technology, and educational/institutional issues related to collaborative education and sharing of resources will need to be considered.
Themes for workshop discussions include:
Why is this a GIS question?
Creating knowledge bases
Finding knowledge in a distributed resource
base
Building and promoting learning resources
Developing futureproof learning resources
and systems
Strategies for meta GI education infrastructures
Challenges for curriculum development
Lessons learnt from TLTP type projects
Metadata for education resources
Accreditation of distributed learning
Assessing and controling quality of distributed
resources
Localization of global materials
Developing value added products from global
resources
The role of publishers and other commercial
enterprises
The role of data providers/vendors
Academic credit and financial return for contributions
to an education resource base
Foreign language issues
With only a couple of exceptions, the meeting will be organized as a small discussion sessions. Summaries from these sessions will be presented to the full group and these will generate the themes for the subsequent discussions with an ultimate objective of specifying a set of needs, objectives and action plans for GIS education interoperability. We will begin by brainstorming ideas about what we should do and what we can do about interoperability for distributed GIScience education. Since the Instructional Management System Project is a major international project which has already started to address many of our issues, we've asked Mark Resmer to give us a short presentation on their current status and needs with respect to discipline-specific groups such as ours. Other participants are welcome to bring forward examples of similar or related projects which we should know about.