[Geowanking] #neogeoweb

[R E Sieber]

Hi Everybody,

Well, my course on trying to teach computational concepts to undergrad 
geography students--the one I asked for advice about on the 
listserv--has begun. The hashtag is #neogeoweb. Please use the hashtag 
periodically to inform, encourage the students. Also remember that 
they'll ramp up slowly so be patient with the quantity and content of 
the tweets.

On the advice of several of you (THANKS!), this is what I decided to teach

Get their feet wet with Geocommons

Get them used to tagging, the conventions of posting and sharing 
geographic data via the geoweb. This is "write your own kmls and kmzs"

Then acquaint them with more structured geographic data entry and 
handling via OpenStreetMap; this also includes a couple of mapping 
parties in a rural community. Theory is the concept of crowdsourcing.

Secondary data use with web scraping of geographic data

Introduction to APIs and the concept of interoperability

Then it's the cloud with Google App Engine. I need to teach Python too. 
I have no idea how long these two will take.

We revisit secondary data but this time it's streaming data with 
Twitter. I hope to give them a sense of what data mining and inference 
engines are all about.

I'm only in week 1 so additional comments are welcome.

Renee