[Talk-us] How to get college students involved?

Richard Weait richard at weait.com
Fri Aug 6 19:50:19 BST 2010


On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Stefan Brandle <sbrandle at cse.taylor.edu> wrote:
> On 8/6/10 1:43 PM, Katie Filbert wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Stefan Brandle <sbrandle at cse.taylor.edu>
> wrote:
>>
>>  Hi. The following may be outside your time and interest scope, but I am
>> interested in hearing from anybody who is willing to nibble on my
>> requests. I have never actually done any mapping work, but joined this
>> list and lurked with the hope of starting to learn about the tools and
>> issues.
>
> It is great to get your students involved with mapping, and give them
> something practical to work with such as OSM.
>
> Though, I suggest first you try some mapping yourself and get more familiar
> with how things work.  You could start out with Potlatch (edit tab), but
> given your more technical background,I think you would do well with JOSM.
>
> [...]
>
> Thanks for your suggestions. I'll start poking away at them.
>
> Actually, I've just started working on the local map and am currently
> working my way through things like getting stumped on how to create a pond,
> etc.  I suspect that reading all available documentation might be a good
> start.  :-)

I've done s few text / image tutorials for beginners.  Let me know if
they are at all helpful, and even better, let me know if you have
questions so I can improve them.

http://weait.com/content/openstreetmap-beginner

I love the idea of exposing students and campuses to OSM.  I have
written about OSM and campuses before and saw some interest.

http://weait.com/search/node/campus

I thought it would be fun to introduce OSM to two rival campuses at
the same time.  For example Ohio State University and Michigan.  And
encourage the participants to out perform the other university by
updating their campus and adding local bicycle trails.  I don't know
what the best approach would be to ensure that participants improve
their area rather than vandalize the rival area.  Probably addressing
it is better than not addressing it, as university rivalries do
attract entertaining hijinks on occasion.



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